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Abstract

The 2017 elections saw the party system of the Fifth Republic implode: Gaullists and Socialists suffered dramatic losses as Le Pen, Mélenchon, and Macron with his En Marche! movement, dominated. In his lecture, Bruno Amable argues that some of the responsibility for that lies with the “governing left”: After the failure of the ambitious reforms at the beginning of Mitterrand’s presidency, the Socialists had neglected their traditional base and, in the hope that a new “bourgeois bloc” could be forged in the center, pledged themselves to neoliberal policies. While Macron governs with the remaining “modernists,” dissenting “sovereigntist” voices are getting louder.