Abstract
This speaking out article argues that populism is not only a phenomenon that characterizes extremist figures such as Farage, Trump or Le Pen. Drawing on Laclau’s conceptualization of populism, we show how French President Emmanuel Macron developed in 2017 a form of anti-extreme electoral populism relying upon (1) the creation of a new political frontier between ‘progressive reformers’ and ‘backward-looking conservatives’, and (2) a number of key empty signifiers, such as ‘Revolution’, ‘(The Republic) onwards’ and ‘and at the same time’. These discursive levers allowed Macron’s campaigns to incarnate a gradually larger plurality of demands, modulating the openness of equivalential chains over three successful electoral steps: the presidential first round, the presidential second round and the parliamentary elections. In parallel, his movement gradually moved from emergent organizing through a partial organization to a bureaucratized and hierarchized party. Thus, our analysis illuminates how Macron organized his own populism, based on a completely new movement: Macron’s electoral populism exploited the middle space left vacant by all other candidates, it relied on its own anti-establishment discourse, and in doing so it succeeded in unifying much more demands than other populisms, leading to a landslide win in the French parliamentary elections.
Highlights
Emmanuel Macron’s electoral victories in the French presidential and parliamentary elections have been associated with a rejection of populism (e.g. Lubben, 2017)
In this speaking out article, drawing on Laclau’s (2005) conceptualization of populism, we instead argue that Macron’s (2017) electoral success was largely attributable to his own brand of populism, organized through the creation of a new ‘political frontier’, the leveraging of a number of key ‘empty signifiers’ (Smolović Jones et al, 2019) and formal moves of ‘political organization’ (Husted and Plesner, 2017) taking his movement from emergent organizing to a bureaucratized and hierarchized party
In the French context, the 2017 elections were held in an atmosphere of anti-elite ‘dégagisme’, which gave Macron massive political space to occupy in the centre of the French political spectrum
Summary
Emmanuel Macron’s electoral victories in the French presidential and parliamentary elections have been associated with a rejection of populism (e.g. Lubben, 2017). While the conservative right had attempted to hegemonize the French Republic by calling themselves Les Républicains in 2015, they got trapped by a similar trick when Macron named his own party based on the same nodal point – certainly the most unifying French political signifier there is – and associated it with his ‘onwards’ project involving both centre-right and centre-left ‘progressives’ It was made all the easier for Macron to incarnate the French Republic as, for the second round of the presidential election, he had found himself the candidate of the ‘Republican front’ – a coalition of all the self-proclaimed ‘reasonable’ parties that has tended to form to defeat Front National when the need has arisen in electoral second rounds (most famously in 2002 with Jacques Chirac’s presidential win over Jean-Marie Le Pen). Macron’s populism succeeded in articulating a large chain of demands for electoral purposes – and he won the second round with approximately two-thirds of the cast votes (admittedly much less than Chirac’s 83% in 2002)
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