Around the time of the French presidential election in 2017, some graffiti appeared in Paris and promptly did the rounds on social media. It read: “Macron 2017 = Le Pen 2022.” With the next election now just over a year away, this warning may yet prove prescient. One poll from January put the pair effectively neck and neck, suggesting that in a second-round runoff between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, the former would win by only 52 percent to the latter’s 48 percent.

With the French far right on the march, Macron has responded by trying to ape it. There was uproar recently when Frédérique Vidal, his higher education minister, whipped up a moral panic about so-called “Islamo-leftism” — a trope lifted directly from the fervid imagination of the extreme right — which, she said, “is eating away at our society as a whole.” This is part of a wider offensive, including plans to draft a list of government-approved imams and to forcibly dissolve the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, an anti-racist NGO.

With Macron’s disapproval ratings having long hovered at around 60 percent and much of his time in office marked by large-scale protests against his policies, it’s no surprise that he’s looking for distractions. Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini’s The Last Neoliberal, newly translated into English, puts Macron and his “Jupiterian presidency” into context. It is an absorbing case study of what happens when the erstwhile center-left, discarding its remaining obligations to the working class, gets drunk on its own heresy.