Francois Ruffin hates President Emmanuel Macron. He hates him so much, he wrote two articles and a book about his hatred.
Ruffin isn’t alone. The past eight months of protests have made clear that, while Macron was lauded as an outsider hero who would sweep the French economy off its feet and restore the stagnating country to its former glory, he may not have been the hero France, or Europe, wanted.
But Francois Ruffin’s opinion matters more than the average person’s. An outspoken, media-savvy deputy for the far-Left party “La France Insoumise”, he has developed a loyal following and has thrust himself into the public arena as a voice of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement. Most importantly, he seems to be unintentionally positioning himself as a challenger to the long-standing face of “La France Insoumise,” Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and by extension as a potential challenger to Macron.
His manifesto, “Ce Pays que Tu ne Connais Pas,” published in February 2019, remains in the list of the top 20 best-selling books in France more than three months later. On April 3, his highly anticipated documentary on the Yellow Vests, J’veux du soleil, was released in theaters. The documentary was no blockbuster, totaling a modest 74,619 views throughout its first week, but it serves as an ideal complement to the greater narrative Ruffin has been building. While reviews of both pieces have been mixed, there is no doubt that they have had a significant cultural impact.
There are many things to dislike about Ruffin’s book. His tone is petulant, and he often portrays himself as a martyr of the people in a theatrical, eye-roll-inducing manner. His more substantial arguments, detailing the extensive network of wealth which he claims helped propel Macron to political stardom, are undermined by ad hominem attacks against Macron that vary from a “visceral hatred of his face” to gratuitous commentary on his lack of wrinkles and mannerisms.
Ruffin also spends much of his time defending his own legitimacy. He begins his “letter” in Amiens, where he and Macron both attended the same Catholic school, Lycée la Providence. While neither politician knew each other back then, Ruffin believes that this coincidence is an essential starting point for his story. Indeed, Ruffin’s disgust with Macron is almost a form of self-flagellation: He is constantly torn between his unwavering commitment to serving as a voice for the downtrodden and his blatantly bourgeois roots.
A career journalist, Ruffin has dedicated his life to shedding light on corruption and defending the “little people” of France. His book is filled with anecdotes depicting his time traveling across the country, meeting disenfranchised workers, single mothers, immigrants, and young people who all serve to illustrate the suffering that Macron, or rather the “oligarchical system” that he represents, has enabled in France.
He is particularly focused on Macron’s friendships with the rich. Bernard Arnault, the owner of LVMH Moet Henessy and the wealthiest man in France, is Ruffin’s favorite target. In truth, Ruffin’s disdain for Arnault predates his disdain for Macron: His first documentary, Merci Patron!, which earned him a César, was centered on Arnault and the treatment of laborers in France.
J’veux du soleil, his most recent documentary, was filmed in six days in December 2018 and details François Ruffin’s experience in the “France of roundabouts” as he interviews various Gilets Jaunes. Filmed in his car by Gilles Peret, a French film producer whose last documentary focused on Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Ruffin seeks above all to humanize the protesters and honor their suffering. Yet the documentary quickly veers into reality-TV-like dramatizations: a slow camera shot zooming into the face of a crying woman in Montpellier, clips of factory workers cut with shots of luxury yachts and jet skis. As with his book, the dramatic emphasis and populist messaging undercuts the substance of the film. Despite the opportune timing of the documentary, one month prior to the European Parliamentary elections, Ruffin’s office emphasized that this was mere coincidence; it was “imperative to the team to be able to present J’veux du soleil while the movement was still alive so that it did not serve as an epitaph but rather as a fighting tool.”
As Ruffin accumulates cultural and political capital, his presence becomes all the more important in France. The traditional Left-Right dichotomy has crumbled, as best exemplified by Macron’s election in 2017, and the only other politician who seems to have survived this collapse is Marine Le Pen, the face of the far-Right National Rally (previously the National Front). While Ruffin often flirts with populist rhetoric and claims no real political affiliations, at its core his messaging remains within the French tradition of leftist politics. That is, while he is a savvy strategist who has benefitted from the recent surge in populist sentiment, he remains anti-capitalist and pro-immigration, unlike characters such as Italy’s Beppe Grillo.
Perhaps the most poignant passage in his book defends just this: Ruffin is deeply contemptuous of Macron’s claims to leftist ideology—he believes that la gauche is earned, not claimed. It is earned by “suffering by the sides of the defeated, of the outraged, the downtrodden”—something he believes Macron has never understood, nor experienced. Ruffin truly thinks he has a calling to help the disenfranchised in France. He does not resort to anti-immigrant rhetoric, Islamophobic discourse, or anti-EU propaganda. He simply tells the stories of the ordinary French people he has met along the way.
Despite the Gilets Jaunes, neither the traditional right nor the traditional left in France has been able to capitalize on the unrest. The inability of these parties to regain traction amidst such political upheaval should be seen as a sign that their existence is increasingly irrelevant within the political landscape. In effect, the Left-Right system has been displaced by a system in which the center faces off with the extremes.
This first became evident in 2017, when France’s establishment parties dramatically underperformed in the election: The center-right Les Républicains captured 20.1 percent. At the extremes, the far-Left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, came in just under 20 percent and the far-Right National Rally emerged as the front-runner against Macron with 21.3 percent. In the center, Macron’s En Marche! (LREM) Party came out with 24.01 percent, eventually moving on to clinch the election against Marine Le Pen. The traditional French Left, represented by Benoît Hamon from the Socialist Party (PS), garnered a mere 6.36 percent of the vote. As this shift in French politics becomes more ingrained, a character like Ruffin, who claims no real political affiliation but the will of the people, becomes all the more interesting, and all the more dangerous as 2022 approaches.
And this trend is by no means unique to France. It seems that the traditional Left-Right divide has been replaced by an open-closed, or global-national, divide across Europe. The issues at the center of this new political divide, namely immigration, climate change, and the European Union, are polarizing in a manner that transcends the politics of old. While the clear example of this mutation is the newfound élan of the populist far-Right, the Left and far-Left have also experienced profound, destabilizing mutations that will have long-lasting effects on European politics. In France, the PS essentially died with its dismal showing in 2017. Centrist Macron and populist Le Pen have not only come to define the French landscape, but also serve as a symbol of the greater political struggle emerging across Europe.
The upcoming European elections further reflect this reality, as Macron’s party competes closely with the National Rally. Current predictions see LREM (whose European election campaign has been rebranded Renaissance) falling behind the National Rally, and recent gaffes by Macron’s top candidate Nathalie Loiseau have done little to assuage the competition. Poor results in the European elections would not only be an enormous blow to Macron, who has defined himself as the pro-Europe, liberal reformer, but also a tremendous setback for the European Parliament’s liberal coalition, ALDE, which seeks to join forces with LREM to create a whole new post-election group within the Parliament.
While Le Pen has been able to take advantage of the anti-establishment wave on the far-Right, the French Left has largely failed to do so. Le Pen has even taken her campaign tactics beyond the French borders, and urged Belgian voters to support far-Right Vlaams Belang at a campaign stop last week. If Ruffin is truly a challenger to Mélenchon as the next leader of “la France Insoumise,” or perhaps as the leader of a new, independent, radical leftist party, he could be the gauche’s answer to the National Rally’s recent success. While this could simply lead to further fragmentation and polarization of the political landscape, it could also be the solution to the rampant disorganization seen on the Left, and thus pose a serious challenge to Macron as he seeks re-election. When pressed about Ruffin’s electoral aspirations, both within the ranks of “La France Insoumise” and at the presidential level, Ruffin’s office declined to comment.
To be sure, Ruffin is in many ways a caricature: He refuses to wear a tie when summoned to the National Assembly, he refuses his full salary from the French government and only claims the minimum wage (though he has other sources of income), he believes the presidency should be abolished (though he started his own micro-party that could serve as a springboard to the Presidency), and he likens himself to Robin Hood, a veritable man of the people—at least the people who despise the elite.
None of this means Ruffin is dishonest, or acting in bad faith. But perhaps, like his Jupiterian nemesis, he isn’t quite so down to earth either.
Whether Ruffin’s increasing media presence will be enough to propel him to the forefront of national politics remains uncertain. However, there is no doubt his voice will continue to echo among the anti-Macron French. And as the Gilets Jaunes lose steam, and the European elections loom, Ruffin’s presence will continue to reverberate within the National Assembly and across France.