Populism and technocracy are two faces of the crisis that Western democracy is going through. Both trends mark a distance from politics as a collective phenomenon. Until a few years ago, French democracy seemed to be an “exception”: one of the few systems of mature capitalism not to be at least overwhelmed by anti-politics, thanks also to a democratic model that seemed to protect the country in the open sea of globalization. The long tail of austerity and the crisis of “happy” globalization have revealed, however, its weaknesses. The operation with which in a few months Emmanuel Macron, enfant prodige et proté gé of the establishment, founds a party “that does not say his name” and wins over the presidential elections highlights all the permeability of transalpine democracy to neo-individualist logic. Macronism thus intercepts a re-founding need of the Fifth Republic, strengthening its paradigm of marked personalization of power, now pushed in a more technocratic and above all individualistic direction. Starting from a provocative critical hypothesis supported by research evidence, the volume brings out macronism as a new, possible model of technocratic personalization of late globalization, whose basic objective seems to be the stabilization of the neoliberal economic and social project.
