Chartbook 411 The twilight of Macronisme: Jean Pisani-Ferry's cri de cœur.

A decoration ceremony is like a funeral oration with a right of reply. And this one comes at a good time, because I have things to say. (...) This is not a moment to simply be pleased with one’s own small achievements. This is a moment when each of us is forced to question our own responsibility for the current state of our country and what we can do to help it move forward.

I have been an advocate of open economies, European integration and the green transition. I do not renounce these causes, nor do I renounce my social democratic commitment, to which I believe I have remained faithful. But on each of these issues, we have to admit that we are regressing.

This is how the distinguished economist and eminent European, Jean Pisani-Ferry began his riveting acceptance speech for the Legion d’honneur in early September.

Pisani-Ferry’s words were concise and framed elegantly around the main themes of his professional interest (international trade and globalization, Europe, climate) and around his political commitments. He lays out a capsule history of his generation and along with it a stark admission of the disarray in which progressive European politics finds itself today.

As his family name suggests, Pisani-Ferry was born in 1951 into the heart of French politics. His mother belonged to the Ferry clan. His father, a notable résistant, was a Minister in De Gaulle’s government of the 1960s. Pisani-Ferry himself is a child of the “trente glorieuse”.

Initially trained as an engineer, he moved by stages into economics, starting his career in the late 1970s at the CEPII [Center for Prospective Studies and International Information] set up by Raymond Barre, prime minister of France from 1976 to 1981. Barre was the PM whose German-accented ordoliberal turn to the social market economy, provided the context for Michel Foucault’s famous discussion of neoliberalism in his Collège de France lectures of 1978-1979.

As Pisani-Ferry himself admits: “We did not anticipate the magnitude of the shock that globalization would bring to advanced countries, nor its impact on jobs and affected regions, and even less its political consequences.” It took the paper on the “China shock” by David H. Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson in 2013 to show the damage done by poorly managed globalization.

Pisani-Ferry’s generation has lived a dizzying inversion of their assumed vision of history. In September 2025 Pisani-Ferry came to the ceremony of induction into the Legion D’honneur, hot foot from an animated debate at the Bruegel think tank, of which he was the founding director, in which colleagues had debated the merits of China’s development model.

The second strand of Pisani-Ferry’s career was Europe. For him, as for so many others on the French center-left, the pivot came in 1983 with the crisis of the Mitterrand administration. As we know, this was a key moment in the turn by many French social democrats both towards Europe and towards an embrace of regulated global liberalism. As Rawi Abdelal points out in his fascinating work, Capital Rules, the Washington Consensus of the 1990s had a heavy French accent.

For Pisani-Ferry, Europe is another story of an incomplete and self-limiting victory. Europe developed the common currency but little else. No capital market, no larger budget, no geopolitical entity.

For Pisani-Ferry, what really brought this home was the humiliating EU capitulation in the face of Trump’s bullying.

Like many of you, no doubt, I was shocked by the photo of Ursula von der Leyen smiling at Donald Trump after concluding a clearly unbalanced trade agreement (...). If that is the price to be paid so that the Americans do not entirely abandon Ukraine, I found it steep. That is not what [Jean] Monnet, Delors and generations of Europeans fought for. That is not the Europe I signed up for, and it is not the one that can win popular support.

Given that there are obvious structural reasons for this subservience and the fact that it may well be the EU that is playing Trump for a fool, it is striking how deeply this moment of subservience has been felt across Europe. I have heard the same indignation and shame from cool heads in Berlin as well.

The surrender to Trump was all the more galling because it involved a U-turn on the third and most recent plank of Pisani-Ferry’s professional interest - climate.

Pisani-Ferry came to the climate issue relatively recently. In European politics you simply could not avoid the topic from 2015, and certainly from 2017 onwards. As he reminds us, he was motivated in large part with frustration with glib talk about the win-win benefits of green growth. His own view, which I must admit I find puzzling, is that the costs will be larger than many people imagine. Perhaps burned by the experience as an optimistic advocate of international trade and the euro, Pisani-Ferry emphasizes stranded assets, the premature retirement of capital and the distributional issues of the just transition.

“Economists bear part of the responsibility: For years, they focused on aggregates and neglected to consider the distributive effects of their recommended policies, on the grounds that the efficiency gains would allow the losers to be compensated. But that is a shameful oversimplification. What is needed is to assess, policy by policy, who the losers are and to determine concretely, with fiscal, budgetary, or industrial tools, how gains will be transferred from winners to losers. Whether it is economic openness, European reforms, or the climate transition, the question of fairness must be central. This is true regarding the distribution of gains. It is even truer when it comes to sharing sacrifices.”

But whatever view one takes of the macroeconomics of climate, it was clearly horrifying to see the Eu agreeing to take hundreds of billions of dollars of American LNG, whilst in Brussels, as Pisani-Ferry remarks, the topic of climate is out of season.

This week I was in Brussels. I found that “climate” has become a dirty word. We were told we should not speak of climate, but of competitiveness. There is an attempt to maintain ambition, but no one dares to name it. Populists do not need to be in government to influence public policy. It is enough for the temptation of demagoguery to be present for its effects to be felt. But by dint of timidity, by dint of tactical retreat, Europe risks missing the great transformation it once sought to lead. (...)

Trade, Europe, climate, these sources of dismay, are very widely shared. For Pisani-Ferry, however, there is a further source of anguish closer to home.

A life-long social democrat, in 2017 he gave up the socialists and joined the Macron campaign to wrote his economic manifesto. He did so, Pisani-Ferry explains because:

“I thought the role-play between the left and the right, with both exaggerating their differences, was fueling democratic disenchantment and extremism. I took seriously the promise of a policy that was “of the left and of the right” and prepared myself for compromises such as are made in many of our neighboring countries. I believe the 2017 program was true to that inspiration.

However, I soon realized that the balance between ideas from the left and those from the right gradually shifted. Those who, like me, had committed to a project of emancipation and equality under the law found it hard to recognize themselves in the government’s policies. That is how I gradually became a grumpy old man of Macronism: too disappointed to still belong, but too faithful to truly break away. … I do not really know what happened. I think one day it will be worth telling the story.”

Now, after two terms of Macron’s Presidency, Pisani-Ferry sees France on the edge of an “era of serious political instability, with the ultimate threat of a shift toward authoritarianism.”

“Je ne sais pas bien, ce qui c’est passé. Je crois qu’il faudra un jour en fair le récit.”

It is tempting to respond to Pisani-Ferry’s perplexity, as the Economist did, by pointing to a series of missteps by Macron in his second term.

Or for a deeper understanding one might evoke the critical political economy of Bruno Amable and Stéphane Palombarini and their account of the tight-rope walk of French neoliberalism and its bourgeois bloc, since the 1980s.

But do these accounts really do justice to Macron’s project and where it has taken France? Is there more to Macron than merely the last “‘spasm’ of a dying neoliberal social order.”

As Nathan Sperber recently remarked in an insightful piece in New Left Review

Macron may have summed up his preferred governing style best when, towards the end of France’s first coronavirus lockdown, drawing on a Hindu metaphor popularized by fascist thinker Julius Evola—not exactly an intellectual reference of the Third Way—he spoke of having to ‘ride the tiger’: ‘The only way to make sure it doesn’t devour us is to ride it’. Nor is this an isolated example of the president’s doctrinal eclecticism. Macron has long entertained affinities with much more reactionary and even tenebrous political traditions than the glossy image he manufactured in 2017 suggested. In May 2018, he confided to a French literary journal that ‘what makes me optimistic is that the history we are living through in Europe is becoming tragic again’. Introducing his policy platform for the 2022 presidential election, he mused that ‘our times are marked by a return of popular sovereignty, that is at bottom a return to what is sometimes called the political’. Such rhetoric should not be overinterpreted; nonetheless these are not the usual trains of thought of the transnational neoliberal elite.

And I was brought back to that suggestion - that Macron was always something other than the operator of a desperate neoliberal transformismo - by stumbling, in a back issue L’Histoire magazine, across an interview with Macron from the campaign trail of 2017.

Asked by the editors of this popular history magazine to describe “Which events, periods, and figures do you favor—or conversely diminish—compared with the political generations that came before you? To be more direct: what are your totems and your taboos?”

Macron replied:

I belong to a generation that, from a historical point of view, has neither totems nor taboos. Totems and taboos are usually the mark of those whom vast historical currents have fashioned in depth—war, revolution, or some mighty ideology. I come from the generation that witnessed the theorization of the end of history and the fall of the Berlin Wall: events that shook many certainties to their core. April 21, 2002, was one of my political shocks (Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right leader of the Front National, qualified for the second round of the presidential election, eliminating the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin. Macron was 24 years old at the time, a young graduate of Sciences Po and entering the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA). The suggestion is that politics had seemed to belong to a stable post-Cold-War, Europeanized order. April 21 shattered that illusion.); there again, the impossible occurred before our eyes. Some may lament what appears to them a certain historical indeterminacy. I am well aware that it is more epic to bear as one’s inheritance the Resistance, communist messianism, or militant Third-Worldism. For my part, I often rejoice to belong to a time of redefinition. Everything must be reconsidered; all political codes must be rewritten. To undertake this work of redefinition—which is the calling of our generation—it is out of the question to dispense with the lessons of history. What lies before us is nothing less than a vast rupture in the political and moral order, such as the world has known before. In a sense, the total revision of our paradigms is comparable to the end of the Roman Empire, to the Renaissance, or to the upheavals brought by the Industrial Revolution. The world toward which we are moving is largely unknown, yet there is no cause to fear it: humanity has faced such historical turning points before, where the worst walks hand in hand with the best. It is precisely here that the use of history finds its proper place. The task is no longer to select a few emblematic figures with whom one feels political kinship, but rather to unfurl the entire arc of history so as to comprehend and analyze the moment we inhabit. We must pass from a history defined by structuring identifications—Gaullism, socialism, communism—to a truly universal history, one that summons every model and every phenomenon. That is why I believe it necessary to return as much to Joan of Arc as to the roots of colonization, to Antiquity as to the Age of Enlightenment, to Valmy as to the plateau of the Glières (one of the sacred sites of the French Resistance in the Haute-Savoie, where fighters from different otherwise hostile camps came together for military training by the British. Hallowed by DeGaulle and visited by both Mitterrand and Sarkozy): for it is within this totality of history that we shall find the answers to our contemporary questions, rather than in a history reduced to ideological seams and narrow lineages.

This Macron is, as Sperber suggests, harder to place as a contemporary political actor.

In any case, to respond to Pisani-Ferry’s moment of honest reckoning with some glib historical framing, would be to miss the weight of his powerful self-reflection.

Of course, a critical political economy can offer a structural account of Macron’s rightward turn and the Economist will lambast his missteps. In this context, the more significant thing is that Pisani-Ferry should choose such an occasion, to so publicly declare his sense of bafflement and defeat. At the moment of being inducted into the Legion d’honneur to warn that the Republic that bestows this honor is itself in danger. In sharing that stark diagnosis at the apex of his career, Pisani-Ferry does us a further service.

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