Jocelyn Evans (top right) is Professor of Politics at the University of Leeds, UK. He’s the series editor of the French Politics, Society and Culture series.
Gilles Ivaldi is Researcher in Political Science with the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at URMIS-University of Nice, France.

The meteoric rise and victory of Emmanuel Macron in the 2017 presidential election constituted one of France’s most dramatic political revolutions since 1958. It has also posed a significant challenge for French electoral analysis. Here, we look back at the writing of our 2017 book, and consider how much the political landscape changed since our initial proposal to Palgrave two years previously. In doing so, we reflect on the critical events of what will remain one of the most spectacular political hold-ups in the history of the Fifth Republic.

 Our general framework for the book was built upon the idea of a ‘blocked polity’. This notion emphasized the atrophy of France’s political system, with the cartelization of its main parties of government, a perpetual duopoly of left and right ricocheting in and out of power across multiple levels of governance, and the ever growing gulf between elites and citizens. By looking at the key factors which had driven previous election results in France, in 2015 we clearly wanted to give the reader a sense of the longue durée, building a systematic analysis of how election results are typically produced by deeply entrenched institutional features – presidential primacy, majoritarian electoral system – and the political culture of party cooperation, and much less so by the short-term campaign events, the profile of the main candidates, or the many controversies that traditionally punctuate presidential campaigns in France.

 In October 2015, political conditions and public opinion were all pointing to another ‘inevitable alternation’ – to quote our 2012 election book – with the political pendulum swinging back once more to the right. Most of our pre-election commentaries fed into this narrative, suggesting that the Socialist President, François Hollande, was heading towards a crushing defeat, that the right-wing opposition would succeed him, and that this alternation of power was most likely to result from a repeat of the ‘atypical’ election of 2002, whereby the FN candidate Marine Le Pen would progress into the run-off at the expense of the socialists. All that remained to confirm in our script was whether we would be handing the keys for the Elysée to Alain Juppé or to one of the other Right-wing heavyweights. You would have had to search hard in the proposal for any mention of the Minister of the Economy, Emmanuel Macron.

The political landscape soon changed dramatically. By April 2016, Macron had founded his own movement, En Marche!; a few months later, he left government, leaving little doubt as to his intention regarding the presidency. In June 2016, a weakened Hollande gave his blessing to a socialist presidential primary, before renouncing his own candidacy in December, leaving the PS to its fate. In November, François Fillon had been the surprise winner in the Republicans primary against Juppé and former president Nicolas Sarkozy, but by January the revelations of the Penelopegate financial scandal had rapidly begun to eat away at any hope of a right-wing victory

Rarely has a presidential election in France produced so many attempts at rewriting the series of events that eventually led to Macron’s election. We ourselves explored ‘what if?’ scenarios for some of the most crucial events that, we thought, may have altered the course of the 2017 race. What if Juppé had won the Republican nomination? What if the Fillon scandal had not surfaced until after the election? What if Hollande had decided to run after all? Even, within three days of the result, what if Marine Le Pen had not hit the self-destruct button in the second-round debate?

 There was little evidence that a re-election bid by Hollande could have decisively tipped the balance to the left in the first round. Our hypothesis that the left simply could not survive the political disaster of Hollande’s, which we had already signed off on in 2015, was confirmed. So too was our anticipation that Marine Le Pen would progress to the second round, just like her father some fifteen years ago, dislodging the traditional left-right runoff opposition, before coming a distant second simply by dint of her unelectability for the majority of French voters.

 On the mainstream right, we did find that Fillon’s victory had a more significant impact on the final outcome – mainly because of the revelations of Penelopegate, but also because Fillon’s popularity had started to decline before the scandal erupted. His profile as the typical provincial right-wing reactionary notable was a strong deterrent for moderates at the centre, typically those well-off, urban educated voters who would support the more progressive liberal values embodied by Macron and François Bayrou.

What remained within Macron’s control, and was an essential condition of his victory, was his almost flawless strategy of taking control of the centre ground, first from the left flank; then by aggregating Bayrou’s Modem with those social-liberals from the PS such as Valls; and lastly, doubling back to the right of the political spectrum in the legislatives, after his masterstroke in nominating Republican Edouard Philippe as his first Prime Minister.

What, then, remains of our initial analytical framework and attempt to chart regularities in the dynamics of electoral competition in France across time? We argue in the book that, as in recent electoral memory, the size of the radical vote, the rise of a viable centrist alternative, and finally the proliferation of candidates which lowered the qualification threshold for the runoff, were the key drivers of the result. Most interestingly perhaps, support for our claim that the 2017 elections, while unique in terms of the outcome they produced, followed a more typical path in French politics, was found in the results of the subsequent legislative elections. In 2017, as in 2002, 2007 and 2012, the legislative elections were seen as ‘second-order’. The honeymoon effect for the new incumbent was sufficiently strong to boost a hastily formed and organisationally absent political club to legislative predominance. Some of the very institutions Macron has set about reshaping were those that secured his executive in the first place.