Why is Macron’s Centrism So Unpopular in France? 

Half the people think he goes too far? The other half think he doesn’t go too far enough?

Have you considered he might be unpopular because he's a politician in France?

Please give her more airtime, I love her professional, composed and well made reports - and bonus point, she's the only colleague who can pronounce foreign words properly! Bien joué ;)

I'm French, living in France, and I approve everything said in this video. Very clear, very informative, non-partisan, well-informed : Two thumbs up 👍👍, and Merci.

Arrogant? The dude dubs himself 'Jupiter'...

Article 49.3, in a democracy that goes through the trouble of having two rounds to assure proportional representation, is just 🤯

There has been nothing centrist about Macron's policy...

I'm not French so maybe there's something I don't know, but generally from what I've seen Macron's decline is due to actions under his administration, not the decline of centrism as an ideology, I predict Macron's party will have a period of losses but if a new popular face that sticks to centrism is introduced they might come back in the distant future.

Macron...arrogant? Shocking. Where is the taxing of the rich?

Centrism can be effective when you build a social concensus, are effective and have your own principles. It's not about being a vacuum of values, it's about being a moderate in the means or at least dialogue while having very clear how you want your country to look. Macron didn't have commitment to a national vision for France, he was the response to the national visions of those perceived as more radical than himself. Hence, he couldn't ever have had that much momentum, especially if his competent centrism didn't actually deliver on the competence part.

I can image a form of centrism which pragmatically combines the most popular and successful ideas from the left and right. Currently, most mainstream centrist parties seem to combine the worst of both, to the benefit of the small elite who fund them. Like privatizing gains and socializing losses.

Centrist? Really? Stop

The problem isn't raising the pension age but setting a higher one for all job sectors. Bureaucrats and office workers can work longer but hard physical labour cannot.

Brilliant ad for new jobs with Sunak though...subtle🤣But yeah, Rishi is going down very soon...

He’s always represented the status quo. Why would anyone wanting change vote for him?

The problem with modern politics is that everyone is fixated on the left vs the right while ignoring the other part of the political spectrum, authoritarianism vs liberalism. Yes Macron is a centrist. But he's also *extremely* authoritarian. Which is what people actually hate about him, not his centrist policies.

I think what would be very interesting would be to show analysis like this for other countries in EU. For example I’d love to know what’s going on in Greece, Portugal, Estonia, Cyprus… France and Germany might be the most populous countries but this channel is called EU so it would be good ❤

The linear representation of politic (left - center - right) is limited. There are multiple centers in politic and Macron's centrism is often called far-center or extreme center.

I do like the way TLDR summarises news stories. I just wish they made a better effort to be impartial. They always come in with right=bad, left=good. No nuance.

Vive la France 🇫🇷 Glory to the sixth Republic

Macron is arrogant and possibly narcissistic. He is however the best President France has had sincr at least Valery d' Estaing. He has made many tough reforms which have been necessary forever.

"Even if they are not really his fault." It is nice to hear such claims without any backup. Makes you seem quite professional.

Nobody likes the extreme center!

_"People are fed up with Neoliberalism. I know what we need! _*_MORE_*_ Neoliberalism!"_

Because France is reverting to its natural state 😂

This is very accurate, from a person living in France. Keep on with the good work, and merci beaucoup!

He's not really a centrist, he's a neoliberal. If you want an American comparison, it's George W. Bush. Now, I actually don't mind neoliberalism, I grew up with the ideology. But it has some real blind spots when it comes to culture and immigration.

Macron needs to stop pushing the soft centre policies and go for the hardline far centre vote.

We were in an apartment with a gas leak, and Macron struck a match to see more clearly.

Macron is not president he is Egoist. Time to say goodbye macaron!

Thanks for the information. I'm French, and this is very informative, especially as a summary of the news and what could have caused them.

I was hearing a couple days ago Macron called the election to dare them to actually govern. I’m guessing that wasn’t the case?

He's not a centrist, and he's overstayed his welcome.

MACRON GET OUT

I like how the first riot footage is from Rennes where I live !

It is not "Ukraine's impact", it is "the consequences of the Russian war on Ukraine". RHETORIC MATTERS!

People talking about centrism in the comments 😂 Centrism DOES exist! There is not only black and white! Some people have more right views on certain topics and more left on others

He's all talk no do.

What is centrism anyways and who gets to define what is normal?

Turns out people dont want the status quo when life currently sucks.

How is this budget news channel on youtube better than CNN and BBC

"We protest your right wing policies!" "Hey, let's elect a far right party!" Genius! *slaps head*

Quite the half-assed job this time, completely overlooking one of the simplest reasons why Macron was hated in the first place: The man itself. He's selfish, arrogant, shows no restraint when he insults a large part of french population and lavishly rains money on the already rich people and business. All of this while surrounding himself with traitors from both the left and right wing, business people with no experience and no morality, and finally, his past job and behavior during Hollande's era. It didn't take long for people, especially the rural world to hate him: he doesn't care about France nor the french. Only about himself, his friends and business. This channel totally failed to notice it.

Ifn his goose is cooked, Macron called it on himself.

Looks like his arrogance is coasting him

The problem with centrism is it stands for nothing and everything all at the same time Centrism is dying a death as it has no principles of it's own only what it borrows from time to time from the two poles No principles no guiding compass .. after while people see through this

Because centrism is utterly meaningless and completely relative to what is to the left and right of it. In this case what macron meant by centrist was the status quo, and nobody wanted that.

He should've stayed centrist or even center-left to preserve his voters. The NR would've risen regardless of his actions.

Instead of pushing through leguslation without parliamentary approval, he should have tried to forge issue related alliances and find compromises. Maybe then public unrest wouldn't have been as bad as it was and partially still is.

Why did it fail? Since when the French were politically moderate in history? Lol

keep ignoring growing income inequality and you get fascism

Il serait intéressant de connaître le parcours de cette présentatrice, car son français est excellent.

The rost she gives to Sunak at the end have become an icon

If you stay in the middle of the road, you get run over.

"Unless I win, there will be war!" Wow. What an egomaniac!

I have a feeling that a French civil war should be one with the right and the left united against Macron, but I guess the centre establishment has managed to put the right and the left against each other despite common ground between the RN and the NFP. While establishment politics may cause the biggest harm to a nation, it manage to portray its "radical" opponents as the "true" enemies of national stability.

The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris will be very telling. I'm sure it will ultra PC.

"Sacre bleu, its gone blue" is genius.

Has france ever been stable and non-polarized. Just a question.

Centrism is a non position and trying to care about everyone, effectively makes you care about no one specifically.

The reality is that people enjoy to complain and blame whoever politician is in power, especially if they really try to do stuff, as Macron actually did. Otherwise you can do like Giorgia Meloni that in 2 years literally did nothing. It’s easy to stay in opposition and gain votes, you just need to say that everything is bad, without being held accountable for your proposals. Macron actually managed to stay in charge for full 7 years and he can still oversee the situation for 3 years as President in case the RN wins. I wouldn’t call that a failure. After 7 years people will be tired anyway and look for the next person who promises what they want to hear. I think history will judge him much more positively than his current polls

Sacre bleu who would’ve guessed fence riding isn’t a winning strategy

Additional details: Macron is a representative of what Pierre Serna, a historian of the Revolution and the First Empire, has called "the extreme/radical center". It's not just centrism, it's a certain brand of centrism that pretends to be above all parties and is completely intolerant to any ideology outside of it, calling it extremist and dangerous for democracy/liberty/whatever term the regime describes itself as, which is in itself an ideological position, just one defending the status quo. Ever since 2017, he came in claiming he would fight populism "on both sides" (as if there's an equivalence between the far right and what he calls the far left), but has instead lead policies that have increased wealth inequalities, made the budget worse due to refusing to raise taxes on the wealthy, has shown himself to be increasingly authoritarian in repressing protests and passing legislation, and has alternated with appealing to center-left voters to present himself as a dam against the far right and normalizing it by taking up some of its talking points and policy proposals, as well as demonizing the left by calling any program even slightly social democratic (like the New Popular Front's or even La France insoumise's) "far left", which isn't the case according to most political scientist, historians and the Conseil d'État, which serves both as one of the two highest courts in France and as an advisory body for the government to write legislative bills (not exactly a den of leftists). He's basically building the far right (and the National Rally is indeed classified as such by those dag-nasty political scientists, historians and jurists) a golden bridge to power, whether he's conscious of it or not. His goal has always been to divide the left, by absorbing the center-left and demonizing and marginalizing the more "radical" side (even if again, there's nothing very radical about LFI's platform), and set up the match between him and Le Pen, content to let the RN become the biggest party in the meantime. The problem is that he's taken what used to be a common agreement among all republican (small-r) parties, not letting the far right get into power, and turned it into a cynical electoral tool. And people are now sufficiently done with him, and the far-right has taken enough root, that he's actually at risk of losing power. So after he got trounced in the European elections, he decided to say "f*** it, better have them be in government now until 2027 and let them wear themselves out so my successor can win the presidency then". Which, aside from being reviling political cynicism, is so colossally stupid because we've seen in the past few years that when right-wing populists get into power in liberal democracies, they don't hand back the reins willingly.

This does sound like he did a really good long term job by structural reforms. But sold it badly.

Polarization of the society, if you doing thing that are not aligned with you opinion, you became the worst leader.

Centrists exist primarily to further the interests of business. Business doesn't like being taxed to contribute to the society it relies on, nor does it like the threat of dictatorial government controlling what it does. So it likes policies that steer in-between the extremes, in the centre. Which is often less bad for ordinary people than the extremes can be. But business also likes having all of the money. So centrist governments also have a tendency to alter the system so that more and more money flows out of the hands of the public and into the hands of the business owning elites, which is bad for everyone. To start with this is fine, you get economic stability, businesses create wealth which employs people so most people feel better off, and the enrichment of the rich only happens in small steps that aren't really felt. But the longer it goes on for the more those little enrichments add on top of each other. Until you end up with a society where the public is getting noticeably poorer but most people dont understand why, and the only solutions the centrists have is the same ones they've been doing this whole time. So people start seeing through them. Then people start turning back to the extremes. The right tells people that they are poor because of immigrants or black people or the gays or because the jews or whatever. The left tells people they are poor because the rich have taken all their money, but their solutions to getting that money back aren't always well thought out. But ultimately, centrists can't remain in power forever, because the incentives they exist under are toxic to society. You can only impoverish the public for soo long before theres either a swing towards redistribution to solve the problem or towards dictatorship to keep the public from complaining about being poor

Shocking. Centrist liberal with no interest in politics and views the electorate as an impediment to technocracy, while tacking right on social issues at every opportunity bar one fails to gain consent for governance long term. Truly shocking. There’s no way you could predict this. And leading the centre in this rightward direction has never ever before produced a rightwards shift in the electorate thereafter either, it’d sooooo unpreceddented. I just can’t imagine why a liberal who campaigns for nothing, thereby generating consent for their programme, who simply follows the polls on what to discuss lost control of the narrative, it’s just in comprehensible why a person who refuses to campaign for a position ends up talking about things on ground he is uncomfortable in, if only there was a class of people who had the power and ability to shape the national discussion.

Centrism is not a solution to modern day problems. All Centrism acheives is maintaining the status quo. Whether we are on the left or the right we can all agree the status quo needs to go. We need modern solutions to modern problems. While I am not extermist, fence sitting acheives nothing, and is what has, in part, led to polarisation of the electorate.

I like Macron but don't agree with him on certain issues

Starmer is going to do the same mistske if he pivot to fast in preserving the status quo. And Britain would lose

Don't think Macron is a centrist at all.

Because the French are mad

The only french person I know is a die hard macron supporter, I feel like somehow I was Lucky to encounter a rare breed

People will only learn when the country's Social Security system collapses. Go ahead, French people!

To be fair to Macron, *all* French presidents are unpopular - this is country whose founding myth is the French revolution, whose national identity is built on suspicion of those in power. Macron actually did okay to win a second term, something neither Sarkozy nor Hollande before him managed. And before that, Mitterand and Chirac had to experience periods of cohabitation, just like Macron is going to have to do now. So from a historical perspective he's only averagely unpopular for a French president, maybe even a little bit better than average.

Macron is only a centrist by name. His policies, both economical and social have all been closer to the right than anything else. I struggle to recall anything he's done that could be considered left leaning to counteract this. Moreover it's his repeated use of 49.3 and general disregard for the people's will in favor of helping big business, as well as tough répression on any form of contestation that led him to become so unpopular.

You could remove the term "centrism" from the caption 😁

Electorate: Wants change Moderate or Centrist: Promises change whilst only wanted to preserve the status quo Electorate: Vote for Centrist or Moderate Centrist: Doesn’t do what they campaigned on, but does exactly what a status quo politician does Electorate: Is angry, and demands change Centrist: Vilifies actual politicians with good plans and policies and decides, whilst deciding the far right is OK enough to deal with Far Right: Promises change whilst wanting to push regressive policies and also backstabs centrist Centrist: Is upset at betrayal, despite history saying this is exactly what happens when siding with the Far Right, and urges electorate to vote for Moderate or Centrist candidates, whilst not doing anything to help their people, and instead enacting the regressive policies the Far Right want, in order to appeal to the Far Right’s voter base Electorate: Hate Centrist. Centrist approval ratings in the gutter, and Far Right appeasement doesn’t work Centrist: Continues vilifying progressive and leftist candidates, who want them to do better and push for change that helps the people Electorate: Vote for Far Right in next election, even when Left tries to warn Centrist, this is bad Country: Takes a massive shift to the right and regressive policies are being implemented, started by the centrist, even when this is against what the centrist wanted Centrist: Surprised Pikachu Face

His "Centrism" is like a lot of peoples "Centrism", ends up being much more right-wing than advertised.

Centrism that's a joke right ,,its left of left like Europe has been forced to be for the past 40 years .Times are a changing

All his reforms are quite sensible and courageous.

Overall I think France is just a nearly unreformable mess as a state with too much hard left/hard-right wing ideological fervor. Pretty much every French President in the past 30-40 years has polled miserably after their first 4-5 years in office and become extremely unpopular. There's room for both big government social democracy and neoliberal policy aimed at trade & market liberalization (Scandinavian countries, Germany and the Netherlands all prove as much), but France's democracy seems seem more systemically dysfunctional and incapable of moving past that dysfunction. Rather the dysfunction just evolves and each French President ends their tenure extremely unpopular, not able to achieve most of the ambitious reforms they ran on when they were first elected etc.

shoutout to all my French brothers and sisters. Patriots standing up against tyranny 💪 Imagine being that heavy handed against your own citizens

I love how only the right wing parties are being called extremist and FAR. Why is there only far-right and no far-left. This is absolutely pathetic.

Macron turning into Macaroni

Although the whole immigration law episode was indeed an ideological win for the national rally, the harder law didn't come from his party but from the more right leaning republicans that still have a majority in the senate (despite representing around 5% of the votes in latest national elections) and amended the original version of the government. Nonetheless, all hard measures included within this version were declared unconstitutional by the constitutional court after Macron asked them to examínate It, and we ended up with an immigration law that is very similar to the one his government first proposed. It was a short term victory for his party, but I think this whole process ended up nourishing the anti establishment feeling against his party and institutions like the constitutional court that was seen by many as more of a political than a judicial institution, acting ideologically (many of its member being former left wing politicians with no background in Law). With that plus the fact that according to polls, the french public was overwhelmingly backing the harder version of the law, I don't think we can say it was a good move for Macron's popularity.

5:35 isn't that graph supposed to be employment rate/labor participation rate rather then UN-employment? French Youth Unemployment is ~17% or so, give or take, no?

I think something needs to be understood about current French politics : Macron's party is not centrist. You often hear about French politics that there's the far left, the centrists and the far right nowadays. It needs to be said : This is a failure on the part of the media, the truth is the "far left" has been officially designated as left by a statute of the state council, that at the same time confirmed that the Rassemblement National is indeed far right. While it is easy to check that the left of today does not in fact support a far left agenda, we also have to look at the way the parties have voted and in that regard it becomes obvious that the "centrist" party of Macron is just as far right as the R.N except on very few subjects mainly immigration. And for those that wondered about the historic right, they rallied to the far right and vote basically as the RN does. So in conclusion, there's the left, the right of Macron and the far right. While politics has shifted to the right for a long time, its transition has been accelerated by the last few years under the rule of Macron, and I believe that might have a lot to do with the way we label those parties ; It is very important to review the politics and history of each parties before labelling them extremes. And the French media has basically been bought by far right billionaires, there's that too

I find amusing how people keep calling Macron a centrist when his politics have been so consistently on the right of the political spectrum, even poaching ideas from the extreme right.

Just to say the 2:15 map is incorrect Far right is way stronger in the north and east while left is stronger in south west and Britanny but I guess it was just to give an example

5:33 Is that graph saying youth unemployment was at times at 90% and general around 60%? Surely that can't be right, and that's actually per thousand, or something?

does the french ever like anyone ?

She explained why the left viewed him as unpopular, but not the right. Again the lack of deeply understanding why the right wing and the traditional values are becoming so popular is shamefull. The cultural war that many countries are facing every single say is never mentioned. Those people live in a bubble.

Raising the retirement age was critical. The French are lazy and love socialism too much but it saves them from austerity measures. Or at least buys them more time

0:03 - 0:11 for me this sounds like a Blackmail..

Well skill issue for him

Macron isn´t a centrist. that´s laughable, he´s France´s first Thatcherite president

Well presented!

He is not a centrist! Doublespeak.

Macron envies Putin's power.