Macron appears to have consolidated power, but is there anything for 'centrists' to learn from his success? Not really

Macron's landslide was not quite what it appeared, exposing how neoliberal Centrism depends upon disinterest and abstention. Photograph: Emmanuel Macron campaign poster 'Macron President' in Paris by Lorie Shaull (License) (Cropped)

Nearly three-quarters of a year has passed since Emmanuel Macron took up the post of President of France. In that time he has seemingly managed to consolidate power (despite of some rocky moments). So: job done, new centrist model ready to roll out? Not so fast.

Well, let's look beneath the surface. The election landslides for Macron and La Republique En Marche were always going to provoke a response, especially with the near wipeout of the old centre-left Parti Socialiste (PS).

One small, but significant, reaction - an indication of how sizeable a reorganisation of French politics Macron has caused - is the reunification of the old Parti Radical with the breakaway Radical Party of the Left, as the new Mouvement Radical.

For years, the two radical parties - in former times a powerful party of government - were occasionally a crucial coalition partner of the larger parties. But they split from one another down the old left-right lines.

The Radical Party of the Left would partner with the Parti Socialiste and the centre-left, and the Radical Party would partner with the various centre-right parties. It appears that Emmanuel Macron has helped to settle the dispute between the two.

The reunification of the Radicals is a small thing, but also suggests that Macron's victory (and the collapse of PS) was big enough to put into abeyance the question of whether to partner with left or right. The radicals are happy with the centre.

That perhaps also says a lot about where Les Marcheurs lie on a political spectrum: European Federalist, social liberal, and for equality of opportunity (rather than of outcomes) within a free market.

Those were also the bones of Macron's pitch at the election. An election that left Macron with a severely weakened opposition, a a left-wing reduced to around 50-60 social liberals, social democrats and socialists, and a right-wing of around 130-140.

One potential problem Macron faced was if those with divided loyalties between En Marche and the social liberals and social democrats in opposition organise, Macron might face difficulty from a voting-bloc under his own left-wing.

However, the Left is still in disarray - and the Radicals seem set jump ship. The election was a disaster for the Parti Socialiste, it's bastion, who fell from 280 seats to just 30. Even their 2017 Presidential candidate Benoit Hamon has walked away.

Hamon has formed a new party, Generation.s, which has formed a tentative European alliance with Yanis Varoufakis and DiEM25. It had been hoped that Hamon might do for PS what Corbyn did for Labour in Britain, but now he will have to start from scratch.

There are also two separate far-left groups in the National Assembly, that have yet to find a way to work together - France Insoumise with 17 seats and Gauche Democrate et Republicaine with 16 seats.

With the collapse of the Left and, so far, no sign of a new rallying position, Macron has for the moment usurped the place of the Parti Socialiste in two-party system. Does this mean that the centre is saved and the model can be copy and pasted elsewhere?

No.

The hope for a centrist revival is not giving due credit the particular circumstances of Macron's victory - nor that both Macron and Les Marcheurs won, across the board, as the least worst option amidst raging disinterest. Not exactly an inspiring rallying call.

Macron's victory also has shadows of the upswell that took Barack Obama to  the US Presidency in 2008. Macron, undeniably a member of the party establishment, rode on the back of a movement that was then jettisoned when office was achieved.

The leading talents of that movement were absorbed into the government machinery, while the movement itself has been left without it's leading figures and central purpose. Will it survive or find a new role?

That Macron has succeeded in consolidating his position must still be put to the test at the ballot. As Obama learned, when you set high expectations, the movement will want practical changes it can touch. A legacy they can touch.

What Macron has right now is a governing majority. He doesn't even have a campaign machinery for himself or his supporters to sustain their agenda. Nothing has really changed over the past year.

Copy the En Marche model at peril. Macron's was a victory for charismatic leadership, but it's hollow inside. The future, never mind success, will depend on the support existing parties like MoDem and the Radicals, and the creation of some sort of plain, traditional electoral machinery for Les Marcheurs.

Macron's victory was a lesson in how to get into government, not in how to stay there. He made waves, a tidal wave, that upset the system and forced some realignment. But politics is fickle.

Alliances can seem unbreakable, until they aren't. Break ups are forever, until they aren't. Just ask the Radicals.

Macron and Popularity: The President of France has yet to win a sceptical public back over to the political process

Photograph: LEWEB 2014 Conference - in conversation with Emmanuel Macron by LE WEB (License) (Cropped)

The victory of Emmanuel Macron attracted the attention and plaudits of centrists across Europe, desperate for a way out of the slump that has undermined social and liberal democratic parties. But the talk in many countries of needing their own Macron and En Marche is all just buying into a myth, because the rise of Macron was an illusion.

Reports this last month talked of Macron and his government already facing a decline in public support. But what those reports ignore is that support was never that high in the first place - the election landslide was more due to the electoral system than a swell of support.

Macron's movement was perhaps well organised or made a particularly well tailored pitch, but En Marche mostly benefited from a system that favours voters' picking their least worst option - which served En Marche who were the heirs of the collapse in the credibility of the centre-left and centre-right.

Macron took just 24% in the full field first round of the Presidential vote, and La Republic En Marche took 32% on a first round legislative election turnout of just 49%. These numbers delivered political power, but not broad public support or high approval. There was no rising wave, just a window of opportunity.

The problem for Macron is not that he has been discredited, but that he has yet to win voters back to the political process. Taking power on the support of a quarter and a fifth, his approval ratings will begin low, with scepticism high and everything to prove.

Turning political power in decent approval ratings was never something that was going to happen overnight. The pledges of Macron were built around big promises with no easy solution, like cleaning up politics.

The difficulties faced by Macron and En Marche were underlined when, within the opening weeks of his new office, his MoDem political allies and their leader Francois Bayrou were hit by corruption investigations.

The other big promise Macron made was to reform France's labour laws, famous for their scale and complexity. It is an issue on which there is a clear public support for action, but no real consensus on what action.

Macron has his own ideas, but has set about a negotiating strategy, rather than trying to force it through. Even trade unions have gotten around the table for talks - with the two of the largest unions even declining to take part in protests against any watering down of labour protections.

While the left under Jean-Luc Melenchon and the union CGT push for protests and strikes, Macron's consensus approach with no legislative surprise has got enough of the key players involved to reduce action to the harder left organisations that media find it easier to discredit.

But the dissatisfaction with politics in France is too broad to be convincingly reduced to the bellyaching of the radical left. And despite the lean times and discrediting of the centre, neither the radical left nor the far right have taken a decisive advantage.

The people of France are not itching to rise up for either extreme, but nor have they fallen back in love with the Republican centre. Macron was never the unquestioned messiah and he has yet to win the public over.

The election results showed all of this. The approval ratings just confirm it. The task ahead of Macron is to rebuild the Republic and he has no gordian solution. A facsimile of Macron in another country would face the same problems.

Macron's ascendency is not the revival that liberals crave, nor are his low approval ratings the death knell of moderate-led reformist capitalism for which socialists are straining their ears. Macron got enough support to get through the door.

But to stay there, Macron and En Marche must win people back to the political process. Sure, his failure to reengage people would be a blow to neoliberals trying to cling to power. But it would be just as bad for progressives of all stripes, for whom public faith in democracy and a politically active and interested people are a cornerstone.

Words Matter: When far-right groups hide behind masks, it's more important than ever for progressives to be clear what we mean

The rise of neo-Nazi white nationalism in the United States behind its mask, the self-ascribed label 'Alt-Right', exposes a problem that needs to be addressed. When the words we use to describe and define things in politics are obscured or blurred it leaves us vulnerable.

Words matter. They are the medium for communication and even our own thoughts and ideas. When we lose clarity in the definitions of words, we lose the medium for expressing these ideas in the ways that can bring us together in shared understanding, or defining for ourselves what something is and how it might be championed, improved or opposed.

The words people use in politics, to name their parties or their belief systems, can inform or deceive. And it is the norm in politics that these words are heard mostly in an adversarial context, as opponents seek to label and discredit one another. But the words of politics describe discrete positions and it is important that people know what each of them represents.

There-in lies the danger of the rise of the self-proclaimed 'Alt-Right'. When white nationalism tries to hide behind the term 'Alt', it is both a deception and an attack upon the language of progress and reform. It allows them to obscure their true nature while attempting to co-opt the language, and therefore identity and perhaps support, of well-meaning reformers and anti-establishment movements.

This game is not newly invented by them. It has been the primary avenue of conservatism for centuries. As political movements reform themselves, the adherents who stick to the old unreformed tenets find themselves caught in the gravity of conservatism.

For instance, the term liberalism has undergone a long series of changes. As its adherents' understanding of how best to achieve individual liberty has evolved, so to has liberalism undergone changes. But the old ideas don't go away.

And conservatism never misses an opportunity. It consumes these ideas and assimilates them, finding ways to fit parts of these ideologies into its own thinking to convey its own purposes - to protect its system of tradition, hierarchy and moral order.

From the elitist constitutional order of the old bourgeois liberalism, to the free markets of classical liberalism, conservatism has found a home in the liberal parties that didn't reform themselves or conservative parties have taken up the ideas as they have been abandoned by the liberals who did reform.

While the determined consumption and repackaging of liberalism has been much commented on, the same process, happening to democratic movements, has been given much less attention. But it is just as real and just as disconcerting.

Amongst the revolutionaries of 1848, there were democrats as well as liberals. In that broad opposition movement, the failure of the liberal part of was clearly pointed out by Marx and Engels. The bourgeois order was the liberal folly that allowed their movement to be absorbed by the conservative establishment.

The democrats were not immune from folly. Their own folly was nationalism. Their leaders, like Giuseppe Mazzini, looked to nationalism as a medium to unite the people around their common heritage and arose them to protect their interests.

But efforts to achieve popular liberation and sovereignty ended up taking a back seat to petty rivalries over 'national' claims to lands and borders - driving rifts between the Germans and Czechs and Polish; saw the Hungarians, who were fighting to end domination by the Austrians, themselves fought by Romanians and Croatians.

The sectarian ideologies reared their menacing heads. Militarism embedded within the conservative establishment, particularly in Germany, wielded nationalism in the forging of nation-states with grand armies as the martial power in a great game - a competition between nations for self-interested domination.

For conservatism, the bourgeois order provided the administrative tools and nationalism provided the means to shape the popular identity. The follies of liberals and democrats, in quests for power and order, had in the end simply fed the conservative establishment with palatable ideas for assimilation.

This pattern on the part of conservatism has not ceased. Their offshoots in national populism and liberal conservatism, and those movements containing both - like the co-opted Republican Party in the United States - continue to play these language games with an eye for opportunity.

Progressives of all stripes, liberal or democrat, need to be wary of this. They need to take great care over their words and ideas, and never be willing to simply give up our words - and everything that comes with them - to conservatism.

American conservatism has co-opted the centrist concept of the republic. European conservatism has co-opted the liberal concept of individual liberty. The far-right everywhere co-opted the democratic-socialist concept of social justice. Now, white nationalist sectarianism wants to present itself as 'the alternative'.

But, as with parties like UKIP and Front National, these parties of the far-right pitching themselves as 'liberators' are really the ultra-establishment forces, disguising themselves in the garments of the anti-establishment movements of the turn of the millennium. They claim words like 'Alt' and pitch themselves as the conservative rebel to the liberal-socialist tyrant because it suits them in this moment.

Progressives cannot keep giving ground. They cannot lightly allow words to be taken as new disguises or fresh ammunition for conservative movements - movements that promise liberation but will deliver only the conservative triumph: tradition over reason, moral order over sound ethics, hierarchy over equality.