France’s Right and Left Wing Parties Are Surging. Can It Hold the Center?
By Will Marshall

French President Emmanuel Macron took power in 2017, the same year Donald Trump first moved into the White House courtesy of the Electoral College. Both were insurgents but stood on opposite sides of today’s new political barricades.

Macron upended his country’s established ruling parties, conjuring up an entirely new centrist bloc as a xxxxxx against Marine le Pen’s far-right National Rally. Trump took over the Republican Party, ousting traditional conservatives and turning it into a vehicle for a belligerent MAGA populism.

Both leaders are still in power, but their fates have diverged. Macron is mired in a crisis of collapsing governments and risks becoming a lame duck with two years yet to run in his second and final term. Meanwhile, the National Rally has become France’s most popular party, taking the pole position in the 2027 presidential sweepstakes.

President Trump, triumphantly reelected last year despite his farcical attempt to steal the 2020 election, is riding roughshod over his political opponents — and the rule of law — with the acquiescence of a do-nothing Republican Congress.

Macron’s fall from grace — his public approval has sunk to 19 percent — raises a host of knotty questions. If he can’t do it, who can pull Europe’s second largest economy out of a protracted slump?

How can the European Union take greater responsibility for Ukraine and collective security if Macron, its foremost champion of “strategic autonomy,” can’t rally domestic support for his policies?

And what lessons should Democrats and other liberal parties draw if the center crumbles and France becomes the next domino to fall to illiberal populism?