France’s Bourgeois Bloc Is Withering
Emmanuel Macron’s coalition, drawing on both center-left and center-right politicians, was a perfect embodiment of the neoliberal project. Unable to deliver prosperity for wider layers of French people, it has driven the political system into turmoil.
The victory of the "bourgeois bloc" succeeded in 2017 with Emmanuel Macron's rise to power. (LUDOVIC MARIN / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)
France’s political dynamic, and the prospects for the Left within it, should be read within the broader trajectory of the country’s neoliberal paradigm. Now dominant for over four decades, this paradigm is built on pillars that structure the worldview of not only a large swath of France’s ruling elites (in the political, economic, media, and cultural spheres) but most voters. Business is perceived as a single, united actor rather than as a battlefield to fight over; it is upheld as the sole creator of wealth and the engine of progress, and the competitive organization of the economy is assumed to be most efficient, both on the domestic market and in international trade. The corollary of this has been the dismantling of public services and the extension of free-trade agreements.
But there is more. Belief in trickle-down economics (that profits will translate into job-creating private investment) implies that government action should be guided by a supply-side policy. The understanding of income as a legitimate reward for individual effort, merit, and risk-taking also raises questions over the value of collective bargaining and social protections. The neoliberal paradigm is also based on downplaying or even denying the reality of class divisions and emphasizing alternative splits in society (insider-outsider, men-women, young-old, native-immigrant, white–ethnic minorities, etc.). In ensuring the competitive organization of markets, including the labor market, the state also has a role to play in promoting a pro-business policy and extending market logic to all social relationships.
These pillars structure the space in which rival political strategies can in principle be pursued. Thus, within the neoliberal universe, there has been a “left-wing” strategy, that of the Third Way, which emphasizes equality of opportunity and the possibility of rapid social advancement for those who show their “merit” in a society made more flexible by neoliberal reforms. It was this promise — that social advancement was within reach — that enabled the neoliberal left of the likes of Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Matteo Renzi, and François Hollande to win the support of a section of the middle and even the popular classes of their respective countries and to form governments. Yet all that is in the past. Neoliberalism’s promises have been largely disappointed, while everywhere it has produced a disproportionate concentration of wealth, the spread of precarious employment, an increase in the number of working poor, and a deterioration in living conditions. This hits even a significant proportion of the middle classes, which now feel they are in danger of falling down the class ladder.
The neoliberal reforms of the last forty years have had several effects on the French political landscape. First, the traditional social blocs on the Right and Left have gradually fractured as a result of the impossibility of identifying a mediation strategy capable of simultaneously meeting the expectations of their working-class elements and of their bourgeois components, which are broadly in favor of the so-called needed reforms. The disintegration of the social alliances once essentially represented by the Republican right-wing party and the Parti Socialiste expanded the space for an old political strategy, the one that Bruno Amable and I have called the “bourgeois bloc.”
The meeting of the “wise men of all camps” — i.e., all the social groups favorable to the continuation of European integration and French capitalism’s transition toward the neoliberal model, a project dreamed of by Jacques Delors in 1995 that had enabled liberal François Bayrou to obtain 18.6 percent of the vote in the 2007 presidential election — finally succeeded in 2017 with Emmanuel Macron’s rise to power. It was at the catastrophic end of Hollande’s five years in power — with a president so unpopular that he was unable to stand for a second term — that Macron won, bringing together voters from both the old left and right blocs. But this social alliance, which brought together bourgeois classes previously separated by the left-right divide and excluded the popular classes almost completely, was structurally in the minority, and it was only able to win amid considerable political fragmentation. Paradoxically, the bourgeois bloc, an almost perfect translation of neoliberal hegemony into a social coalition, has come to power as a result of a political crisis that is fundamentally a result of this same hegemony.
Crisis of Hegemony
The concrete effects of neoliberal reforms are, in part, reflected in the difficulty of rebuilding a dominant social bloc and hence in a political crisis. But they are also having repercussions in the ideological dimension, where the neoliberal paradigm, although still in a position of strength, is increasingly challenged and is seeing its power weakened.
This weakening has had several major consequences. First, it has affected those political strategies that are compatible with the principles of neoliberalism. As I mentioned earlier, a neoliberal left existed and was even in a strong position at the time of the Third Way proposed by Anthony Giddens. But today, after almost half a century of hegemony, no credible promise of social progress is compatible with neoliberalism. The reforms it promotes can surely be legitimized in various ways: as necessary, inescapable, dictated by the imperative of international competition or by the risk of the state possibly going “bankrupt.” But all they promise the popular classes is suffering, and the middle classes the risk of falling further down the social hierarchy. This internal evolution in the neoliberal ideological galaxy not only marginalizes a certain kind of Left — i.e., the Third Way, which finds itself totally bereft of program or political perspective. It also means that the bourgeois bloc, which brings together the classes that would favor French capitalism transitioning toward the Anglo-Saxon model, appears ever more clearly as a coalition of the privileged whose policies aim only to protect the interests of the rich and the superrich. On the other hand, the strategy of an authoritarian and identitarian neoliberalism is gaining traction. This explains the rise of the far right, particularly Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National.
The Rassemblement National’s strategy is fully in line with the neoliberal paradigm. The rare frictions that may have existed have been erased by a normalization process that led it first to abandon any notion of breaking with European integration and then to oppose raising the minimum wage or redistributing the tax burden in a way that disadvantages capital income. But while the Rassemblement National offers strictly no alternative to the pursuit of neoliberal reforms, which it endorses as merely inevitable, it does promise a section of the working classes a form of protection against these reforms’ consequences. This is where the diffuse racism inherited from the colonial era becomes a political resource for the Rassemblement National.
The far right’s response to the threat of impoverishment and social degradation is not about a change of policy; rather, it relies on deliberately dividing the working classes. It promises that the blows will fall primarily on certain groups — the racialized, Muslims, banlieue populations, immigrants, and French people of immigrant family origin — while the white, “native-born” French of Catholic culture will be protected as far as possible. “National preference” and the abolition of State Medical Aid are symbolic measures that perfectly illustrate the program of a party that has gradually succeeded in building a heterogeneous but compact social bloc. It should be remembered that the first significant rise in support for the Rassemblement National (which at the time was called the Front National, when it was led by Marine Le Pen’s father) came, in the 1980s, from a petty bourgeoisie that was calling for a violent, Margaret Thatcher–style break with Gaullist institutions, a rapid dismantling of social protections, and huge tax cuts. At the time, the ruling Gaullist right also had to manage the opposite kind of expectations — i.e., preserving certain aspects of the French model of capitalism — and preferred a strategy of gradual reform. These traders, shopkeepers, and small businessmen thus defected from it to the Front National. They were then gradually joined by a significant proportion of the popular classes, and in particular the lower-middle classes, who were sensitive to the promise of protection to which I have just referred. Finally, in the most recent period, the far-right bloc has been joined by a fraction of the well-off classes who, faced with the weakening of the bourgeois bloc, now see in the Rassemblement National the most reliable guarantor of the existing social relations of domination.
Another notable consequence of the weakening of the neoliberal paradigm, which in fact sets France apart from many other European countries, is the gradual formation of a left bloc favoring rupture with neoliberalism, which proposes policies that are totally at odds with the founding principles of this paradigm. That this bloc has been able to emerge is partly the result of a long series of social struggles in opposition to neoliberal reforms, which have nurtured the diffuse expectation that it is possible to defend social protections, quality public services, and an employment relationship not totally unbalanced in favor of capital. Yet its existence also owes to the political initiative of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who, following the signing of the Lisbon Treaty that completely betrayed the result of the 2005 referendum on the draft European Constitution, left the Socialist Party to found the Parti de Gauche and later La France Insoumise. It was through Mélenchon’s three presidential bids, in 2012, 2017 and 2022, that the alliance of the anti-neoliberal left gradually took shape, resulting today in a French political landscape made up of three blocs. The bourgeois bloc and the far-right bloc, with their different positions within the neoliberal universe, are thus opposed by a third, which positions itself outside that universe.
The profile of the new left-wing bloc is that of a cross-class alliance. In the 2022 presidential election, polls suggest that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who received 22 percent of the vote in the first round, won the support of 27 percent of blue-collar workers and also 21 percent of senior managers. This result is unsurprising given that the harmful consequences of neoliberal reforms do not only affect the popular classes. The individualization of salary levels (against collective bargaining), the growing importance of corporate hierarchies, the elasticity of working hours, and competition in a “flexible” labor market are putting major strains even on the most affluent categories of employees. According to a November 2023 survey, 48 percent of French employees say they are experiencing psychological distress, 32 percent are at risk of burnout, 12 percent have severe burnout, and 43 percent say they want to leave their current firm. Furthermore, the inability to find credible responses to climate change within the neoliberal paradigm obviously affects all social classes to one degree or another.
The three blocs that structure French politics can be characterized by differentiating between the ideological and the more directly political dimensions of social conflict. The bourgeois bloc brings together those who support the continuation of the neoliberal transition; the far-right bloc endorses neoliberal policies while proposing a form of protection against their consequences; and the new left-wing bloc is built on the assumption of a clean break with neoliberalism.
Obstacles for the Anti-Neoliberal Left
The question that then arises is what political prospects the new left-wing bloc really has. What obstacles does it face and what possibilities of expansion does it have? This question is all the more pressing given that the collapse of the bourgeois bloc has largely benefited the far right. The three blocs had roughly the same weight in the 2022 presidential election; in the 2024 parliamentary elections, the Left maintained its reach, but — while Le Pen’s party fell far short of a majority — there was a significant transfer of votes from the Macronist camp to her Rassemblement National.
The anti-neoliberal left is not the heir to the old governmental left that was one of the driving forces behind the transformation of French capitalism in a neoliberal direction. However, there is still a Left that proposes to continue the “necessary reforms,” and nostalgia for Hollandeism is strong, particularly on the right wing of the Parti Socialiste. Logically, the priority of what remains of this left is to break off the alliance with France Insoumise, which poses a major problem of coherence between the social composition of the new left-wing bloc and its partisan representation. Due to a form of inertia, and also because of the unequal territorial presence of the anti-neoliberal left (which I will discuss later), the Hollandeist left carries far more weight at the local level than it does in national contests. Paris’s outgoing mayor, Anne Hidalgo, an expression of this current, only obtained 1.7 percent of the votes cast in the 2022 presidential election. But among the main representatives of the right wing of the Parti Socialiste, with which half of the party’s activists identify, we find a large number of local elected representatives (the president of the Occitanie region and the mayors of Paris, Rouen, and Montpellier). Even though the entire Parti Socialiste supported the list led by liberal-left candidate Raphaël Glucksmann for the European elections in June 2024, he campaigned on the line of breaking left-wing unity, scoring a decent result (13.8 percent). This score played a major role in the negotiations on the distribution of candidacies for the broad-left coalition, the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), at the parliamentary elections that followed just three weeks later. The result was that the once moribund Parti Socialiste can now count on sixty-six MPs, almost as many as France Insoumise, which elected seventy-one.
The NFP’s coalition agreement was reached in the urgent situation following President Macron’s sudden call for snap elections, and this probably prevented a careful analysis of the Glucksmann list’s result. Its score had surely been flattering, in the sense of misleading. First of all, it should be remembered that turnout in EU elections has historically been much lower than in national elections. In 2024, the abstention rate was 48.5 percent, with particularly high peaks among under-thirty-fives (59 percent) and the poorest categories (56 percent), while 61 percent of pensioners and 70 percent of the well-off voted. The only relevant comparison — for an election whose actual participation is almost reminiscent of the days when only homeowners could vote — is with the previous EU elections in 2019. When we compare the two elections, we see that the Green-Socialist space declined by more than four hundred thousand votes, even though 1.7 million extra people voted and the Macronist camp lost some 1.5 million votes. So it’s not that Glucksmann took advantage of the space opened up by rising turnout and the collapse of the bourgeois bloc. He simply won back the electorate that, five years earlier, had gone for the list led by the Green Yannick Jadot, who had, like Glucksmann, campaigned on behalf of a reasonable, moderate, pro-EU left. The big winner of the 2024 European elections was therefore not Glucksmann but the Rassemblement National, which registered an extra 2.5 million votes compared to 2019. But the result of La France Insoumise (+1 million) also represented a significant advance.
While the new left-wing bloc formed around a clear proposal for a departure from France’s neoliberal course, its representation at the level of party politics remains riddled with contradictions. Only adding to this is the fact that the first-past-the-post (albeit two-round) electoral system makes it virtually impossible for the left-wing parties not to coalesce before parliamentary elections, even if they promote directly incompatible political projects. However, the main obstacles to strengthening the left-wing bloc are not institutional but concern the struggle to establish a new hegemony. The neoliberal paradigm is certainly in crisis, but it can remain in a commanding position so long as no alternative paradigm arises to rival it. The label “anti-neoliberal left” and the language of “rupture” indicate that the glue holding this bloc together is more a rejection of the policies that have marked the last forty years than commitment to new and different proposals. France Insoumise has been alone on the Left in working to build a new paradigm centered on renewed class solidarity, the imperative of ecological transition, a leading role for the state and planning, and a strengthening of public services. It is no coincidence that the left-wing coalitions’ respective programs in the most recent parliamentary elections (the NFP in summer 2024, like the Nouvelle Union Populaire, NUPES, in 2022) have been modelled on L’Avenir en commun — i.e., Mélenchon’s presidential program. However, a great deal of work remains to be done. There is no clear answer yet to the decisive question of the compatibility of the paradigm being developed with at least some sort of capitalist organization of the economy and society.
The difficulty is even greater when faced with the big media outlets, both public and private, which relentlessly work to demonize any proposal that is not in line with neoliberal dogma. Despite the admirable role played by a few independent journalists and websites, it is hard to imagine that the media balance of power can be changed, at least in the short term. To convince people that there is a concrete, realistic, and desirable alternative to the neoliberal transition, the Left would therefore have to find other channels, the most obvious being a strong and widespread territorial presence. But France Insoumise remains in a weak position in this sense because of the course it has followed. It should be remembered that first the Parti de Gauche and then France Insoumise were the products of a national political initiative whose direct focus was the presidential election. The history of France Insoumise is thus that of a highly effective instrument in the service of Mélenchon’s 2017 and 2022 presidential campaigns. The situation has certainly changed in recent years, with the election of a number of MPs and the emergence of a first-rate class of leaders. But the fact remains that a movement capable of achieving 22 percent in the presidential election does not control any region, city, or large town. The hostility of the mainstream media is compounded by the difficulty of disseminating a counter-discourse through direct contact with the population, particularly outside urban areas.
A further difficulty, and an important one, stems from the impact of neoliberal reforms on the productive and social structure itself. These reforms have led to the spread of precarious employment, the individualization of pay negotiations, a weakening of the role of centralized bargaining and collective protection, and a reduction in the scope of public services. These structural changes surely do stir the discontent of a large part of the French population. Yet they also stand in the way of the reconstitution of class solidarity, which is so crucial to making an alternative paradigm viable. One of the strengths of neoliberalism is that it makes part of its own presuppositions come true. Class divides, which neoliberal ideology claims to have overcome, are in reality no less relevant today than they were in the past. But as a result of neoliberal reforms, it has become more complicated to construct a political strategy based on such cleavages. This obviously poses a mighty problem for the Left.
Battle for Hegemony
We should not try to downplay the obstacles facing the left-wing bloc. But it is important to remember the broader context of political crisis. The difficulty of building a dominant social bloc is one that concerns all the social alliances in the French political landscape. The bourgeois bloc seems on the verge of collapse, swept away by the crisis of a neoliberal paradigm that is its purest expression. The normalization of the far right — i.e., its complete alignment with neoliberal principles — is in turn the source of a series of contradictions. Even if the Rassemblement National has identified a possible space for mediation between expectations structured by the neoliberal worldview and a demand for protection against the harmful consequences of neoliberal policies, claiming to be the party of the people while refusing to raise the minimum wage and endorsing the destruction of public services is likely to become a difficult balancing act. This would especially be the case if the far right were actually to come to power.
In this uncertain situation, we can assume that a surge in turnout would strengthen the left-wing bloc. In the 2022 presidential elections, the abstention rate was 25.1 percent, with peaks among eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds (41 percent) and the unemployed (37 percent) — social categories in which Mélenchon recorded particularly high scores (36 percent and 30 percent, respectively), well above his national average. However, it is also worth highlighting the high level of abstention among nongraduates (36 percent); in this category, Marine Le Pen scored very high (37 percent), while Mélenchon was one point below his overall average (21 percent). So there is certainly room for the Left to grow among abstainers, but this is also true, to a lesser extent, for the far right, while support for the bourgeois bloc is concentrated in categories that already vote a lot — the well-off and pensioners in particular.
Still, the debate over which groups the left-wing bloc should focus on expanding its support should not obscure the decisive question, which is the method of enlargement. Whether the Left targets abstainers convinced that election results won’t change their lives, or the section of the working classes that, resigned to reforms that they see as damaging but inevitable, look to the far right for some form of protection, the problem is fundamentally the same: how to convince people that another political, economic, and social trajectory — one that is sustainable, reasonable, and radically alternative to the neoliberal one — is really possible. The prospects for the Left are therefore linked to the outcome of a fight for hegemony, which fundamentally centers on the possibility of spreading a vision of a different world. In this struggle, and in a largely hostile media landscape, it is essential for the Left to step up its presence throughout France. In concrete terms, for the Left to be able to govern in the long term, winning city halls will be at least as essential as getting battle-ready ahead of the next presidential election.