The presidential elections of 2022 proved to be a testing ground for the central thesis of this book. The analysis above was largely finished – save for this conclusion – by the time the official campaign started on 28 March ahead of the two votes on 10 and 24 April. The ultimate victory of Emmanuel Macron repeated the 2017 result, albeit with important differences. The first difference was a shift of Macron’s electorate to the right. Whereas Macron could still garner support from sections of the left in 2017, this support had virtually evaporated in 2022. It confirmed electorally what had already been true ideologically: Macron was now firmly the candidate of the right, crushing the old electoral right in 2022 as he had crushed the electoral left in 2017. The bourgeois bloc, now independent electorally, has largely rallied behind Macron and his values of security, merit and hope. The second difference was the antipathy of the left towards Macron. Even in the second round of the elections, more left-leaning voters shied away from giving Macron their support, recognizing that the next five years under Macron will be a continuation of the neoliberal reforms already enacted since 2017. Between the globalist neoliberal policies of Macron and the neoliberal nationalist policies of Le Pen, the choice for the left was unappealing, to say the least. This conclusion will detail those arguments by analysing the 2022 campaign and the results of the presidential elections, as well as providing some reflections on the future of French politics over the next five years. I will show that the best answer for the left during this period is to position itself as the alternative to Macron’s new right, oppose its values and propose a positive alternative – notably by engaging the workers that abstain in large numbers in the electoral cycle.

The 2022 elections

France has a rather unique and original electoral cycle. The President of the Republic is elected directly by citizens, either in a single round of voting, in the case where a candidate gets over 50 per cent of the vote – something that has never happened in the history of the Fifth Republic, not even when de Gaulle ran for office – or in a face-off between the top two candidates in a second round of the election two weeks after the first round.