The crisis engulfing Emmanuel Macron contains a warning for Keir Starmer

The French president dominated the centre ground but has failed to build a legacy there. Labour is in danger of doing the same

Britain and France do not share a fixed quota of political stability such that reduced volatility on one side of the Channel causes chaos across the water. It was just a coincidence that Keir Starmer won a huge majority at precisely the moment last July when legislative elections made France ungovernable for Emmanuel Macron.

It was a misfortune for both men, and for Europe, that their political trajectories were out of sync. Macron had dealt with four Tory prime ministers before finding a potential ally in the ascendant Labour leader. By then his presidency was in spiralling decline. Britain was rousing itself from Brexit delirium just as France was losing the plot.

The two conditions are not comparable in scale. France’s parliamentary paralysis is a big mess. Britain leaving the EU was a monumental calamity. But they are alike, as harms that were self-inflicted at the ballot box by arrogant leaders with misplaced confidence in their powers of persuasion.

David Cameron held a referendum in 2016 because he was sure he could charm voters into keeping EU membership. Theresa May incinerated the Tories’ parliamentary majority in 2017 because she was convinced the country would recoil from Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party and give her a vast personal mandate to enact Brexit.

Macron’s folly had elements of both errors. He dissolved the national assembly last summer because he imagined fresh elections would focus moderate French minds on the threat posed by the far-right National Rally (RN), which had recently triumphed in European elections. He was right, up to a point. Millions of voters did mobilise to deny RN a majority, but to the benefit of leftwing parties that despise the president.

Macron responded by trying to form governments from a depleted pool of loyal centrists, in denial of parliamentary arithmetic and defiance of the convention that presidents name prime ministers with some deference to the will of the electorate.

The result has been months of paralysis, protest, polarisation, collapsing technocratic administrations, recriminations, demands for new parliamentary elections and calls for a presidential resignation. Macron has no intention of standing down before his term expires in 2027 and no obvious avenue to get much done in the meantime. The combination of frenzy and stasis – everything in turmoil, nothing changing – is reminiscent of the rolling Brexit crisis in parliament that ended in December 2019. By then, enough voters were sickened and demoralised by the whole spectacle that they gave Boris Johnson licence to finish the job however he wanted.

In a French version of that story the denouement puts Marine Le Pen, the RN’s former leader and veteran presidential candidate, into the Élysée Palace. Or, if a court upholds a ban on her standing for office as the penalty for an embezzlement conviction, it would be Jordan Bardella, the party’s slick, business-friendly millennial leader.

France is so unlike Britain in terms of constitution and political culture that analogies hardly stick. For neighbouring nations with intimately interwoven history, similarly sized populations and comparable economies, the lack of affinity between leaders is remarkable.

Or maybe not. Proximity breeds rivalry. French presidents and UK prime ministers always find common ground eventually. The global imperative of cooperation trumps local competition, but solutions have to be reached through a cloud of mistrust formed by unsettled particles of centuries-old enmity.

The transatlantic relationship has always been a more comfortable fit for UK prime ministers. There has never been a match of personalities and programmes across the Channel akin to the Thatcher-Reagan alliance of the 1980s or the spark that leapt from Bill Clinton’s New Democrats a decade later to jump start Tony Blair’s New Labour.

If they hadn’t risen out of phase, Macron and Starmer might plausibly have achieved something close. They both see themselves as champions of pragmatic, liberal democratic centre-ground politics, unburdened by dogmas of left and right, on a mission to push back a rising tide of demagogy and nationalism.

They both arrived at the pinnacle of their respective systems with relatively little experience of government or party politics. Macron became president at 39, having skipped the standard French apprenticeship of mayoral offices and senior ministries. Starmer was 61 when he became prime minister, but he had only been an MP for nine years, and never in government.

With professional backgrounds in finance and the law, neither man can be called an outsider but nor were they typical political animals, indigenous to the jungles in which they arrived as top cat. They each neglected to learn some of the feral skills and pack behaviours required for survival.

The French president’s arrogance is more spectacular than the British prime minister’s understated self-assurance, but both have made needless enemies by failing to cultivate alliances beyond their innermost cliques.

Their personal relationship is said to be warm and open, although not exactly fizzing with chemistry. (Only intimate friends and family have access to that level of connection with the Labour leader.)

Their styles are vastly different. At the peak of his powers, Macron had a magnetic eloquence that is not in Starmer’s repertoire. No one has ever accused the Labour prime minister of rhetoric that soars too high in lofty abstraction and geopolitical analysis of Europe’s future. That is Macron’s comfort zone.

But they can do business together: on Ukraine, on wider security and defence collaboration and on illegal migration. Critics may quibble about the detail of such agreements, but there is a clear dividend in enhanced trust.

It helps that relations are no longer polluted by the hostile tabloid briefings and snarky historical allusion that were de rigueur whenever the Tories felt Paris was being uncooperative. It turns out that 21st-century diplomacy works better without juvenile comments about Agincourt.

Dropping pointless Brexit bluster can only move the dial so far. There are structural limits on bilateral cooperation between an EU member and a “third country”. It doesn’t help that Starmer has been unable to articulate a concept of Britain’s future relationship with its neighbours – a sense of destination and strategic purpose to engage Macron’s interest in what Brussels policymakers call the “variable geometry” of the European project.

The UK prime minister came to power with timid and hazy pro-European ambitions. And by then the French president, who might have been excited by something bolder, was already haemorrhaging authority from his multiple domestic wounds. The hope of some Franco-British special relationship to bolster Europe belongs in the realm of counterfactual imagination.

In the real world, the comparison of Macronism and Starmerism works only as a tragedy of missed opportunity; a tale of two missions that captured the centre ground, then failed to build anything durable there.

The French president is besieged by radical forces of left and right, each naming the other as their mortal enemy, while harmonising in scorn for an incumbent who has run out of road. Macron leaves no legacy for an anointed successor to defend. His blessing would probably kill any candidacy.

The cry to rally to the aid of a Republic under threat from the far right has been issued and reissued with diminishing returns through successive elections. The wolf entered the mainstream long ago. It prowls freely in parliament, persuading increasing numbers of French voters and business leaders that it has domesticated itself, that it is no longer the predator of cautionary fable. It growls that the real threat to democracy and the economy comes from the left.

Nigel Farage and his pack of British wolves are watching and learning. They see how resistance is worn down. They see support for the liberal centre drain away because it only ever finds its voice in a last-minute panic of self-defence. They see how to cast moderate, pragmatic government as feeble, corrupt advocacy for the status quo. That is the trap being set for Starmer. By studying Macron’s fate, he might learn not to walk right in.

Cover photo:  Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron at the Gaza peace summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, 13 October 2025. Photograph: Yoan Valat/AFP/Getty Images