Macron dreams of a coalition from Glucksmann to Lisnard to lock in 2027

According to Le Figaro, which on 4 November publishes a "counterpoint" on the 2027 presidential election, Emmanuel Macron does not want a primary. He judges the candidates in the running "inaudible on substance" and would like them to start by working together on a project, in a coalition stretching from Raphaël Glucksmann to Laurent Lisnard. The stated aim: to derail a Le Pen-Mélenchon duel. The briefing is thin: we do not know who has agreed to sit at this table, on what timetable, or on what programmatic basis. The rest is our reading.

First, admire the boldness of the diagnosis: the candidates are inaudible, so they must be locked in the same room. A strange remedy. When voters no longer hear any differences, the cause may not be a lack of common programme, but that too many programmes already look alike. Merging clarifies nothing.

Above all, the manoeuvre reveals how power sees politics: as a problem of supply management. Two poles are rising, so you build a bloc to contain them. The man who has governed since 2017 proposes himself as referee of an alliance running from the centre-left to the right, and calls "duel" what looks very much like a popular vote that someone would like to prevent from being expressed. Let us recall that Rosa Luxemburg expected nothing from the virtue of coalitions. In Reform or Revolution, she argued that democracy is indispensable to the working class because it is by exercising it, in the struggle for it, that the class becomes conscious of its interests (our translation). A bloc negotiated at the summit does the opposite: it spares people the need to learn.

The criterion is simple, and the Luxemburgist tradition applies it to every parliamentary deal: does it raise the strength and confidence of those at the bottom, or does it demobilise them? Can a coalition from Glucksmann to Lisnard carry a measure that takes power away from capital, or only guarantee its good management? Concessions won by struggle are clawed back as soon as profits demand it; the promises of a management bloc are the first to fall. We know nothing of its contents, but its geometry suggests the answer: the further it stretches to the right, the more the programme gets planed down.

There is also the question of common sense. Gramsci saw in it the heart of hegemony: a ruling class holds when its world appears normal, even inevitable. Presenting the coalition as the only alternative to chaos is working on that certainty: outside the bloc, there would only be the extremes. The trap is to make people believe that the only possible democracy is the one prepared behind closed doors.

The response will not come from a better casting. It will come from assemblies, unions, neighbourhoods, from everything that makes politics something other than a casting show. If power wants a bloc, let it build one: we will see whether it holds when the people stop being extras.