Macron governs Paris but Le Pen rules France

There has never been a more Parisian government than the one selected by Emmanuel Macron last week. Ten of its 15 ministers come from the capital, despite the fact that the Greater Paris region represents 18 per cent of the population. 

New prime minister, Gabriel Attal, is a Parisian, the MP for a district in the south of the city. I was one of his constituents for a number of years; he did a decent job and, during political campaigning, I sometimes took a leaflet from one of his minions. They were all very much like Attal: same age, same breeding, same self-assurance.  

I’m no longer a Parisian. Last year I moved to the provinces, to a quiet corner of Burgundy. It is only an hour by train to Paris so it is not La France Profonde; rather, it is La France Périphérique, a term coined by Christophe Guilluy in his 2014 book of that title. He described Peripheral France as home to the white working-class, many of whom have moved from the cities to the nearby countryside. A minority did so out of their own free will; but many were forced because they could no longer afford to live in the ‘globalised and gentrified’ city. This has bred a resentment against the ruling elite who, states Guilluy, ‘have still not grasped the ideological and cultural gulf that now separates them from the most modest classes’.

Does Attal and his nine Parisian ministers understand the extent of this chasm? Some provincial mayors fear they don’t. In response to the nomination of the new government, they published an open letter in which they described the provinces as the ‘beating heart of France’. They then asked: ‘Who in government today is capable of understanding our problems?’ They fear no one because it is ‘too Parisian, and not sufficiently focused on France in all its diversity, particularly its geographical diversity, [which] once again leave us with a feeling of abandonment’.

This sense of abandonment is not imagined. It is the main reason why Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is so strong in the provinces; she is the self-styled champion of the ‘little people’. A poll last week revealed that she has the confidence of 39 per cent of the population, the most of any political figure; her No. 2, Jordan Bardella, is just behind her on 35. Macron’s approval rating is 24, an unprecedented low. Le Pen’s party is also on course to romp to victory in June’s European elections, its current lead over Macron’s Renaissance party at 10 per cent.

My Département in Burgundy has three MPs, two of whom belong to the National Rally. For decades, the Département was staunchly centre-right Republican. Gradually, that loyalty eroded, voters turning away from a party that gave up caring about the issues that mattered to them. Among my neighbours are a farmer and a builder; the farmer’s wife told me recently that she voted for Macron in the 2017 presidential election; she didn’t in 2022. I didn’t ask her who she did vote for, but I have a good idea.

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Like her husband, she works hard, combining a 9 to 5 job with helping out on the farm, but they wonder what for. More specifically, they are puzzled what happens to their taxes because heath, education and transport services have all deteriorated this century in this neck of the woods.  

Some left-wing commentators blamed last year’s summer riots on a State that had abandoned its inner-cities. It was a fallacious argument. Compared to La France périphérique, the Republic’s inner-cities are teeming with buses, doctors, dentists and sports facilities for bored youths. There are also plenty of police, which is not the case in the countryside since Nicolas Sarkozy’s Republicans – who liked to boast that they were the party of law and order – streamlined the gendarmerie 15 years ago. 

The farmer and his wife are admirable people, salt-of-the-earth types, as is the builder. He’s doing some work on my house so we chat now and again over a coffee. He’s my age and tells me how the nearby town has changed since he was a boy. There is no longer any respect for authority. On the contrary, there is a contempt because thugs and drug dealers believe, with some justification, that the judiciary is more on their side than the police’s.  

In the Anglo-Saxon media, Le Pen supporters are lazily stereotyped as Gallic ‘swivel-eyed loons’, obsessed with immigration and Islam. These issues do concern them but what worries them most is the decline in their living standards, the creaking health system and the reluctance of the Republic to crack down on criminals.  

One of Attal’s first public appearances as prime minister was in the flood-stricken Pas-de-Calais: ‘You are the embodiment of that hard-working France that gets up early in the morning,’ he told people whose homes and businesses had been flooded. ‘We’re with you and I’m obviously going to follow this very closely.’ It was a line borrowed from Le Pen’s party, which talks often about the virtues of the France that rises early and works hard.

Macron has never hidden his disdain for La France périphérique – perhaps because he grew up in such a region (in Amiens) and doesn’t familiarity breed contempt? He once famously dismissed provincials as ‘resistant Gauls’. 

The farmers among these bloody-minded ‘Gauls’ have noted with interest the protests of their brethren in Germany. Farmers in France also are nearing the end of their tether with EU diktats and rising costs, and there is a growing fear in Paris that their farmers may soon invade the capital in their tractors. 

Five hundred tractors staged a protest in Paris a year ago, angry at an EU ruling on pesticides, and more recently farmers across the country have been turning roadsigns upside down in a further show of anger at EU policies that are slavishly implemented by Paris. 

In my quiet corner of Burgundy the signs identifying villages and towns have been topsy-turvy for weeks. Surely the police, the few that there are, could right them if them wanted to. Perhaps in not doing so they are demonstrating their solidarity with the farmers. 

Hosting his new government at the Élysée last week, Macron urged his ministers to be ‘revolutionaries’ not ‘managers’. None of the 15 have the look of revolutionaries about them. They are bureaucrats, chancers and yes-men.  

The revolutionaries are in the provinces, the voters who are giving up on the broken promises of successive centrist presidents and turning to a party that they believe will finally break with the Paris elite.