The Startup President: Part V
In which Macron's victory in the first round offers hints at the divisions and protests that will mark his presidency.
The following is an excerpt from a book project about life in modern France. This week, I’m publishing in 6 parts a chapter I wrote about my various encounters with Emmanuel Macron and his 2017 campaign for president. Most of this is based on stories for VentureBeat and the Los Angeles Times. Some of the writing has been recycled elsewhere, so you may recognize snippets. But with the first round of the French elections approaching this Sunday, it felt like a good time to look back at the last campaign that transformed Macron from an obscure figure to an unlikely president who continues to confound the French.
Following Macron’s first-round victory, divisions bubbled to the surface. Several days after the Sunday vote, a few hundred protestors gathered in the Place du Capitole in the Toulouse city center during lunchtime to express their frustration with the results of the first round of voting.
Many of them had been supporters of the far-left Mélenchon and found themselves unable or unwilling to choose between the two finalists. So, they came to vent and to march and to take up a new cry that had been echoed in rallies and marches across the country in cities such as Paris, Bordeaux, and Lille in recent days: Ni Macron, Ni Le Pen. Neither Macron, nor Le Pen. While most pundits still expected Macron to win comfortably, these vocal holdouts were a sign that Macron’s talk of centrism had failed to convince many citizens.
“Our goal in coming here today is not just to be against Le Pen and Macron,” said Florian Bernard, a young technician speaking to the crowd using a megaphone. “We are also against the machine that put them there.”
While polls continued to show Macron winning by 2-to-1 over Le Pen, that margin would be narrower than 2002 when Le Pen’s father, so openly racist that she later banned him from his own party, only got 18 percent to Jacques Chirac’s 82 percent in the 2nd round. Nicolas Sauger, an associate professor and director of the Political Science Department at Paris’ Science Po university, told me at the time that he believed this public dissent against Macron was a strategic move by the left to prevent him from winning by too large of a margin and claiming a mandate to overhaul France’s protective work laws and social benefits.
“Those who hesitate between Macron and abstaining do not think that the two options are equivalent,” Sauger said. “The line of reasoning, following the experience of 2002 is that they don’t want to support and then give more legitimacy to Macron if he is going to be elected.”
The narrow loss was a bitter pill for Mélenchon, whose surge of support was one of the campaign’s other major surprises. While almost every other major candidate came out and endorsed Macron within hours after the results were known, Mélenchon initially refused. He said both candidates represented a failed economic system. Then he announced that while he would not back Le Pen, he planned to consult his supporters as to whether they should be advised to abstain, cast a blank ballot, or vote for Macron.
That reluctance infuriated many of Macron’s supporters, who took to social media to denounce Mélenchon voters for trying to argue there was no difference between Macron and Le Pen. Macron himself criticized Mélenchon in a TV interview for not offering his endorsement, and again at a rally in a French mining region. Where Macron supporters saw an energetic, youthful voice for reinventing France’s economy, Mélenchon supporters still saw a former investment banker and government insider.
At the Toulouse rally, one organizer, who would only give his first name as “Robin,” told the crowd he was frustrated with an electoral system that left them to choose between two candidates who got such a small percentage of the vote. He noted that Macron had been the Economy Minister for two years under the deeply unpopular Socialist Party government and failed to put a dent in the country’s high unemployment. While “Robin” believed Macron would win, he questioned his legitimacy and said now was the time to start organizing the “resistance” to the work reforms that would likely be proposed. “We must mobilize and demonstrate,” he said. The crowd then marched through the city for the next hour, chanting “Ni fachos, ni patrons” (neither fascists, nor bosses) and “Ni la brute, ni le banquier.”
Bernard said he was still torn about how to vote but said he may well just flip a coin or not vote at all. He was also encouraging people to participate in a national day of protest, Jour Debout, planned for the day of the second vote.
Later that week, I stopped by our local corner Casino market where the owner, Eric, liked to talk politics. The previous year, he kept warning me that he was worried about the whole Trump phenomenon and that I wasn’t taking his chances of his winning seriously enough. Now, with Macron leading, I wondered if this gave Eric some optimism. Not really, he replied. Fundamentally, he just didn’t trust Macron and this idea of centrism. “There is left, and there is right,” he said. “Being in the middle means you don’t know what you believe. How can I trust someone who doesn’t know what he believes?”
Macron vs Le Pen
This ambivalence created an opening that Le Pen tried to seize. Le Pen attempted to woo Mélenchon’s students and blue-collar supporters by painting Macron as an elitist pawn of financial institutions. The battle for the working-class vote took center stage in Macron’s hometown of Amiens. Macron had a planned meeting with executives of a Whirlpool factory there, which was being closed. Le Pen made a surprise appearance, joining a demonstration of hundreds of employees facing layoffs. “When I learned that Emmanuel Macron was coming here and did not want to meet with the employees, I found that it was so much contempt for the Whirlpool employees that I decided to get out of my meetings and come to see you,” she said, in footage broadcast on cable news station BFMTV.
Hearing that Le Pen had been outside, Macron later went to confront the protestors, and amid jeers and burning tires, spoke to them for about 90 minutes, which his campaign streamed live to his Facebook page. At several points, he said they should be suspicious of Le Pen for promising easy answers or saying that economic protectionism would fix France’s economy. “When she tells you the solution is to turn back globalization, she’s lying,” he said. (The New York Times just published a feature about the fate of this factory, and it does not have a happy ending.)
Several days before the second-round vote, Le Pen and Macron squared off in a nationally televised debate that was a 2.5-hour shouting match. The two were seated across a table from each other. The hosts were essentially chucked aside to watch helplessly as the candidates volleyed back and forth. Macron so thoroughly crushed Le Pen that even many of her supporters were critical of her following the debate. As Macron calmly responded to her repeated insults and attempts to bait him into fights over immigration and the European Union, Le Pen was often furiously rifling through a stack of paper files she had brought to find her facts and rejoinders, mangling them in the process. Even after the debate, her father, the disgraced racist she had kicked out of her party, said she had failed to rise to the occasion.
As Macron moved toward victory, the French political class continued to underestimate him and his En Marche movement.
The conventional wisdom became that Macron’s support was a cult of personality. Or that he was a media-driven candidate. France holds its legislative elections several weeks after the presidential election. How, observers wondered, could Macron get anyone to run for the National Assembly under the En Marche! banner? With no representatives in the Assembly, surely he’d spend the next five years struggling to piece together coalitions from disgruntled Socialist Party members and the Republicans to pass incremental legislation.
“Whether Macron would manage to get enough support of the more centrist [National Assembly members] from the left and the right is still unclear right now,” Sauger said when we talked before the second round of voting. “But in any case, it is quite unlikely that the winning candidate will be able to implement his or her pledges in terms of policy proposals.”
The Fight For France’s Future
During this two-week campaign for the second round, the discussions inside the country and outside about what it meant were very different. From the exterior, this was the story of a young, progressive leader who would be a champion for the E.U., against another populist who wanted to break the established global order and turn the country toward nationalism. There was some truth to that.
Inside France, this election was about the future of work. And in that respect, it’s too bad in a way that Mélenchon didn’t make the second round. Because the country could have had a more direct debate and choice about two competing visions for the path forward. Instead, much of the second round came down to the question of whether to vote for the fascist, or the person who was not a fascist. The discussion of the changing economy was drowned out by the questions of immigration and closing borders.
Macron represented a surging sector that included not just an expanding entrepreneurial class bolstered by the French Tech surge, but an increasing number of independent workers who were excited about these changes and wanted reforms that would let them embrace new opportunities and accelerate the race toward the future. This broader transformation of independents had been happening more quietly. France’s economy had traditionally been built around its largest companies and the government, the nation’s largest employer. The driving financial and cultural motivation for young people had for decades been to find a job with one or the other, which traditionally came with a near-guarantee of lifetime employment and the promise of a comfortable retirement.
As these largest companies slowed or stopped hiring, a growing number of French were working independently, becoming self-employed, either by choice or necessity. While that’s been common in places like the U.S. for a long time, in France, it was a somewhat new concept, made challenging by archaic rules surrounding social benefits and taxes. If you work for a big company, paying your taxes might take about 10 minutes per year. Independents, by contrast, have to maintain a mountain of paperwork and are often required to hire an accountant. They were also governed by a different agency for social benefits, one that Macron vowed to abolish. They do not fit neatly into that administrative box, and so the French bureaucracy often doesn’t know how to handle these independents, making their lives miserable.
Despite this uphill slog to work independently, France had been seeing one of the biggest increases in self-employment over the past decade. According to one study by the European Forum of Independent Professionals, the number of independent workers in France increased 85 percent between 2004 and 2013, behind only the Netherlands and Poland. “The subject of freelance work is one that stirs controversies and passionate debates in France,” wrote Laetitia Vitaud, editor of Switch Collective, a publication for independents and freelancers. “In a country where unemployment exceeds 10 percent of the active population, a majority of ‘insiders’ protected by rigid work contracts see all the ‘outsiders’ as a potential threat that ought to be eliminated. They aim to erect more barriers to stop alternative work models from developing. Freelancers are perceived either as the poor helpless victims of evil American digital platforms or as feckless millennials unable to hold a ‘real’ job.”
Macron insisted that it would be possible to support more entrepreneurship while protecting workers and making sure no one gets left behind. He said he would unleash the entrepreneurial spirit in a way that lifted all of France and doesn’t just create a few lucky billionaires in Paris. Mélenchon (and to a degree Le Pen) spoke for those who either feared or deeply distrusted what these changes meant and sought greater protection and social support against this tide.
The fear, and it wasn’t an unreasonable one, was that companies wanted to push workers toward independent or temporary positions to reduce protections and benefits and make it easier to hire and fire people. Those skeptics simply pointed across the water to the U.S. where workers have largely been stripped of security and benefits as evidence as to where such ideas would inevitably lead. Or they look north to neighboring Britain where Conservative and Labor governments dismantled worker protections in the name of liberalizing the economy. What they saw were economies that have become unfair and far more brutal in the name of competition and cheaper goods. While some of the reforms in France seemed trivial, the greater fear is that if they give a single inch now, they will step out on the slippery slope where every year they are being asked to give up more and more.
During the presidential election, Mélenchon had offered his own detailed plan for fixing France’s stagnant economy, one more in line with the classic ingredients the French would expect. Mélenchon proposed raising the minimum wage, cutting the work week to four days, and borrowing heavily to inject a strong dose of spending by consumers to turbocharge the economy. He also had his own set of reforms designed to make entrepreneurship easier. By the same stroke, he wanted to require international companies to comply with French work rules that would have made life difficult for many Silicon Valley companies doing business here. The idea was to emphasize “Made in France” products and services by ensuring all companies were playing by the same rules. It also included investments in new industries like environmental technologies. Finally, he wanted to renegotiate France’s relationship with the European Union, which he felt had become too business-friendly and had imposed austerity budget measures that were too harsh.
This platform drew tremendous support for Mélenchon, transforming him from a fringe candidate to a serious contender who almost made it through to the second round. And while there were important differences, a good part of this economic agenda overlapped with that of Le Pen’s, who also sought to boost French companies by making it tougher for outsiders to do business here and also planned to borrow heavily to stimulate the economy. If you put Mélenchon’s and Le Pen’s first-round vote together, along with some of the other left-wing candidates, this more protectionist side got nearly 50 percent of the votes in the first round of the presidential race. The case for economic liberalism finished second.
Macron still had much convincing to do.