French President Emmanuel Macron is finding himself increasingly isolated in the political arena as voters abandon his centrist political party ahead of snap parliamentary elections in France.
In a desperate bid for relevance just days before voters go to the polls for the first round of elections Sunday, Macron proclaimed that if either the far-left France Unbowed or the far-right National Rally secured a majority in parliament, it could lead to “civil war.”
Macron said that the far Right “reduces people to their religion or their origin [and] pushes people towards civil war,” while the far Left effectively does the same thing.
The French president is, of course, being hyperbolic, whether he admits it or not. There will not be a civil war if France Unbowed or the National Rally win the parliamentary elections. At this juncture he is screaming into an electoral void, desperately trying to find a way to make his political party electorally relevant again.
Macron and his Renaissance party are on the verge of irrelevance. The brand of centrist politics on which the French president has prided himself has lost its salience with voters, and he is quickly discovering how lonely the center of the political spectrum can be.
Those who advocate for centrism in politics usually cast their lot with the political establishment and the status quo. Macron and his party have embraced a corporate friendly economic vision alongside socially liberal policies on family, life, and immigration. The result is that the two-term president is so unpopular that his party is on course for a political wipeout.
What Macron failed to grasp is that the Left and the Right cannot be bridged in the middle because the Left and the Right have fundamentally different goals of governance. By attempting to stake out a position in the middle by borrowing governing philosophies from both camps, Macron and others like him have managed to please no one and anger everyone.
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The late Margaret Thatcher once remarked that “standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous” because “you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.”
When the French people head to the polls on Sunday, Macron and his party will learn exactly what she meant.