Five years ago, 39-year-old Emmanuel Macron — France’s youngest leader since Napoleon — strode alone on to a stage at the Louvre to launch his presidency. It’s the most hopeful French moment I’ve experienced in nearly 20 years living in Paris. This month he’ll probably get re-elected. So what’s his half-term report card?
Unlike other recent presidents, Macron set out to transform France. So far, he has merely improved it. He loosened up the labour market, making hiring and firing easier, and so helped cut unemployment from 10 per cent to 7.4 per cent, the lowest level since 2008, and near the 7 per cent target that seemed implausible when he set it in 2017. He halved many class sizes in primary schools in poorer areas. And because, psychologically, he travels alone, without cronies or even friends, he was free to take on the political class. His law on the “moralisation of politics” has genuinely reduced corruption. Among other things, he stopped politicians hiring relatives or spending cash handouts as they chose.
Hardly anyone is talking about his reforms of France, though. From the gilets jaunes uprising of 2018 through to today’s cost-of-living shock, Macron has been a crisis manager. Managing Covid-19 looked impossible in France, the most vaccine-sceptical of 140 countries in the 2018 Gallup-Wellcome survey. But Macron gambled by introducing a “sanitary pass”, which made vaccination compulsory for anyone wanting to enter a restaurant, train or many public spaces. It worked: France’s vaccination rate of 78 per cent exceeds Germany’s and Britain’s, and its excess mortality rate of +6 per cent during the pandemic beats all of its neighbours except Germany.