A Palace War, not a Revolution

Abstract

Abstract The chapter begins by recounting the main events of the 2017 French electoral season, an atypical campaign that led to the election of 38-year-old Emmanuel Macron, who had never been elected to office and lacked the support of an established political party when he launched his campaign. Yet this initiative proved to be very successful, for him as well as for the hundreds of MPs who entered parliament just one month after him. This cohort was hailed by some as a game changer, with its scores of novices, its unseen representation of women, and the diminishing mean age. But, for critics, the change was a superficial public relations exercise, and the few dozen inexperienced MPs a gauzy distraction from the reality of a parliament that remained as unrepresentative as ever. Comparative analysis across cohorts offers original insights in this debate, and into French political careers. Using sequence analysis, it shows that the 2017 vaunted renewal was for the most part a career accelerator for many. The 2017 election is more akin to a “great shortcut,” where dozens of elected officials collectively took advantage of a shake-up in the order of succession to bypass the queue they were already waiting in.