Reports that Édouard Philippe, the dour yet competent former Prime Minister, is now favourite to succeed Emmanuel Macron should alarm those who believe the tide of history flows only one way. The chatter in London, Paris and Washington suggests a certain relief: the centre has held, the populist wave has crested, and the Fifth Republic will muddle through with a technocrat at the helm. But this is a shallow reading, the kind that assumes the present is simply the past with better tailoring.
Let us be candid. Philippe is the acceptable face of a system that has lost its nerve. He represents the managerial class, the énarques who have run France since de Gaulle, men and women for whom the word 'reform' means tweaking the retirement age while the fabric of society frays. His lead over Marine Le Pen or Éric Zemmour is not a victory of ideas. It is a victory of inertia. The French public, weary of gilets jaunes, yellow vests, and endless strikes, have opted for the least frightening option: a dull, competent man who will not set fire to the Republic.
But compare this moment to the late Roman Republic. The optimates, the establishment, kept winning elections for decades, yet the Republic collapsed into civil war because they refused to address the rot: the latifundia, the dispossessed peasantry, the disenfranchised masses. Philippe is our Cicero—eloquent, legalistic, and ultimately powerless against the forces he refuses to name. The populists, Le Pen and Zemmour, are the Catilines of our age, channeling genuine grievances through crude, often toxic, channels. They may lose this election. But the grievances will not vanish.
Britain's allies, of course, watch with clinical detachment. The Foreign Office calculates that Philippe means continuity on the Channel, steady as she goes on defence budgets, on the Ukraine commitment. They are right on the surface. But beneath, the tectonic plates shift. France's banlieues remain powder kegs. The pension system leaks money. The agricultural heartland feels abandoned by Brussels and Paris alike. A Philippe presidency would be a holding operation, not a restoration.
The intellectual decadence of our era is to mistake calm for health. A patient in a coma is still. A fever charts its own course. The French centre's 'resilience' is a reading of the thermometer, not a diagnosis. The populist vote in France has not peaked; it has merely consolidated. Le Pen and Zemmour between them command nearly forty per cent of the vote. These are not ephemeral malcontents; they are a permanent counter-public, waiting for the establishment's next mistake.
What should give British planners pause is not Philippe's victory but the price of it. To fend off populism, the centre has adopted populist language on immigration and Islam, diluted its economic liberalism with handouts, and turned the presidency into a plebiscite on personality. The substance of governance—the rebuilding of state capacity, the reintegration of lost communities, the reform of sclerotic institutions—has been postponed. Again.
My fear is that we are repeating the pattern of the late Victorian era: magnificent architecture, self-satisfied prose, and a gnawing sense that the scaffolding is about to collapse. Philippe is a reassuring figure. But he is not a renewer. He is a caretaker. And caretakers, in history, are remembered only when they fail.
