John Bankston - Emmanuel Macron

Emmanuel Macron

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In college, he was more interested in philosophy than politics. After graduating, his first job was in government, but he later paid 50,000 to get out of his contract. Much of his career was spent in banking. Macron was a millionaire in a political party that championed the poor. Many of his fellow socialists didn't trust him.

Macron's fame arrived with a law bearing his name: "Loi Macron" would allow small businesses to stay open one Sunday a month. Besides changing rules governing store hours, Loi Macron would do other things, like make it easier for young legal professionals to open offices.

"It scarcely seems revolutionary, for instance, to allow shops in certain tourist areas to open on Sunday once a month, up from five times a year under current rules," The Economist magazine wrote in December of 2014. "And the bill is expected to say nothing at all about the 35-hour working week, despite Mr Macron's regular criticisms of its constraint on French business."

Conservative politicians had long tried to change the law, which forced companies to pay overtime after 35 hours (in the U.S., overtime is usually paid after 40 hours). Critics believed it unnecessarily added to the expense of running a business. Supporters thought it would force companies to hire more workers.

His own party railed against Loi Macron, despite a poll showing 75 percent of Parisians wanted stores open on Sundays. Socialists argued that requiring businesses to give their employees the day off was good for workers. In The Economist article, Socialist legislator Pascal Cherki complained, "My objective is not to vote for all the measures that [former Conservative President Nicolas] Sarkozy did not manage to pass and which we fought against in opposition."

Fellow socialists weren't the only ones who disliked the bill. Some more conservative legislators had their own issues. In 2017, Francis Vercamer, a member of the centre-right Union of Democrats and Independents, told reporter Alissa J Rubin that he had proposed several amendments privately to Macron. Although Rubin said the Minister was supportive when they were brought before the legislature, he opposed them all. "I don't want to say it was dishonest because that's not the right term," Vercamer explained. "But for someone who comes to a private meeting and says, 'This is good,' and then comes to a public meeting and doesn't support you and doesn't give a reason, that's not worthy of a representative of the Republic."

Vercamer's amendments were a tiny fraction of the ones legislators tried to add to the bill after French Prime Minister Manuel Valls took it to the National Assembly, a legislative body similar to the U.S. House of Representatives. There, Macron endured 82 hours of parliamentary commission debate over 1,967 amendments. Four-hundred-ninety-five were adopted. When the amended bill was presented to the Assembly, Macron sat through another 111 hours of debate while nearly three thousand additional amendments were proposed, with 559 adopted.

Macron admitted he considered resigning if the bill wasn't passed. "But I think it was not an option, because we have to progress," he told The Wall Street Journal in 2015. "We have to go further, and we want to deliver."

Yet after all of that time and all of that work, Macron and Valls realized that Loi Macron didn't have the votes to pass. The bill was pulled. In many countries that would mean the end of it. France is different.

In the U.S., a bill has to be supported by the majority of both Senators and Representatives in order to reach the President. The President then must sign the bill for it to become a law. The French Constitution allowed the President to turn a bill into a law without legislative support. Legislators can only stop the President if a majority of them vote "no confidence." This means they dissolve the government, triggering a presidential election. It's a drastic and very rare step. After Socialist President Francois Hollande used the Constitutional maneuver to make Loi Macron a law without a vote in the Assembly, members of his party were upset. Macron was more interested in France's problems than other politicians' concerns.

"France is sick and we are facing difficult times," Macron told The New York Times in 2014, echoing Juppe. The former prime minister was a Conservativea party that many believed focused on the needs of businesspeople. Conservatives had long tried to change France's 35-hour work week. Macron was a member of the same party that led protests against changes in work rules. He explained in the interview, "For me being a Socialist today is about defending the unemployed, but also defending businessmen who want to create a company, and those who need jobs. We have to shift the social model from a lot of formal protections toward loosening bottlenecks in the economy."

It was an opinion many in his country shared. France usually has a much higher unemployment rate than places like Germany, England or Norway. For over three decades, it rarely dropped below eight percent. By 2014, it was hovering around ten percent. Even worse, one out of four people under age 30 who wanted a job couldn't find one.

Just a few months after championing Loi Macron, the Economics Minister championed a movement. It would borrow ideas from Conservatives and from Socialists, while remaining independent of them both.

The group met on the second floor of an unremarkable building in Paris. Most of them were in their 20s or 30s. Few had ever worked on a political campaign before. Even fewer had held a political office. They weren't lawyers and legislators. They were bakers and bloggers. They were ready for a change.