Labour’s Renaissance? Lessons from Macron’s Failings

Macron’s France offers a political mirror which Starmer’s Labour ignores at its peril. After years of cautious positioning, Labour has stumbled through the opening phase of government, seemingly unaware of a public exhausted by decline and impatient for visible change. Macron began his project with similar ambitions – technocratic renewal through post-tribal politics – but it has collapsed under a failure to deliver significant structural reform, fracturing the political landscape and entrenching ideological gridlock and near-ungovernability. If Labour is to have anything resembling a Renaissance, it must learn from the ruins of Macronism rather than repeat them.

Labour's governing pitch shares similarity with early Macronism: both attempted managerial competence whilst populist forces advanced on their left and right. In France, Macron’s centrist coalition, Ensemble, is being eroded by Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally and by the left through Mélenchon and the New Popular Front. A softer version of this dynamic is emerging in Britain, where Labour is being squeezed by the insurgent Greens and Reform as voters grow increasingly alienated with the promise of “a decade of national renewal” and the reality of under-delivery, strategic drift, and a series of policy blunders. 

Labour's position governing in a parliamentary system gives it more agency to change course. France’s hyper-presidential system, where even disillusionment from long-time allies – such as former PM Édouard Philippe, who called for the president to resign last month – cannot directly lead to changes in leadership. In Britain, by contrast, a leader who loses the party can be removed overnight. Moreover, the deliberately anti-charismatic, managerial style of governance from Starmer and Reeves makes changing leadership easier than convincing the self-described “Jupiterian” president, whose identity is built on personal grandeur, to step down. While both trajectories show huge dangers, the crucial difference is that Labour, unlike Macron, still possesses the institutional flexibility and political bandwidth to adjust before disillusionment hardens into a permanent anti-establishment revolt.

In 2017, fresh off his monumental victory, the sight of Emmanuel Macron striding along the Seine towards Versailles promised optimism for a country battered by the Global Financial Crisis and years of political stagnation. Here, supposedly, was a leader unburdened by the traditional left-right divide and prepared to drag France into a new economic and political era. That optimism has evaporated. After losing his fifth Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, after barely a month, Macron walked along the Seine alone, seemingly contemplating whether the job was possible. 

Despite grand rhetoric, Macron’s policies seemed punitive. His widely despised pension reform was marketed as a technocratic inevitability rather than as an extension of his campaign vision. This widened the perception that reform was something done to the French rather than with them. His leadership seemed increasingly detached from France’s political reality. The imposition of the pension reform by constitutional manoeuvres, allowing him to pass the bill without a vote unless a motion of no confidence passes, confirmed this. His decision to call a parliamentary election after Ensemble’s drubbing in the 2024 EU elections, despite them being larger than either the left or right blocs, plunged the National Assembly into chaos without any coalition close to a governing majority. 

What links Paris and Westminster is the public mood. Voters who once tolerated pragmatism now demand visible progress. Macron discovered that a pitch of competence without momentum is not enough. Labour faces the same impatience; it must change fast or face the same fate. 

Macron demonstrated that no project of national renewal can survive without public consent. A government must govern with society rather than over it. Labour’s rhetoric around moving to a preventative NHS model would require hospital closures, and this needs local legitimacy rather than a centralised decision. Labour’s devolution strategy must go further and faster, rather than top-down reform by giving power over policy decisions to local leaders. Doing so would strengthen perceptions that democracy can still deliver, reducing the desirability of the snake oil salesmen politics Labour claims to oppose.

Any reforms or policies must be accompanied with a political and moral narrative instead of invoking “tough choices”. Labour must articulate why choices matter, restore the sense of fairness in policy decisions, and deliver with meaningful visible wins to match their long-term ambition. By governing with a sense of direction and purpose, Labour can tap into the majority of voters that oppose Farage and build a coalition against his policies and with a vision of their own. Labour MPs must ask themselves whether Starmer is a leader capable of doing this. Getting this decision wrong risks letting the future of Britain be shaped by those thriving on disillusionment, not hope.

Illustration: Will Allen/Europinion