Emmanuel Macron leaves the Élysée in eight months. And, in keeping with the political journalism tradition whereby last-minute criticism apparently makes up for a decade of deference, the brickbats are coming thick and fast. The Economist, having once regarded him as the ‘saviour of Europe’, now mocks a ‘lame duck’ president. Two Parisian courtiers have devoted a book to ‘the story of an exceptional man … who screwed things up in an exceptional way’. Alain Minc, mouthpiece of the liberal elite and once the president’s advisor, has called him ‘the Fifth Republic’s worst president’ (1).
As the Latin tag has it, Ingratis servire nefas – ‘There’s nothing to be gained from serving the ungrateful.’ And ungrateful they certainly are: since 2017 Macron has largely followed the recommendations of the Minc report (1994) and the commission chaired by Jacques Attali (2008), on which he served as deputy rapporteur. He has likewise followed the defence spending recommendations of the European Union and NATO.
More than any of his predecessors, Macron has stripped French diplomacy of the vestiges of independence that used to set it apart. Paris has adopted Kyiv’s Russia policy, Washington’s Venezuela policy, Abu Dhabi’s Iran policy and Berlin’s trade policy. It no longer has an Africa policy, since the Sahel states sent its army packing.
Macron has also completed the transformation of the state into a Committee of Private Safety, ensuring record dividends for shareholders (2). Of the EU’s 27 member states, France has become a haven for speculative funds that now control thousands of businesses, including some of the country’s most prestigious companies. The social security system no longer aspires to provide for each according to their needs, while resource-starved public services are turning into a nightmare for employees and users.
Macron has been the virtuoso exponent of the liberal, Atlanticist extreme centre. But he’s been playing out of time. A champion of globalisation and transcending traditional politics, he did not foresee either the former’s demise or the latter’s return. His supply-side strategy, discredited by the international resurgence of sovereignty and economic planning, has failed. Unemployment is on the rise, growth is stagnant. The trade deficit remains high, while almost half of France’s consumption-based carbon footprint consists of emissions generated abroad. The public finance deficit is used to justify France’s shortage of firefighters and firefighting aircraft.
As his country burned last month, Macron was photographed speeding across the water on a jet ski – a fitting image for a presidency ending with a headlong rush on two fronts. The first is Ukraine, which is intended to reunite his camp after his disastrous dissolution of the National Assembly in 2024 and give a boost to Europe’s defence industry in the name of strategic autonomy. But it comes with the risk of triggering massive German rearmament (see special report, in this issue) or even a confrontation with Russia.
The second is the erosion of civil liberties, which has been under way for several years, and has been reinforced by the recent appointment of a reactionary, François-Noël Buffet, as Defender of Rights, and government support for a presumption that police officers act in legitimate self-defence.
Five years ago, Marine Le Pen, the frontrunner for the 2027 presidential election said of Macron in Le Figaro, ‘Here’s a man who has suppressed freedoms … with unprecedented violence … And then he comes along and says Marine Le Pen is a threat to individual freedoms and democracy. It’s a joke.’
In May 2017 president-elect Macron said of Le Pen’s voters, ‘I will do everything to ensure that they no longer have any reason to vote for the extremes.’ Two terms later, we can see how well that’s turned out.
(1) The Economist, London, 8 January 2026; Nicolas Domenach and Maurice Szafran, Néron à l’Élysée: Comment il a tout gâché (Nero in the Élysée: how he ruined everything), Albin Michel, Paris, 2026; Alain Minc in L’Express, Paris, 7 October 2025.
(2) See Pierre Rimbert and Grégory Rzepski, ‘Crisis government in the era of panic’, Le Monde diplomatique, online exclusive, August 2022. The Committee of Public Safety was the provisional government of France, set up by the National Convention in 1793 to address the threat of civil war and invasion.