Macron Becomes France’s Answer to Strongman Populism

PARIS — The plush red velvet seats of France’s National Assembly are filled with lawmakers who owe just about everything to President Emmanuel Macron.

Three-quarters of the 577 members are brand-new, swept into power in the wake of his election last year. More than 60 percent are in his camp. Nearly one-third have never held public office, and 38 were younger than 31 when they entered office.

They are perfect foot soldiers for a president with an expansive notion of power and the revolutionary aim of wrenching France’s society and economy into the 21st century. With the assembly firmly in his control, Macron has had almost unchecked authority to carry out his agenda, even as critics fret that he is building a fawning cult of personality.

On Thursday, tens of thousands of railway workers, teachers and air traffic controllers went on strike across France to protest salary freezes for civil servants and Macron’s pledge to cut 120,000 public-sector jobs and introduce merit-based pay and use more private contractors.

But the anger on the streets has found little expression in the legislature, where Macron has been given free rein to ram through major legislation.

The symbiotic relationship between Macron and a legislature made in his image is a hopeful sign to his many supporters that the sclerotic French politics of the past few decades have given way to an era of renewal in a country that has long embraced the principle of a strong presidency. Elected on promises to enact more business-friendly labor laws, put the pension system on sounder footing, cut some taxes on the wealthy and address a host of other issues that his predecessors failed to solve, he has spent his first 10 months in office methodically working through his to-do list.

But there is also concern among his critics that a young and inexperienced legislature is deferring to him too much, allowing him at times to govern almost by edict, often bypassing debate and dismissing criticism.

“He’s a bad example for democracy, but a good example for reform,” said Patrick Vignal, a survivor from the previous assembly and now a supporter of Macron in parliament. He spoke with a grin, but some of his colleagues express similar sentiments with dead seriousness.

In fact, Macron has come to embody a paradox of French politics. Abroad, Macron has been seen as a vital European defender of liberal democratic values after France sidestepped the West’s turn to populism by rejecting the far-right National Front in elections last year.

But in place of populism, France got a sort of humanist but all-powerful leader who muses aloud about the solitary exercise of power, faces little internal dissent, and has effectively neutered the opposition.

Less than a year into his presidency, Macron’s push to upend France has spawned intense and sometimes overheated reactions. He is routinely if perhaps hyperbolically compared to either Napoleon Bonaparte or Louis XIV in the French media.

But there is no appetite to challenge or slow down Macron in the National Assembly, which is wholly dominated by his newly branded political party, La République en Marche, or the Republic on the Move.

The assembly has become a showcase of Macron’s forceful powers of persuasion and the ways he wants to reshape and update all of France.

“There’s been a complete cultural shock,” said Jean-Paul Delevoye, a senior official in Macron’s government who helped pick his candidates for parliament.

“We’ve completely overturned the sociology of the assembly,” he added.

Diet Coke replaced wine as the most popular item at the assembly’s bar. Wine sales had plummeted, stunning the barmen, though they are creeping back up under the influence of long days. Macron’s acolytes sit through them, unlike their predecessors.

Before, the rule for a deputy was arrive Tuesday morning and go home Wednesday evening. Now, many say, Macron’s deputies come for the whole week.

So assiduous are they that “now, it’s hard to find a spot at the restaurant, that’s what strikes me,” said Brigitte Bourguignon, another ex-Socialist who joined Macron. Among the youthful deputies, common positions are worked out in advance on applicatios like Telegram, befuddling the old-timers. There is little patience for them in any case.

But the ambition is also infused with arrogance, critics say, a charge frequently leveled at Macron himself.

“They give the impression that the world begins with them,” grumbled Boris Vallaud, a rare remaining Socialist. “Before, there were only imbeciles. And all the reforms they are accomplishing are necessarily the best.”

“They’re only there by the grace of Emmanuel Macron,” Vallaud added. “It’s a system of personal allegiance.”

For those rare lawmakers who managed to survive the clear-cutting of France’s opposition and traditional political parties from the assembly, the going has not been easy.

“There’s an arrogance, a lack of humility,” Vignal said, without rancor.

“We were the ‘saved ones,'” he added. “So it was like, ‘Shut up, at least you were saved.'”

Some of that disdain is evident in the attitudes of the new deputies.

“We’re not here for the show of it, like some of these career deputies,” said Benoit Potterie, a member of Macron’s movement and a political novice who owns a string of optical shops in the north. “We’re here to work, to write laws.”

Like him, a fifth of Macron’s new deputies are what the French term “executives”from either the public or private sectors. Many own small businesses.

In the carpeted hallways of the National Assembly, legislative aides and the few remaining opposition deputies mumble about the “sheeping-down” of parliament — a phrase that recurs frequently.

There is little doubt that Macron is getting what he wants out of his parliament, sometimes by cutting it out of the picture altogether.

Parliament was barely to be seen last year when Macron forced through changes to France’s rigid labor code to allow companies more flexibility in negotiating directly with workers and to limit payouts after layoffs.

Instead, the president proceeded by special decree, using a rarely used procedure that allowed the National Assembly merely to vote thumbs up or down on the labor reforms — it voted up — but without the power to change or even discuss them.

Then, Macron rammed through the lifting of a tax on wealth, insisting that it was necessary to free capital for investment. Many economists agreed. But apart from a few opposition whimpers, there was hardly any debate.

In coming weeks, he proposes to take on the railway workers — the bête noirof many a French government — again by special decree. Macron wants to end the hiring-for-life, early retirement and enhanced medical insurance that have contributed to a whopping deficit. But he doesn’t necessarily want parliament debating it.

The steamroller of the reform drive has left France caught somewhere between unease at the plenitude of Macron’s powers and astonishment at the speed with which he is moving.

“Debate is extremely limited,” said Jean-Michel Clément, who broke with the Socialists and joined Macron. “It’s difficult to debate when you’ve got 300 people.” What discussion there is sometimes resembles back-patting rather than debate, an echo chamber of praise.

When Macron’s transport minister, Élisabeth Borne, recently defended her government in parliament, Macron’s deputies applauded in unison.

Before that, it was pure flattery from the ranks. “You showed unequaled strength,” one of Macron’s deputies said, lavishing praise on the president’s hand-picked prime minister, Edouard Philippe.

Others disagreed that the climate had turned sheepish, to a point.

“Sure, we invite our people to debate the issues,” said Delevoye, the senior Macron government official. “But once something is decided, that’s it, the decision has got to be respected.”

That appears to suit Macron just fine. He has made it clear that he doesn’t want much discussion and that power is best exercised alone.

“Since I was elected president, I’ve taken the measure of the office’s responsibility, its weight,” Macron told a group of surprised journalists last month, suddenly ruminating aloud in his trademark philosophical style.

“Of the part of solitude that it implies, and of the end of innocence that it announces,” Macron added loftily.

Power is “something ascetic,” Macron continued. “I am the fruit of a kind of brutality in history, a kind of forcing-in, because France was unhappy and uneasy.”

It was an unusually introspective portrait of the exercise of power, and there was only one person in it: Macron.

The president’s many allies in parliament were invisible, and for good reason. Some of Macron’s recent initiatives have made it ever more clear that he is not thinking about them very much.

He is aiming to limit the rights of members to propose amendments, and he wants to cut back on the number of deputies altogether, by about one-third.

For his dedicated supporters in parliament, subordination is not an issue. Asked whether he had been in disagreement with the government, Potterie replied: “Ah, no. No. At the margins maybe. But for the moment, no.”

In the National Assembly, “it’s true that we don’t challenge the government,” he added. “It’s because we were elected to carry out their program.”

That sense of purpose runs deep.

“It’s not true that we are simply puppets,” insisted Bourguignon, the former Socialist. “We’ve got a government that reforms, and we’ve got to follow the government.”