A more liberal France, a more social Europe? Macron, two-level reformism and the COVID-19 crisis

Abstract

Emmanuel Macron was elected President of France in 2017 on a programme that promised to confront the structural antagonism between the country’s social model and the liberalising thrust of European integration since Maastricht. His novel political offer combined supply-side reforms at home and the strengthening of the social dimension of the European Union, starting with the operation of European economic governance. And he saw simultaneous and explicitly linked action in both the domestic and European arenas—two-level reformism—as crucial in generating political support for this project. This paper assesses his government’s success in realising these objectives, and asks what if anything the COVID-19 crisis changed. Focusing on the crucial case of unemployment insurance, it shows how pre-pandemic reform efforts were complicated by deeply embedded policy legacies and were insufficient to significantly enhance France’s leverage at European level. COVID-19 generated some unanticipated momentum behind aspects of Macron’s plans for Eurozone reform, but at the same time further complicated both the implementation and the politics of his domestic reform agenda. Overall the French case underscores the challenges of radically reorienting mature welfare states, European economic governance and their interaction, even in the presence of major endogenous and exogenous shocks.