{"id":207327,"date":"2025-10-17T20:54:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T20:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/207327\/"},"modified":"2025-10-17T20:54:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T20:54:08","slug":"broken-promises-and-political-crises-how-emmanuel-macron-fell-from-french-favour-emmanuel-macron","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/207327\/","title":{"rendered":"Broken promises and political crises: how Emmanuel Macron fell from French favour | Emmanuel Macron"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three French governments have collapsed in less than a year<\/a>, and the political crisis looks likely to continue, overshadowing Emmanuel Macron\u2019s last 18 months in power and his domestic legacy.<\/p>\n

This week, the latest minority government narrowly survived its first vote of no confidence<\/a>. But it remains the weakest cabinet in decades and could be toppled at any moment if opposition parties join together to oust it. France faces a brutal two-month battle in parliament to achieve what once seemed the most basic element of governance: passing a budget.<\/p>\n

Political analysts argue that that the figure most damaged by the current crisis is the centrist president.<\/p>\n

The pro-Europe, pro-business Macron was first elected in 2017,<\/a> vowing to revolutionise politics and listen to voters<\/a> like no one had done before. He promised a \u201cpragmatic\u201d cherrypicking of ideas from left and right to liberalise the economy, create jobs after decades of mass unemployment and end inequality. Crucially, he said he wanted to stop the rise of the far right by ensuring citizens had no more reason<\/a> to vote for extremes.<\/p>\n

There were crises: the gilets jaunes<\/a> (yellow vests) anti-government revolt, followed by the Covid pandemic and then the war in Ukraine. And when he was re-elected in 2022, Macron no longer had an absolute majority in parliament.<\/p>\n

But his woes deepened considerably when he gambled on calling a sudden and inconclusive snap parliamentary election<\/a> in June 2024, at a time when Marine Le Pen\u2019s far-right National Rally (NR) was at a historic high after its European election win<\/a>. Parliament is now split between three blocs: the left, the centre and the far right, which has increased its vote. No bloc has an absolute majority. Meanwhile, Macron\u2019s centrist base has begun to fragment.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe crisis in France<\/a> runs very deep,\u201d said R\u00e9mi Lefebvre, a professor of political science at the University of Lille. \u201cThe problem is there are actually several crises mixed together. There\u2019s a financial crisis of [public] debt, a social crisis of inequality, a weakness of political parties, and then there is the rise of the far right. Macron is not the sole cause of the crisis; it\u2019s all those different factors, but Macron has accelerated those factors.\u201d<\/p>\n

To prevent the government being ousted this week, Macron and his centrist ally, the new prime minister, S\u00e9bastien Lecornu<\/a>, appealed to the Socialist party. The government offered a highly symbolic suspension of the only major change of Macron\u2019s second term: the 2023 pensions law<\/a> that introduced a gradual rise in the retirement age from 62 to 64.<\/p>\n

Lefebvre said Macron\u2019s second term risked looking \u201cchaotic\u201d and ineffective. His choice not to appoint a leftwing government last year \u2013 when a left alliance<\/a> won the greatest number of seats but fell short of an absolute majority \u2013 had been seen as damaging democracy, he said.<\/p>\n

Stewart Chau, the director of polling at Verian Group, said: \u201cIf there\u2019s one political personality or political movement that emerges extremely weakened from the sequence which began with the snap election of July 2024, it\u2019s Emmanuel Macron<\/a> and his centrist party, Renaissance. That is clear in every study.\u201d<\/p>\n

Polls this month have shown that only about 14-16% of voters have confidence in Macron. Even his global presence, which once boosted his image at home, no longer lifts his ratings. \u201cHis popularity has constantly declined in recent months, despite a significant international news cycle,\u201d Chau said.<\/p>\n

Support had dropped among Macron\u2019s voters because he was seen as lacking empathy for people\u2019s daily concerns, Chau said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of Macron\u2019s biggest promises as president had been his vow to block the path of the far-right National Rally, saying that no one would ever have reason to vote for them again,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

But since Macron became president, more people have voted for the RN and view the party as a credible alternative.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is a real shift,\u201d Chau said. \u201cPreviously, some people had voted for extremes, saying it was a protest vote. Today, a lot of French people think it\u2019s no longer simply a protest vote, it\u2019s an alternative \u2013 and Macron is, perhaps, responsible for that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The political historian, Jean Garrigues, said Macron\u2019s image was now probably the worst of any president since France\u2019s current political system, the Fifth Republic, began in 1958.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe has dropped to an exceptional level of unpopularity but, above all, an exceptional level of hatred,\u201d Garrigues said. \u201c[His Socialist predecessor] Fran\u00e7ois Hollande also experienced record unpopularity but didn\u2019t experience the same level of being detested as Emmanuel Macron.\u201d<\/p>\n

Garrigues said this public rejection had roots that ran deeper than the current crisis. Macron arrived in 2017 amid strong hope and expectation built around a kind of mythology of the \u201cman of the moment\u201d, he said, but disappointment followed when voters felt his promises to work with all political sides and \u201cpermanently listen to citizens\u201d were not materialising.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three French governments have collapsed in less than a year, and the political crisis looks likely to continue,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":207328,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-207327","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}