What if a leader is democratically elected? What do they owe those who elected them? What if what leaders believe to be right and good and true is different from what their followers believe to be right and good and true?
It’s one of the oldest questions to bedevil democratic theory. Specifically, to what extent should leaders who are democrats follow their followers? Hold their fingers to the wind and see which way it blows. Or, conversely, consider themselves not one of the people but of the people, their representative, selected to lead in what they decide is in their constituents’ best interests.
Nowhere is the democrat’s dilemma, the democratic leader’s dilemma, more vividly exemplified just now than in France. For better and worse, French President Emmanuel Macron has thrown caution to the winds to pursue what he thinks best for the country – the peoples’ preferences be damned!
This is my third post on Macron. The first was on May 7, 2017, shortly after he was first elected. I wrote then that he was a “boy wonder.” At not yet 40 the newly minted French president was an excellent pianist, exceptionally clever in economics and finance, highly literate, a self-made man of considerable wealth and, presciently, “as bold as he is brilliant.”
My second post on Macron was on April 28, 2022. It was occasioned both by the election in which Macron had just won a second term (the first French president to be reelected in 20 years), and by the war in Ukraine which Macron was trying diligently if ultimately unsuccessfully to mediate. I wrote then that while Macron was in many ways a visionary who had an impressive list of political accomplishments already to his credit, he was also seen as an elitist, one who was not only poor at working a room and playing to a crowd but didn’t much care about winning the crowd over. He was a leader who did what he thought right when he thought it right. He did not lead from behind – he led from out front, sometimes far out front. As I wrote in 2022, “For the entirety of his [first] term the French president has been seen as arrogant and remote, and as not much, if at all, interested in the day-to day travails of the lower and working classes.”
At the time I thought it possible that Macron had been chastened by his political rival, Marine Le Pen, who had come closer to defeating him in the election than he anticipated. In this I thought wrong. Not only was the French president not chastened he was emboldened. He was emboldened by his reelection to among other things promote a pension reform plan that an overwhelming majority of the French people hated. Despised. Detested … and protested in numbers so enormous they resulted in the largest demonstrations in France in decades.
Macron’s pension bill would, or now more likely will, push the legal age of retirement from 62 to 64. “What’s the big deal?” say Americans, who have long been used to working well into their sixties and even into their seventies. Given we’re living much longer in the present than we did in the past, it only makes good fiscal sense to push back the age at which we pull back. Not so say the French, who for social, political, and cultural reasons see themselves as being different from other Western countries, and to whom their now relatively young retirement age is a right to be protected not a privilege to be amended not to speak of abandoned.
Though Macron has just (barely) survived two votes of no confidence, France is slated again to come to a halt on Thursday when people in massive numbers will take to the streets to protest the man they rather recently reelected president. For his part, Macron is doing what he thinks is right – advocating for modernizing, pushing for reform that is fiscally responsible and demographically sensible. But for their part, the French are doing what they think is right, taking on head on a leader who refuses to hear what his followers have to say.
The democrat’s dilemma. The democratic leader’s dilemma – which President Emmanuel Macron appears to have resolved, if only to his own satisfaction.