Trump’s poll ratings are better than Macron’s, after a year. Why?

A little over a year after coming to power, Emmanuel Macron is turning out to be just another run-of-the-mill disappointing French president. Like his predecessors, he has seen his popularity nosedive among his political base. This “Jupiter”, who embodied newness, youth and modernity, is now bogged down in forced reshuffles and goings-on that look very much like old-fashioned political manoeuvrings. Worse, despite claiming he would lead France to become the “start-up nation”, economic performance is poor. Growth is stagnant, unemployment isn’t falling and poverty is taking a firm hold. The disappointment is all the more acute because of the expectations Macron raised among those who rejected populism in favour of a candidate who both stood for good sense and could run the economy.

This turn of events isn’t just worrying for Macron, it’s worrying for those in Europe’s pro-globalisation camp who placed their faith in him to halt the wave of populism sweeping the western world. For them, after the twin shocks of the UK’s Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election in the United States, Macron simply must succeed. The slide in his popularity – Macron is now more unpopular than his predecessor, François Hollande, at the same stage – is a dire warning to “globalists”. It comes at a time when Trump’s popularity among his voters is relatively stable by comparison and the American economy is growing. Macron’s fate could have far-reaching consequences for Europe’s political future.

What makes the contrast between Trump’s and Macron’s fortunes so striking is that the two presidents have so much in common. Both found electoral success by breaking free of their own side: Macron from the left and Trump from mainstream Republicanism; they both moved beyond the old left-right divide. Both realised that we were seeing the disappearance of the old western middle class.

Both grasped that, for the first time in history, the working people who make up the solid base of the lower middle classes live, for the most part, in regions that now generate the fewest jobs. It is in the small or middling towns and vast stretches of farmland that skilled workers, the low-waged, small farmers and the self-employed are concentrated. These are the regions in which the future of western democracy will be decided.

But the similarities end there. While Trump was elected by people in the heartlands of the American rustbelt states, Macron built his electoral momentum in the big globalised cities. While the French president is aware that social ties are weakening in the regions, he believes that the solution is to speed up reform to bring the country into line with the requirements of the global economy. Trump, by contrast, concluded that globalisation was the problem, and that the economic model it is based on would have to be reined in (through protectionism, limits on free trade agreements, controls on immigration, and spending on vast public infrastructure building) to create jobs in the deindustrialised parts of the US.

It could be said that to some extent both presidents are implementing the policies they were elected to pursue. Yet, while Trump’s voters seem satisfied, Macron’s appear frustrated. Why is there such a difference? This has as much to do with the kind of voters involved as the way the two presidents operate politically.

Trump speaks to voters who constitute a continuum, that of the old middle class. It is a body of voters with clearly expressed demands – most call for the creation of jobs, but they also want the preservation of their social and cultural model. Macron’s problem, on the other hand, is that his electorate consists of different elements that are hard to keep together.

The idea that Macron was elected just by the big city “winners” isn’t accurate: he also attracted the support of many older voters who are not especially receptive to the economic and societal changes the president’s revolution demands.This holds true throughout Europe. Those who support globalisation often tend to forget a vital fact: the people who vote for them aren’t just the ones on the winning side in the globalisation stakes or part of the new, cool bourgeoisie in Paris, London or New York, but are a much more heterogeneous group, many of whom are sceptical about the effects of globalisation. In France, for example, most of Macron’s support came in the first instance from the ranks of pensioners and public sector workers who had been largely shielded from the effects of globalisation.

They may dislike populism, but that doesn’t mean they have been won round to globalisation. It is among pensioners that the president’s popularity has fallen most dramatically over recent months. The Benalla scandal, when a presidential bodyguard beat up a leftwing protester, has tarnished his image. But Macron’s ratings were damaged much more by the first round of reforms he embarked on. These measures include an additional tax burden on pensioners and an overhaul of the rights of public sector workers.

So, while Trump appears to be delivering what his voters want, Macron is pushing through more and more measures that go against the wishes of his.

These developments are an illustration of the political difficulty that Europe’s globalising class now finds itself in. From Angela Merkel to Macron, the advocates of globalisation are now relying on voters who cling to a social model that held sway during the three decades of postwar economic growth. Thus their determination to accelerate the adaptation of western societies to globalisation automatically condemns them to political unpopularity. Locked away in their metropolitan citadels, they fail to see that their electoral programmes no longer meet the concerns of more than a tiny minority of the population – or worse, of their own voters.

They are on the wrong track if they think that the “deplorables” in the deindustrialised states of the US or the struggling regions of France will soon die out. Throughout the west, people in “peripheral” regions still make up the bulk of the population. Like it or not, these areas continue to represent the electoral heartlands of western democracies. By ignoring them, those who promote global economic solutions are deliberately shunning any meaningful involvement in politics. They limit themselves to supporting and managing implementation of the globalised economic model. With opinion polarising as it is now, such political passivity is suicidal. In France, voters are looking to President Macron to show that he can drive the political agenda, not just be a supporting actor to a movement that only benefits a minority. Macron promised to lead a “revolution” (the title of the book setting out his programme) but that has to be done through, and with, the forgotten regions of France – in other words through society itself.

• Christophe Guilluy is the author of Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, Periphery and the Future of France