To be french is always to rise to the times when they demand it . . . It is, ultimately, choosing to write history rather than be subjected to it.’ On 9 June 2024, with this grandiose flourish, president Emmanuel Macron concluded the televised address conveying his decision to dissolve France’s National Assembly and to schedule a parliamentary election three weeks later. The address was delivered barely an hour after the announcement of the preliminary results of the election to the European Parliament held that same day, in which Macron’s centrist coalition, with 15 per cent, had come a distant second behind the far-right National Rally’s record-breaking 31 per cent.

The president’s decision stunned observers far and wide—not least, France’s entire political class. A poor showing for an incumbent government in a European election is nothing out of the ordinary; it has happened more often than not since the first European election was held in France in 1979. The Macronist coalition had the largest parliamentary grouping in the National Assembly, having won 250 out of 577 seats in the previous parliamentary election in June 2022—shy of an outright majority, but enough to pass over a hundred bills in less than two years and to defeat the no-confidence motions tabled by opposition groups. More puzzling: is it not asking for a second beating to call a new election on the day of an electoral defeat? While a number of political considerations and calculations may have justified it in Macron’s own eyes, to much of the public it seemed a defiant, impulsive decision. The president’s vindictive streak was on display the next day when, according to the newspaper Le Monde, he declared in a conversation during a visit to Oradour-sur-Glane, the ‘martyred village’, on the 80th anniversary of the massacre during the Second World War: ‘I’ve thrown my live grenade at their legs. Now let’s see how they get on.’footnote¹

The parliamentary election Macron called was held in two rounds on 30 June and 7 July. It returned a National Assembly chiefly divided into three blocs of comparable if not equal size. An alliance of four left-wing parties came first, though short of an outright majority. Macron’s centrist coalition came second, and the far right, led by Rassemblement national (rn), came third, contradicting weeks of polling that had predicted its victory. On 5 September, after two months of talks and dithering, Macron named Michel Barnier as prime minister—an unthreatening senior figure from the establishment right-wing party Les Républicains (lr), which had obtained less than a tenth of the seats in the election. In such a fractured National Assembly, it is uncertain how long the new government will survive. What can be gleaned from recent developments and the recomposition of parliament regarding the political condition of France? The seven years since Macron upstaged the two-party system and entered the Élysée have been nothing if not eventful. The electoral field is at once confronting and accommodating ascendant political forces of a new kind. How is the Fifth Republic changing?

With hindsight, it is now possible to take the measure of the historical break that 2017 represented for France’s political system. So far, the Fifth Republic—born in the tumult of the Algerian War and under threat of military intervention in 1958—can be divided into three periods.footnote² In the first, from 1958 to 1981, only the right was in office, with the presidencies of de Gaulle (1959–69), of his heir Pompidou (1969–74), and of his former finance minister Giscard d’Estaing (1974–81), already less of a Gaullist. The electoral victory of the left in 1981 marked the beginning of the second period, consisting of a steady alternation between the Socialist Party (ps) and the post-Gaullist right, the latter under successive acronyms—rpr (Rassemblement pour la République), then ump (Union pour un mouvement populaire), today lr (Les Républicains). Between 1981 and 2017, under the presidencies of Mitterrand, Chirac, Sarkozy and finally Hollande, governments of the centre-left and centre-right succeeded one another, the French electorate rejecting the incumbent party at virtually every opportunity. This two-party system of thirty-six years collapsed in 2017, when Macron and his new centrist political vehicle En Marche!—em, his own initials; then lrem (La République En Marche), today Renaissance—won the presidential and parliamentary elections. By roundly beating the established governing forces of the left and right in 2017, and then again on the occasion of his re-election in 2022, Macon has ushered in a third period in the history of the Fifth Republic.

What are the defining traits of the new period compared to the last? For one thing, it revolves around personalities more than organizations. Macron is a free agent, unfettered by the party he set up in 2016 to support his personal ambitions. To Macron’s left, the ps has been eclipsed as an electoral force by the more radical Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who launched his own personal campaigning vehicle that same year, La France insoumise (lfi). Initially claiming to be ‘movements’, both Macron’s and Mélenchon’s outfits have operated above all as personal parties: mobilizing and disciplining instruments at the service of their leaders.footnote³ To Macron’s right, the post-Gaullist lr has been since 2017 overtaken by Marine Le Pen’s rn. Le Pen inherited the party—the National Rally, formerly the National Front (fn)—from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2011. Even though the rn has more organizational backbone than either Renaissance or lfi, Le Pen’s grip on it is currently uncontested. By contrast, the diminished ps and lr—survivors of the defunct two-party system—remain parties in a more recognizable, twentieth-century mould, not beholden to an individual but instead traversed by contending political lines and factional rivalries. Since 2017, then, the organizational ecology of the Fifth Republic has seen the supersession of one formerly hegemonic species, the twentieth-century collective party, by another, the personal—or leaderist—party, and the two dominant electoral actors of the past few decades, the ps and lr, have been displaced by three new poles: Macron’s centre, Mélenchon’s left and Le Pen’s far right. The ps and lr retain a presence in France’s regions and municipalities, with local capacities that outdo the lightweight operations of the rn, Renaissance and lfi. But in national politics, the two establishment parties have been reduced to secondary players.

Yet for all the recomposition of France’s electoral field since 2017, there are deep-seated continuities with the Fifth Republic’s prior political phases. As willed into the 1958 constitution by de Gaulle, and as taken advantage of by all of his successors, the political system has remained remarkably ‘vertical’ (in the French expression), if not fully presidential. In contrast to the United States, the government is accountable to the National Assembly, which has the power to revoke it, conceding the executive’s ultimate parliamentary foundation. However, the French presidency’s symbolic pomp, constitutional prerogatives and de facto dominance over both governmental and legislative affairs under most circumstances have made it a much more powerful office than its American counterpart. Macron fully embraced the trappings of his position, repeatedly giving the public a taste of the arbitrariness it affords him—not least by dissolving parliament on an apparent whim.

In terms of political orientation, Macron’s governance has also displayed broad continuity with the preceding period. This is not surprising, since his training as a haut fonctionnaire (senior civil servant) at the elite École nationale d’Administration and his subsequent admission to the rarefied corps of inspecteurs des finances tie him precisely to the segment of the technocracy that has done so much to shape French economic policy since 1983—the year when Socialist president Mitterrand publicly abandoned the bold redistributive platform that had had him elected two years before. For four decades, this political orientation has been defined by the twin processes of neoliberalization and Europeanization, as designed by the technocracy and pursued jointly by the ps on the left and the post-Gaullists on the right. The most significant political-economic restructuring on these counts took place between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s. Macron, then, stands as the inheritor of a policy order forged in the late twentieth century, and to which France’s political economy has remained tethered ever since.