Parisian election posters showing candidate for the 2017 presidential election Emmanuel Macron, March 23, 2017. Apaydin Alain/Press Association. All rights reserved.The 2017 presidential election in France will mark
a moment of great historical import. We may be wrong, however, in our
assessment of what makes this election particularly significant.

France, we are told ad nauseam, is the arena
in which one of the final rounds in the global battle between populism and
democracy will be fought. After the lukewarm results of the Dutch elections last week, liberals
everywhere in the world seem on the edge of their seats, awaiting the final act
of what resembles a Greek tragedy in three acts. After the Brexit and Trump
debacles, however, no-one seems prepared to even dare believe in a happy ending
any more. But this is perhaps wherein lies the tragedy: that even the most
desirable outcome, a Macron presidency, is already couched as, at best, a
Hollandisme 2.0. That the future of liberal democracy in France seems to rest
in the hands of a 39-year-old Wunderkind, we are told, is no grounds for optimism.

Our cynicism might in fact hasten the outcome that
we are so afraid of: a Le Pen presidency. The Cassandras of populism might just
turn this plausible scenario into a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially if
they continue to suggest that Emmanuel Macron’s centrist platform is on a par
with the Front National’s amalgam of right-wing nationalism and socialist
promises to ameliorate the plight of French workers and lower middle classes.

Such commentaries only contribute to enhancing the
credibility of the populist claims that only they provide bold, system-changing
answers to contemporary challenges. If the election lies in the hands of a new
class of voters, those who “no longer give a damn” it is the duty of commentators to reel them back
in to politics. Our collective failure to do so might just convince them that
the only sound course of action is to follow the British and American voters in
using their ballot as a middle finger to deliver yet another “fuck you” to the establishment on 23 April.

The
Hamon-Macron-Fillon phenomenon

We need to take a closer look at what is going on
in France if we are to avoid such an outcome. There is something truly momentous
happening at the centre, within the political mainstream. It is this epic drama
unfolding at the median that we ought to put in the spotlight if we are to
avoid another Brexit-Trump post-electoral hangover. What is happening on the
Hamon—Macron—Fillon spectrum deserves much greater analytical clarity and
historical depth.

We are facing a situation unprecedented since the
creation of the Fifth Republic in 1958: for the first time in history, neither of the traditional government parties – the Parti
Socialiste (PS) and Les Républicains (LR) – is likely to make it to the second round
of the presidential elections. There are several reasons explaining why this
has happened. Perhaps the most crucial one is the use of primaries to determine
the choice of presidential candidates in both the Republican and Socialist
parties. Indeed, the primaries contributed to selecting candidates that were
further away from the centre than is customary in the Fifth Republic.

But other factors also led to the marginalization
of the traditional mainstream parties. A young and charismatic new leader, Emmanuel
Macron, has managed to spur some much-needed life in an inchoate centre.
Old-school centrists like François Bayrou and prominent members of the
political Left and Right have rallied behind Macron’s call to ‘get going’ and
joined his eponymous political movement, En Marche. François Fillon’s
(LR) entanglements in corruption scandals and Benoît Hamon’s (PS) strategy to
court the votes of the far left have also helped Macron to emerge as the
strongest candidate against the populist contenders for the post.

Democracy
in France is not on the wane

That the traditional parties of Right and Left have
become marginalized in contemporary French politics is indisputable, while the
refulgence with which Macron has risen to the top is surely remarkable. Yet it
is not at all clear that the Macron phenomenon is inherently at odds with the
Fifth Republic. In 1962, Général De Gaulle also campaigned outside the traditional
party apparatuses. In fact, when De Gaulle drafted the Constitution of the
Fifth Republic with his colleague Michel Debré, he conceived the office of the
President as a way to elevate politics above mere party strife, towards the
higher common good. 

Macron’s refusal to be stamped by either Left or
Right-wing label should not be written off as a cynical ploy to triumph over
the ashes of the mainstream parties. Macron is not “surfing the neither-left-nor-right wave.” For one, his is not a strange fad. In fact,
Macron’s centrism has many historical precedents. Theorists and practitioners
of democracy from Alexis de Tocqueville to Jean Jaurès, Léon Blum, Michel
Rocard, or even former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, proposed third-way models combining elements of political liberalism usually
associated with “the Right” with ideals of egalitarianism, inclusivity, and
solidarity that have historically been advocated for by “the Left.”

So at its core Macron’s centrist political platform
is not that new. Yet it is successful because the categories of Left and Right,
intellectually and practically, are no longer doing the work they are supposed
to. These labels have become inadequate shorthands to capture the real nature of political antagonisms today. By holding on to them in their current form
we are unable to correctly diagnose the problems at stake and address them
effectively. The decisive questions under democratic scrutiny no longer
correspond to a binary antagonism between liberal capitalism on the one hand
and socialism on the other. These elections, are required instead to provide a
long-overdue articulation of liberal social democracy in France.

Why continue lamenting the world as we knew it when
it has proven incapable of delivering the results we had hoped for? The
Socialist and Republican parties crystallize bygone ideological cleavages.
Their decay, however, is not necessarily indicative of the supposed existential
crisis of liberal democracy. In fact, we should find hope that it has been possible
to shatter the ossified political entities making up the institutional
framework of the Fifth Republic.

 This is what is truly extraordinary in the
2017 elections.