Britain already has a Macron-style centre party: the Conservatives

The French president has lost his lustre but is forging ahead with a reform plan Tories would be proud of

It’s quite something to end up with a worse approval rating than Donald Trump but this is, now, one of Emmanuel Macron’s many unlikely achievements. Most French presidents can expect to be hated, especially if they have the temerity to change things. Macron jokes that no sane politician wants to be loved, but there’s a lot riding on his personal appeal, not least the political party he created. His magic – finding ways to appeal to Left and Right – is now starting to weaken. For those who see him as the great hope for a revival in centrist politics, it’s all a bit alarming.

Macron has been around long enough to be judged by what he does rather than what he says – which is, for him, a problem. When campaigning, he was mocked for saying “at the same time” (“en même temps”) when joining together contradictory ideas. He once used the phrase 29 times in a single speech. He’d call for more globalisation and, at the same time, more social protection. He’d be pro-business yet, at the same time, pledging even more environmental regulations. He ended up with a list of inconsistent promises – but with his audacity and momentum people went along with it.

As he starts his second year of government, it’s harder to suspend disbelief. For Nicolas Hulot, it proved impossible. He quit as Macron’s environment minister on Tuesday, live on radio. It was hard to fault his rationale. He had been a well-known environmental campaigner wooed by Macron, but now he had to ask: where is the all the regulation they were promised? Where was the crackdown on pesticides, the edicts on biodiversity? He said he would no longer be part of Macron’s “mystification” process, nor would he be a green smoke screen blown around a president more interested in cutting taxes and regulation.

Macron, here, is guilty as charged. He never really was an eco-warrior. He is a former socialist who, as a minister in François Hollande’s government, realised that Left-wing economic policies tend to mean more poverty and unemployment. He campaigned on the slogan “neither Left nor Right” but ended up appointing Rightwingers to the economic brief, asking them to cut taxes and regulations while trimming the size of government. His aim: faster economic growth, more jobs, more prosperity. France has been crying out for such reform for decades and Macron, to his great credit, seems serious about applying it.

It’s not entirely clear if the French were expecting all this, which explains the force of the Mayday protests this year. It didn’t help that Alexandre Benalla, one of Macron’s bodyguards, was found to have joined the police that day, borrowed a helmet and was then caught on camera roughing up protesters. “L’affaire Benalla” has been keeping newspapers busy throughout the summer, and seems a powerful allegory for those who think Macron is being just as rough with France. But he doesn’t seem too worried. A quarter of French think their country’s decline is irreversible: he’s pretty sure he’ll prove them wrong.

Macron would hate to use the term, but his agenda looks a lot like classic progressive conservatism. Take his plan to lose up to 10,000 civil service jobs a year: it’s certainly unpopular. But David Cameron shrank the public sector by over 400,000 and found the economy creating eight jobs for every one shed by government. Like Cameron, Macron is seeking to cut welfare benefits and make it harder for workers to win big damages on unfair dismissal claims. He might find, as Britain did, that this makes employers more likely to hire. More jobs counteract the effect of welfare cuts, so the incomes of the poorest rise faster than those at the top.

About two-thirds of French voters now think Macron has revealed himself as Right wing, although most say that these terms don’t mean much anymore. When attacked for being a friend of the rich, he replies with pragmatic arguments. (“My predecessor taxed wealthy, successful people at a higher rate than ever before. And what happened? They left. Did unemployment drop? No.”) It’s likely that, in cutting taxes for the rich, Macron will milk even more from them. This was Britain’s experience when Cameron cut the 50p rate.

And if more of Macron’s reforms work, his “at the same time” talk might make sense. For example, his deregulation has allowed companies such as Peugeot to lay off hundreds of workers, but others are hiring and unemployment in France has been at a nine-year low. Conservative reforms tend to rekindle confidence in the economy. If it all goes well, by the time of the next presidential election in 2022, Macron might end up with the kind of economic results that helped Cameron in 2015.

And this is the irony. Now and again, we hear about how Britain needs a new centrist party, our own Macron, someone who can combine economic efficiency with social progress and take the fight to the populists. But Britain already has such a party, and it’s currently in government. Macron is seven years behind reforms applied by Conservatives during the coalition years. He’s a far better actor than Cameron, far better at dressing his reforms in the language of the progressive Left. His reforms are ambitious, by French standards – but not really by ours.

And while Macron’s electoral achievements are heroic, he hasn’t vanquished Marine Le Pen, who won a third of the vote last year. Those seeking an example of centrists genuinely crushing populist parties can look to Britain, whose act of radical centrism was to vote for Brexit. Populists can exist only in gaps between what people want and what mainstream parties offer. In Britain, that gap was closed by the referendum. It was agony for many politicians, but it was the agony of voters tugging politicians back to the centre.

If there was a gaping vacancy for a centrist party in Britain, then the Liberal Democrats would not be on life support and more Labour rebels would be following Frank Field out of the party. As for Macron, his “third way” talk now looks like nothing more than elegant spin. He campaigned as “neither Left nor Right” but has ended up governing as a conservative. If he sticks at it, he might end up a successful one.