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When it came to populism, France was supposed to be different. The United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election as president—in June and November 2016, respectively—seemed to usher in a new era in Western politics. The “people” were in revolt against “elites,” voters appealed to the nation for protection against the dangers of globalization, and mass immigration was vigorously denounced. As France entered its own election cycle in the spring of 2017, it too looked like it could succumb to populism’s unstoppable force. Though the far-right National Front party had been around for decades, its leader, Marine Le Pen, appeared to have cleverly recalibrated its message to align with populist concerns.
Yet her victory was not to be. Out of thin air, a young, previously unknown yet charismatic banker launched a movement that laid claim to the center of the political spectrum. Emmanuel Macron preached optimism, assuring French voters that moderate free market policies would redound to the greater good and that the European project would make their country stronger in the long run. In the runoff presidential election, Macron soundly defeated Le Pen. Populism, it seemed, was not to be France’s fate.
What a difference eight years make! At present, France finds itself in an extraordinary state of political dysfunction. The country’s Parliament is split among three more or less equal-size political factions that are mutually hostile to one another and incapable of forming a governing majority. Far from bridging the left-right divide, Macron’s centrist party is now fighting a two-front war against populist parties on both its flanks. Because the current prime minister (the head of government, who is beneath the president) and cabinet are constitutionally required to have parliamentary support, they are exceptionally vulnerable to the whims of hostile legislators. Indeed, last December, the Parliament booted out a prime minister for the first time in over 60 years. Moreover, 2024 was the first year since 1934 in which France had four different prime ministers in a single year.
To make matters worse, the political situation has obstructed the normally routine business of approving a national budget, at a time when the French government faces massive public debt and a budget shortfall of 6.1% of GDP [ [link removed] ]—leading Moody’s to downgrade [ [link removed] ] the country’s credit rating. And all this is seen as an unforced error on the part of Macron, who decided last June to call snap parliamentary elections that he lost—as almost everyone predicted he would. As his old rival Marine Le Pen saw her party become the largest in Parliament (even if it was denied the outright majority that many expected), the era of good feelings that Macron inaugurated in 2017 seems a distant memory indeed.
Populism is not, of course, the only reason for France’s quandary. But it is, perhaps, the main reason. The current crisis provides a vantage point to consider three lessons recent French history has taught us about populism: (1) Centrism is not the answer, primarily because it tends to attract elites’ support—and populists don’t like elites. (2) While populism has complicated the political spectrum, it can’t escape the left-right divide. (3) Finally, even though populism has managed to give a voice to those who feel voiceless, it also leads to considerable institutional dysfunction.
Centrism Is Not the Answer Because Populists Don’t Like Elites
In 2017, much of Macron’s appeal lay in being an alternative to the politics of resentment embraced by the National Front (now called the National Rally). Though he had briefly served in the cabinet of his Socialist predecessor, Macron had no strong connections to any major party. Consequently, he decided to create a new party that would be “neither right nor left.” He projected confidence, optimism and inclusiveness. While he was pro-business, Macron also promised to defend the welfare state and firmly commit to the European Union. His politics were, in short, resolutely centrist.
In addition to bringing political neophytes and civil society figures on board, he also recruited moderates from the Socialist Party and the Republicans, the country’s main center-left and center-right parties, respectively. His electoral strategy was also centrist. After receiving support from both the Socialists and the Republicans in the first round of voting—itself an unprecedented achievement—Macron proceeded to rally moderate voters of the left and right, allowing him to comfortably defeat Le Pen in the runoff.
While Le Pen’s party, the National Front, is no newcomer to French politics, only recently has it adopted a populist line. The party was founded in 1972 by a coalition of tiny far-right organizations, some of which had direct ties to fascism. One of the founders [ [link removed] ] had participated in the Charlemagne brigade—a French unit of the Waffen SS, the military branch of the Nazi Party’s main paramilitary organization, the Schutzstaffel. Through the National Front, political forces that had been completely delegitimized by the defeat of Nazi Germany attempted a comeback.
Under its charismatic leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen (who died [ [link removed] ] in January at the age of 96), the party experienced increasing electoral success from the 1980s on, even making it to the runoff in the 2002 presidential election. Yet while Le Pen père managed to tap into French anxieties about immigration and loss of national identity, the party under his leadership never shed its association with the far-right tradition. This was largely because of Le Pen’s fondness for provocation: For instance, he once notoriously observed [ [link removed] ] that the gas chambers were a “detail” in the history of the Second World War.
Since taking over the party’s leadership in 2012, Marine Le Pen—Jean-Marie’s daughter—has built on her father’s legacy while also reorienting the party in a self-consciously populist direction. Her party embodies the “four D’s” that politics professors Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin have defined as the main characteristics of “national populism.” [ [link removed] ] The first is a profound distrust of elites, particularly the political establishment: first the center-right and center-left parties, now Macron. This distrust is rooted in the second “D,” the perception that elites have contributed to the country’s destruction, primarily by failing to clamp down on immigration, as well as by ceding sovereignty to international organizations such as the European Union.
Marine Le Pen has proved particularly adept at appealing to a working-class and lower-middle-class sense of deprivation—the sense that these groups are falling behind, struggling to make ends meet and being underserved by public services. Finally, she has pursued dealignment, claiming that her party is “neither right nor left” (in a way that oddly echoes Macron’s use of the same language). The real dividing line, she argues, is between the French “people” and disloyal “elites.”
The core problem with Macron’s presidency is that rather than creating a lasting consensus anchored at the center of the political spectrum, he has become a lightning rod for populist resentment on both sides. First, Macron has appeared extraordinarily tone-deaf to the concerns of ordinary people. Famously, in the name of moving France to cleaner energy, he introduced a carbon tax in 2019 that seemed to disproportionately harm people who relied on cars. In practice, this meant the measure was relatively popular among well-heeled urbanites in walkable areas (who strongly supported Macron) but was reviled by working-class people and farmers in exurban and rural areas who needed to drive to do their jobs.
This measure triggered the months-long “yellow vest” movement [ [link removed] ], which became a collective cry of pain on the part of ordinary people who felt that elites not only disregarded their needs but held them in contempt. This was reflected in their slogans [ [link removed] ]: “Respect the people!”; “Macron, stop taking us for fools”; “Yellow Vests, not so dumb!” Mépris—the French word for “scorn”—is one that Le Pen and others regularly used to describe Macron’s attitude toward the French people.
Second, Macron’s centrist solution failed because it veered away from the center. Former French President François Mitterrand once described the center as “a soft variety of the right.” Macron’s presidency has confirmed this insight. He began his presidency with an impressively bipartisan array of political support from both Socialists and Republicans. This centrism was reflected in his cabinet, his parliamentary group and his policies, which combined business-friendly economic policies with left-leaning cultural and social policies (last year, he had the right to abortion [ [link removed] ] inserted into the French Constitution, reacting to the U.S. overturning of Roe v. Wade—despite the fact that it had zero consequences for French politics). Over time, however, Macron has hemorrhaged support from the left and has defaulted to a conservative program, emphasizing law and order and restricting illegal immigration. Even as he continued to alienate the populist right, he fueled the rise of a populist left.
Finally, Macron has shown a willingness to use the full authority of his office in ways that sit uneasily with the consensus politics he initially sought to promote. Early on, he theorized the “vertical [ [link removed] ]” (top-down) nature of presidential authority under the current constitution, which established the French presidency as one of Western Europe’s most powerful political offices, legally speaking. He dislikes and is impatient with the slow-paced nature of conventional politics.
After being reelected in 2022, for example, he committed to reducing the retirement age [ [link removed] ]. While many saw this reform as necessary, Macron failed to negotiate seriously with labor organizations or to seek compromises that might have made it more palatable to those who opposed it. Despite the reform’s importance for many people, it was adopted without a vote in Parliament.
Instead, Macron resorted to using a measure based in Article 49.3 [ [link removed] ] of the constitution, which allows the government to adopt a law by decree—similar to an executive order in the U.S.—unless the Parliament votes no confidence. Since his reelection, Macron’s prime ministers have used this measure 27 times [ [link removed] ], out of a total of 116 times it has been used since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958. Even worse, Macron’s decision in June to “dissolve the National Assembly”—and thus call snap elections—seems to have been made almost entirely on his own. The resulting chaos is seen as the culmination of his “all about Macron” approach to government. It has, moreover, made it harder to condemn the authoritarian tendencies harbored by the National Rally, since Macron seems to share them.
In these ways, far from mitigating populist grievance, Macron has aggravated it. If Macron had not existed, populism would have had to invent him.
Populism Can’t Escape the Left-Right Divide
One of the mantras of populist movements is that they transcend the left-right divide that has structured Western (and global) politics for decades. First, populists argue that center-left and center-right parties are both run by elites whose interests ultimately converge, notably in promoting globalization, to the detriment of ordinary citizens. Second, instead of the categories of left and right, populists prioritize the difference between the interests of the “people” over those of the “elite” as the main dividing line of contemporary politics. Third, populist parties tend to blend ideas that are traditionally associated with the right and those associated with the left.
Le Pen’s National Rally party, for example, has sought to get beyond the left-right divide in precisely these ways. For years, it claimed France was run by a mono-party, which it accused of drowning national identity in an ocean of European Union institutions and regulations and failing to rein in immigration. It also touted itself as the party of the “people,” a claim that was justified by its increasingly working-class electorate. Finally, particularly under Marine Le Pen, the National Rally has adopted economic policies that many regard as leftist. While it still supports the principle of “national preference”—the idea that government services and benefits should be reserved for French citizens—Le Pen has also favored protectionist trade policies and been reluctant to reform generous social benefits along free market principles, complicating her relationship with big business.
Yet news of the demise of the left-right divide was premature. Macron’s increasingly conservative turn opened a space for an alternative form of populism located to his far left. In 2016, Jean-Luc Mélenchon founded La France Insoumise (LFI), which has since replaced the Socialists as the dominant party of the left. Mélenchon is a former Socialist who broke with the party over its support for European integration. He has denounced the mainstream parties’ concessions to globalization and neoliberalism and argued that the nation and the state should provide ordinary people with a xxxxxx against the dangers of the global economic order. In so doing, Mélenchon advanced themes that bore a striking resemblance to those of Le Pen’s party.
Of course, Mélenchon claimed to oppose all forms of racism and xenophobia, hoping in this way to distinguish his party from the National Rally. In 2017, after coming in third in the presidential election, he refused to endorse either Le Pen or Macron in the runoff—a shocking position for a leftist candidate, who would typically favor blocking the National Rally above all else. Mélenchon also hoped that a genuinely populist economic program would win back working-class voters from the far right. Thus, rather than replot French politics along a new axis—globalists vs. nationalists, or urban elites vs. exurban and rural populations—Macron in fact pushed France toward a tripartite political system, with populists of the left and the right fighting against a broad centrist coalition.
At the same time, Le Pen has had to temper some of her populist rancor, making her party more appealing to a traditional conservative electorate. Her support reliably grew in both the 2017 and 2022 elections, yet winning an election outright continued to elude her. When Macron called snap elections last June, it appeared that, for the first time, the National Rally was poised to win Parliament outright. This is because Le Pen managed to retain her working-class support while extending her appeal to conservative voters, who appreciated not just her views on immigration but also her newfound concern with economic issues such as the national debt. She also contributed to a split among the center-right Republicans, a faction of which formed an electoral pact with the National Rally—at the price of being kicked out of their own party.
In the new Parliament that was elected in July 2024 (following Macron’s decision to call snap elections), populist parties simultaneously disrupted the traditional left-right divide and reintroduced it in a more virulent form. The Parliament, which has traditionally been divided in two between a broad left caucus and a broad right caucus, is now divided into three groups with similar numbers of seats: a left coalition (including Mélenchon’s LFI), Macron’s centrist coalition and the National Rally (which is actually, for the first time, the biggest party in Parliament, as it does not consist of a coalition of smaller parties). The traditional right trails these three groups.
This three-way split frustrates one of the main purposes of the left-right spectrum, which is to ensure that someone always has a majority. The results of the elections held in June and July were muddled: The left coalition (consisting of multiple parties) won the most seats, surpassing the National Rally, which nonetheless became the largest party (as opposed to coalition). Macron’s allies lost seats but remained credible. None of these political forces, however, commanded a majority or even an imposing plurality.
Even so, the politics of the new Parliament continued to obey a left-right logic. Le Pen categorically refused to support a left-wing prime minister. She ultimately agreed to support Michel Barnier, an elder statesman of the center-right whom Macron appointed prime minister in September. Because the National Rally was in a position to credibly threaten a no-confidence vote—thus pulling the plug on the government—Barnier proved willing to negotiate with Le Pen, appointing an aggressively anti-immigration interior minister and supporting some of her budget priorities. Meanwhile, the left continued to attack Macron for brazenly disregarding the outcome of the election and denounced Barnier for cooperating with Le Pen. Despite populism’s transformative power, competition between the left and right remained a major dynamic in French politics.
This new political dynamic shows how populism has proved to be a dramatic new force in French politics. It has altered and increased the National Rally’s appeal, making it a serious contender to govern the country. It has changed the terms of political discourse, bringing the needs of common people to the forefront of political debate. It has upended the traditional left, as seen in the fact that LFI’s support far exceeds that of the center-left Socialist Party.
Yet populism has in practice inserted itself within the left-right political spectrum rather than destroying it. This is because French institutions (like those in most Western countries) are designed to reward majorities. France is even more invested in majoritarianism than most democracies, as many elections require runoffs to ensure that winners obtain at least 50% of the vote. And the left-right spectrum seems better suited to yield majorities than the “people vs. elites” logic prioritized by populism.
Populism Has Contributed to Institutional Dysfunction
Populism has become a dirty word in politics, but it does have its upside. Namely, it has brought a powerful democratic correction to Western political systems that had become stagnant and unrepresentative. Despite their continued electoral competition, mainstream left and right parties had begun, in the post-Cold War era, to converge on a range of issues: globalization, trade deals, international cooperation and neoliberal economic policies. Denouncing this consensus as an elite construct, populism has frequently been a salutary disruptive force. It has called attention to the unrepresentative tendencies within democracies themselves and has put establishment forces on the defensive.
It remains an open question, however, whether populism can convert this disruptive energy into a lasting political program. The question of how revolutionary momentum can be transformed into the sober business of governing is one that haunted socialism, a problem that historians have described as socialism’s “long remorse about power [ [link removed] ].” A similar concern seems ingrained in populism: Can populists turn their grievance against elites into an effective program for government?
Populism’s tendency to default toward disruption has been evident in the crisis France has found itself in since July. France is literally ungovernable, in that an election produced no governing majority. The only available majorities are those that oppose whichever minority party is tapped to form a government.
In this crisis, both populist parties have primarily played the disruptive card: using the no-confidence vote motion to bring down the government. This situation has particularly high stakes as Macron’s decision to call elections postponed the annual budget process, at a time when it is imperative that France address its colossal public debt, the very existence of which has further undermined Macron’s reputation as a business-friendly reformer.
During Barnier’s premiership, Le Pen initially presented herself as an honest broker. Though Barnier sought to cut spending and raise taxes, he showed himself willing to make concessions that would help Le Pen’s constituents. Initially, Le Pen also seemed interested in showing that her party was politically responsible (in contrast to the cantankerous populist left). The chain of events that resulted in the no-confidence vote of Dec. 4 and the collapse of the Barnier government showed, however, that populism defaults to disruption. The Le Pen-Barnier relationship eventually broke down over her objection to the government’s intention to de-index retirement benefits to inflation.
Le Pen, moreover, seems to believe that the ultimate political battle is the presidential election that will be held in 2027. Her goal is to embarrass Macron as much as possible and lay the blame for the current mess at his feet. The LFI’s Mélenchon has joined her in this effort. This enterprise came to a head when Barnier passed the social security budget by decree, to which LFI responded with a no-confidence resolution. Though the resolution contained language that specifically criticized the National Rally, Le Pen supported it. When the left coalition and the National Rally joined forces, Barnier’s fate was sealed: He became the first prime minister to lose a no-confidence vote since 1962.
Though the deadlock persists, the situation has nonetheless evolved under Barnier’s successor, François Bayrou. Bayrou is a familiar face in French politics, a three-time presidential candidate who pioneered the centrist politics that Macron would later successfully embrace. In many ways, the Bayrou cabinet differs little from its predecessors. It consists of centrists and conservatives, a coalition that is insufficient to form an automatic majority in Parliament. The left coalition still feels it has been snubbed, while the National Rally asserts that Macron is in denial over his rejection by voters.
Yet where Barnier tried (unsuccessfully) to cultivate Le Pen as his privileged interlocutor, Bayrou has engaged in productive discussions with the Socialists. The Socialists, reduced in the Macron era to a shadow of their former selves, are eager to prove that they are a serious governing party. They are also fed up with Mélenchon’s left-populist antics.
On Feb. 5, when Bayrou proposed his budget, LFI filed a new no-confidence motion. This time, however, the Socialists and the National Rally joined the centrist and conservative factions in rejecting it. Populism, it would seem, is not a hand one can play at every round. The Socialists seemingly prefer responsibility to posturing, and the National Rally, at least this time around, craves respectability (in addition to loathing LFI). Barnier’s ouster made clear that populism remains a force to be reckoned with, but Bayrou’s survival showed that it has not completely reinvented politics. Budgets must still be passed, and governments must still do their job.
The return of consequential no-confidence votes to French politics is revealing at many levels. France finds itself more politically unstable than it has been in decades. During the Third Republic (1870-1940), it used to be said that one goes to London to see the changing of the guards, and to Paris to see the changing of the government. The whole point of the Fifth Republic (which began under Charles de Gaulle in 1958) was to bring this instability to an end. Since 2024, however, that instability has returned. France also has yet to pass a proper budget that can deal with its catastrophic debt levels, though it did pass a stopgap measure. But at least one of the major lessons of this crisis is that populism continues to be a dynamic and disruptive force in Western politics.
During the Middle Ages, the Avignon crisis resulted in two popes claiming to preside over the Roman Catholic Church. Finally, after a century, the Council of Pisa in 1409 sought to resolve the matter by deposing both sitting popes and replacing them with a new one. Rather than solve the problem, however, they exacerbated it: Now there were three popes. Something similar has occurred in French politics over the past decade. Macron—as well as Le Pen—claimed to transcend the sterile left-right divide that had long dominated the French political landscape. Instead, they contributed to a three-way split that is even more intractable and less conducive to forming a majoritarian government than the previous system.
As the French case demonstrates, populism has managed to shake up the political order and inject an element of democratic legitimacy that it was in danger of losing. Yet with a few exceptions (notably Italy), populism often seems better at disrupting institutions than managing them. Populism has yet to provide convincing evidence that it can solve the important issues it raises.

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