By the second week of February, with both stanchions of alternation removed, it was already clear who would be the next President. In October Emmanuel Macron, Hollande’s Minister for the Economy, had resigned from his post to run against his patron. The previous April he had created a movement adorned with his own monogram,
En Marche!, with the obvious intention of testing the waters for a bid to capture the Élysée, and in November duly announced it. A typical product of the upper reaches of the political class, an
énarque moving effortlessly between public service and private enrichment, from Inspector of Finances to instant millionaire with Rothschild, he had joined the ps in 2006, dipping out of it in 2009, after making the connexions levitating him into Hollande’s personal entourage in 2012, where he became deputy chief of staff and in short order, at the age of 36, a leading minister in the government. Entranced by this
enfant choyé, Hollande saw in him an earlier version of himself, adorning his regime with a touch of youthful glamour.
Macron, c’est moi, he told his journalists.
[8] So far as policy went, he was not wrong: little or nothing divided them, Macron’s background guaranteeing he would be a business-friendly icon of deregulation of the kind Hollande wanted. That formally he was no longer a member of the ps hardly mattered, since privately Hollande was already saying the party was a thing of the past. But in thinking that Macron would be a loyal princeling, since he owed his elevation to Hollande, he was deluded. Close up, Macron could see the likely fate of his regime, and at the right moment had no hesitation in helping to bring it down to further his own ambitions. By the time he announced his candidacy, he had assembled business, bureaucratic, professional and intellectual backers galore, along with a commensurate war-chest, and bathed in fulsome media coverage, could step forward as the embodiment of all that was dynamic and forward-looking in France.
...
Ideologically, from the outset Macron had launched
En Marche! as a movement transcending the outdated opposition between Right and Left in France, for the creation of a new, fresh politics of the Centre, liberal in economics and social in sensibility. This was, of course, itself a time-worn appeal, repeatedly offered by assorted politicians of one kind or another, and corresponding to a real demand in the middle of the spectrum of political opinion, but never successfully dislodging the dichotomy of Left and Right; in part because of the polarizing logic of the electoral system, but equally because the dominant opposition was between two blocs each of which could legitimately claim the same prefix: Centre-Left and Centre-Right. Now, however, that both of these were disabled, a ‘pure’ self-declared Centre could for the first time command the stage. In projecting his construction, Macron had to deal with the last pretender to the role, the Catholic politician François Bayrou, who had run for the Presidency in every election since 2002 (achieving a high point of 18.57 per cent of the vote in 2007), and could subtract electors from Macron if he ran again. The political party from which he had come, the udf, was a creation of Giscard in the seventies, and in its subsequent metamorphoses—it is now the udi—served as a traditional, if not invariable, ally of the much larger party of originally Gaullist extraction led by Chirac—of whom Bayrou had been a Minister—and Sarkozy.
[9] It had always been a more significant component of the Centre-Right bloc than any counterpart element in the Centre-Left. Since Macron could scarcely conceal his passage through the ps, it was all the more important he secure the support of Bayrou, to ensure that his candidacy had visible endorsement from the opposite field, where the banner of the Centre had always been most consistently raised. On 22 February, Bayrou came aboard without undue tergiversation. Macron immediately gained 5 points in the polls. The Centre was now truly his own. Well ahead of Fillon, with Hamon languishing low behind either, he had locked down the Presidency.
