Emmanuel Macron's Challenge: French Capitalism in Transition

In the 2010s, France was in a situation of systemic crisis, namely, the impossibility for political leadership to find a strategy of institutional change, or, more generally, a model of capitalism that could gather sufficient social and political support. In this lecture, the various attempts at reforming the French model are analyzed. In the 1980s, the left tried briefly to orient the French polit­ical economy in a social-democratic/socialist direction before changing course and opting for a more orthodox macroeconomic and structural policy direction. The attempts of governments of the right to implement a radically neo-liberal structural policy also failed in the face of a significant social opposition. The enduring French systemic crisis is the expression of contradictions  between the economic policies implemented by the successive left and right governments, and the absence of a dominant, social bloc, that is, a coalition of social groups that would politically support the dominant political strategy.

Comment: Prof. Dr. Arndt Sorge, Universität Potsdam

Bruno Amable is professor of economics at the University of Geneva and the University of Paris I Panthéon - Sorbonne from which he is on leave. His research focuses on the political economy of institutional change and compar­ative capitalism.

The lecture is based on his latest book (Oxford University Press 2017) on the evolution of the French model of capitalism in relation to the instability of socio-political compromises.

This event is part of the WZB lecture series "Great Crisis of Capitalism – A Second Great Transformation?"