What Is Centrism?

Introduction

During the first 100 days of President Trump’s second term, a report in The New York Times suggested the changed economic and foreign policies of the United States government – including tariffs – had ‘breathed life into centrist leaders’ around the world. A Trump shock to policy was also a potential ‘Trump bump’ politically for those ‘vulnerable to the same populist tide’. Which centrist politicians stood to benefit? Among those mentioned were the UK’s centre-left Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, Canada’s Liberal Party leader, Mark Carney and Germany’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union leader, Friedrich Merz (Landler, 2025). The juxtaposition of populism with centrism has become a truism. While our understanding of the distinctiveness of populist politics owes much to the scholarly attention it has received, the same cannot be said of centrism. Defining centrism as non-populism leaves us with a potentially valid, though broad political category stretching from centre lefts to centre rights around the world. Yet, some centrist projects, as with the presidency of Emmanuel Macron in France, have disrupted traditional centre-left and centre-right political dynamics, demanding greater analytical specificity for ‘one of the most widely used and least understood terms in politics’ (Dunt and Lynskey, 2024: 2).

In what follows, I expand upon this problem – the ambiguity in our collective understanding of centrism – and make some advances towards greater specificity. In certain usages, centrism can be relatively uncomplicated and uncontentious, for example as a basic spatial metaphor to describe intra-party dynamics: an actor who is not ‘far’ left or right is sometimes described as more centrist, relative to those further to the left or right within their political party. The same observations can be made between different parties (Bobbio, 1996: 34). More complicated – and contentious – is the conceptualisation of centrism as a set of political ideas, on which interpretations vary greatly among scholars and practitioners alike. Centrism can be both ‘about splitting the difference’ between interpretations of left and right (Hindmoor, 2024: 78) and ‘emphatically not a splitting of the difference’ (Blair, 2024a: 57). For some, an ideological ‘centre’ can mean ‘a unique and specific way of looking at the world’ (Ostrowski, 2023: 5), and for others, it is the embodiment of neoliberal hegemony spanning multiple party-political traditions (Ali, 2018). If centrism is ‘a distinct set of ideas’ (Dunt and Lynskey, 2024: 143), it would appear to have significant affinities with moderation and the institutional norms of liberal democracy (Craiutu, 2024), raising the question of whether it is a synonym for other terms. As a rhetorical strategy, centrism appears to follow the logic of ‘thirding’, where a huge array of ideological positions can be ‘represented as blazing a third trail between two conspiring terms in an obsolescent dualism’ (Bastow et al., 2002: 272). Such framing, it has been suggested, may amount to nothing more ‘than a rhetorical trope’ (Shaw, 2005: 192).

The progress made in scholarly interpretation of populism is instructive for understanding centrism. As Mudde and Kaltwasser (2013: 493) argued, ‘the discussion about populism concerns not just exactly what it is, but even whether it exists at all’. Regarding centrism, these same questions require sustained analytical scrutiny and debate. This article proceeds in three parts. First, I introduce existing literature from which different conceptualisations of centrism can be derived. Here, I consider the distinction currently made between moderation and centrism, and interpretations of a ‘centre’ in politics. In the second section, I analyse the case of a politician who, it has been suggested, ‘best represents the continuation of the centrist tradition’ (Dunt and Lynskey, 2024: 145): Emmanuel Macron, first elected president of France in 2017 having upended the traditional parties of the left (Parti Socialiste) and right (Les Républicains). Macron embodies some of the paradoxes of centrism: idiosyncratic, yet often business as usual; a competent administrator, (Hutton, 2022) but with a reputation for disruption. These features of Macron’s centrism help to define the more general phenomenon. Centrism is a politics that seeks, in some way, to move beyond a dichotomy: left and right. Yet, this has proven to be elusive, characterised more – in Macron’s case – by ‘zigzagging’ between the two (Abboud and Hall, 2024).

In the third part of the article, I offer a new theory of centrism to conceptualise this very changeable politics: centrism as a structure for political action. Generated from a critique of existing left and right establishments – a precondition for the centrist case – is a framework for action: a politics of the necessary rather than the ‘ideological’, and the privileging of reforms ‘blocked’ by left and right intransigence. While this more specific form of centrism does not have a place for political tribalism – it is much too fluid – it does allow for subjective judgements of the politically acceptable: an intangible, highly contingent quality that centrists prioritise. While ideologies within the broad categories of left and right rarely display consistency over time (Greenleaf, 2003: 13–14), centrism is even more liable to inconsistency: it operates as a strategy within the ideological parameters of the moment, oscillating between left and right. In liberal democratic systems, centrism offers a strategy to act, but in a political context largely shaped by existing ideologies of left and right, moderate and extreme. Following this, centrist politics does not inscribe specifically centrist political ideas. The search for something that is simultaneously left and right, and in some sense ‘bridging’ the two (Ostrowski, 2023: 14) is merely an exercise in tracking the oscillations of centrism, before learning whether the actor’s destination is, in the aggregate, on the left or the right.

This conceptualisation of centrism is a distinctive one, but I do not argue it is the only one. The concept of centrism as a moderate anti-populism, which I discuss in what follows, is a broad, valid category; so too are particular, historically contingent ‘centres’, of which postwar liberal democracy was – and is – one. Rather, my focus here is to bring clarity to a confusing political identity in contemporary politics: the centre between, beyond or transcending left and right. There are political traits observable now and in the past that can plausibly be labelled centrist: believing that political pluralism – of ideas, actors and institutions – is not only a democratic good but a political resource for each other, for example (Dunt and Lynskey, 2024: 145–146). Here, political actors assess and reassess their context, update their prognoses, and adjust their proposals. Within left and right political families, actors and thinkers who do this are sometimes labelled centrists, sometimes modernisers or, more descriptively, revisionists. They practice a form of philosophical pragmatism, with ideologies as a type of political knowledge (Anderson, 2023: 234–245). This is an anti-dogmatic, intellectually curious ideological politics of left and right, rather than a protean centrism claiming to be beyond left and right – that elusive idea of centrism.

Moderation and Centrism

Centrism has been conceptualised in different ways, directed at specific political phenomena and periods of time. As these do not always translate into other areas or periods in politics, certainly not with their original meaning intact, some organisation of these different ‘centres’ is necessary. In what follows, I attempt to draw out from the existing literature three concepts of centrism: centrism as a moderate disposition, with the centre a location of moderate political actors within liberal democratic systems; the centre as an electoral outcome and as a related political construction, often known as ‘the centre ground’ in politics; and centrism as a set of political beliefs, which actors and thinkers attempt to distinguish from left and right. It is my contention that, while the first two concepts are reasonably consistent and coherent, the third – centrism as a set of political beliefs – is not. Hovering around these three concepts of centrism are periods of time – contingent, historical moments – where the existence of a centre has been posited. There is some overlap with this kind of centre – Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s The Vital Center, first published in 1949, is the example I use here – and the three concepts. Yet these specific, contingent centres are sometimes used as a byword by political actors to locate themselves and their politics at other moments in time, and between different political forces. Such a reconceptualization attempts to substantiate a set of ideas, but risks obscuring an original meaning.

I begin with the relationship between centrism and moderation, a connection which is undoubtedly an interpretative feature of contemporary politics: for example, with expressions of relief at the victories of ‘non-populists’ (Luce, 2025). In the essay ‘On moderation’, Montaigne (2003: 223) wrote: ‘I like natures which are temperate and moderate’. Why? Because of the damage wrought through ‘excess’, however, well-intentioned the action may be (Montaigne, 2003: 222):

It is as though our very touch bore infection: things which in themselves are good and beautiful are corrupted by our handling of them. . . Those who say that Virtue knows no excess (since she is no longer Virtue if there is excess within her) are merely playing with words.

This line of thought is in-keeping with what Shklar (1984: 30) described as Montaigne’s (1994: 32) ‘scepticism’, a politics that seemed to blend unease about both the status quo and of change: ‘the conservatism of universal disgust, if it is conservatism at all’. Among the political lessons from Montaigne is that of avoiding harm by avoiding extremes. This idea reappears in contemporary work seeking to define a moderate ‘ethos’, something that ‘can be described only with approximation’ (Craiutu, 2017: 30). Consequently, Craiutu’s (2024: 44) approach can be described as a lexicography of moderation: ‘scepticism, prudence, eclecticism, pragmatism, propensity to incremental change and piecemeal reforms, civility, toleration, dialogue, modesty and humility’.

Craiutu’s (2024: 7) lexicographical approach arrived at similar political characteristics to those Dunt and Lynskey (2024: 41) associated with centrism, leaving us with something close to centrism-as-moderation, despite Craiutu’s argument that moderation and centrism are distinct, something I return to below. Craiutu’s (2024: 211) normative preference for moderation can be contextualised within the populism vs everything else frame: his recent work, directed predominantly at politics in the United States, and published after the end of the first Trump administration but before the start of the second, noted that ‘our democratic norms and institutions are facing a moment of trial and reckoning, and we may be heading off a cliff unless we make necessary adjustments’. In this context, Craiutu positioned moderation as a strategy for rescuing democracy from a polarised politics that risks becoming more extreme, and less democratic. This interpretation is both broad and evocative of liberalism as a bulwark against illiberal forces (Freeden and Stears, 2013: 336), including the ‘Liberalism of fear’ memorably thought through by Shklar (1998: 9): that of a liberal core that ‘concentrates on damage control’. This is not a comprehensive form of liberalism (Lefebvre, 2024), of which there is much variety and political contextualisation around the world. Rather, as Shklar (1998: 11) suggested, it is of a more ‘universal’ nature, recognised today in a defence of pluralist, liberal democratic norms embodied by moderate politicians and political movements – a form of meta ideology that envelops different ideological families. ¹

Electoral and political centres – conceptualised as both descriptive devices and as drivers of electoral competition – are also commonplace interpretations of centrism and the centre. Hindmoor (2004: 18–40) theorised the differences between electoral and political centres. An electoral centre is a contingent location of popular support, often discussed in politics as the ground on which parties must compete to win: the centre ground. The political centre is a set of beliefs, proposals and arguments posited as the ideational backdrop to the centre ground. It partly constitutes and foregrounds the electoral centre. Moving towards the political centre can be interpreted as accommodating to opposition arguments (Reich, 2024), while interpretations of the electoral centre can lead to politicians consuming huge amounts of polling, and targeting narrow groups of voters in a potentially depoliticising move (Hay, 2007: 118–121). The concept of moderation returns here: political actors offer interpretations of what moderate, centre-ground politics is or should be (Hindmoor, 2004: 40). This could make for meaningful political and ideological disagreement. Yet subjective meanings of moderation could operate in favour of a status quo, supressing meaningful disagreement. An ‘extreme centre’ has been interpreted as a set of exclusionary ideological norms, where a centrist political actor reproduces a ‘form of intolerance towards anything’ that does not accord with ‘an arbitrarily proclaimed juste milieu’ (Deneault, 2018: 156). This is an anti-thinking form of politics, where left and right – within the sphere of centrism – lose the senses that gave them real meaning (Deneault, 2018: 163–164).

In liberal democratic systems, centres can lean left or right and are affected by the institutions and electoral systems operating within a polity. When scholars, practitioners and commentators observe politics ‘moving’ to the right or left – for example, the ‘shift to the right’ in France (Ivaldi, 2024b: 175) – it is the political and electoral centres they have in mind. Here we can move to the interpretation of a centre at a particular moment in time, Schlesinger’s The Vital Center, which is often cited in work on centrism (Craiutu, 2017, 2024; Dunt and Lynskey, 2024); Schlesinger emphasised the liberal, democratic path to a fairer capitalism as the necessary postwar politics, protecting freedom and democracy from fascism and communism. Tyranny could be defeated and progress made for societies around the world if democrats (and Democrats in the United States) fostered a ‘new radicalism’ (Schlesinger, 1970: 153). Schlesinger, a ‘New Deal’ liberal, was in favour of a more interventionist liberal state, one that avoided investing too much power in bureaucrats, but was strong enough to prevent too much power accumulating in the private sector. As Schlesinger (1970: 248) wrote, ‘chamber-of-commerce banalities will no longer console industrial man’.

Schlesinger’s book did have what could be considered universal political themes, ones pertinent to understanding centrism as a political phenomenon. Schlesinger was attracted to what he saw as an economically interventionist, yet pluralist approach from past political figures, both Republican and Democrat. His was undoubtedly a moderate politics, noting the importance of gradual reform. And he speculated as to whether a centre was not something in between extremes, but itself one extreme, far away from the other side of immoderate, illiberal politics, regardless of ideological variety (Schlesinger, 1970: 256) – a thought broadly comparable to populism vs everything else, or anti-pluralism against pluralism (Fieschi, 2019: 164). For Schlesinger, a centre was not, however, any path that an actor wished to locate between interpretations of a left and a right. When Bill Clinton, US President from 1993 to 2001, used the Schlesinger-coined phrase ‘the vital centre’ – momentarily (Schlesinger, 2008: 806–807) – and was associated with the ‘third way’ politics of the 1990s, he did so in a way that ‘downsized the concept’ (Lichtenstein and Stein, 2023: 307). In 1997, Schlesinger responded, noting that he had written a defence of liberal democracy in The Vital Center, not an interpretation of a middle in contemporary democratic politics between the centre right and the centre left, or new right politicians and liberals (Schlesinger, 1997).

From these two concepts of centrism – centrism as moderation, and centrism as a fight for the political centre – and with Schlesinger’s interpretation of postwar centre-left politics overlapping with both, we can now move to centrism as a set of political beliefs, for which Schlesinger’s memorable phrase is sometimes borrowed to substantiate. It is here where critical attention is most needed for the topic at hand. Craiutu, recognising that the term centrism is seemingly resistant to definition (Craiutu, 2024: 127), distinguished between a ‘soft centrism’ that emphasises some level of common agreement within a polity (Craiutu, 2024: 120) and a more ‘muscular’ centrism that asserts the non-exclusive nature of some values-based judgements: e.g. a political economy that finds things within capitalism to praise and to criticise (Craiutu, 2024: 124–125). Much rests upon the relationship between centrist moderation (if they are different, which is Craiutu’s contention, moderation appears to be the more comprehensive) and ‘isms’ (Craiutu, 2018: 180; 2024: 44): ideologies of left and right. Here, the political actor is encouraged to ‘think politically rather than ideologically’ (Craiutu, 2024: 215). As with recent work in political psychology (Zmigrod, 2025), the claim is that ideological thinking is problematic, despite an acceptance that moderates are ‘found on all sides of the political spectrum’ (Craiutu, 2024: 41, original emphasis), presumably including actors located within centre-left and centre-right ideologies.

This ‘suspicion’ of ideologies (Dunt and Lynskey, 2024: 145–146) is an important facet of centrism. It is also one part of a very ambiguous political and analytical relationship between centrism and existing ideologies. The ‘third way’ period is instructive in this regard. Seeking to move beyond the ‘old’ left and ‘new’ right of the 1980s, centre-left parties and thinkers participated in a process of ideological revisionism (Goes, 2024: 88–95): a ‘new’ economy required a ‘new’ politics. The British sociologist Anthony Giddens was a significant intellectual influence during this time. Socialism – the old left – was characterised by Giddens as stasis, reduced to the protection of shibboleths and therefore conservative. The new right, in embracing market power, had become associated with breaking things and losing touch with tradition (Giddens, 1994: 8–9, 33–34, 73–74). Giddens (1994: 174, 191, 194–195, 251) presented a post-distributional politics, where basic questions of ‘who gets what’ were considered less controversial than in the recent past, leading to the reduced relevance of the left/right dichotomy. This judgement has arguably not stood the test of time, as big questions of distribution have not gone away (Savage, 2021). Giddens’ argument that ‘the ‘centre’ shouldn’t be regarded as empty of substance’ (Giddens, 1998: 45), owing to an interpretation of modernity – including what Giddens (1994: 90–91) called ‘life politics’ – at the turn of the millennium, was far from systematic. Overall, what was being derived from a centre was ambiguous.

Overlapping in time with the third-way debate, the Italian theorist Norberto Bobbio, motivated to intervene in the long-running debate on the relative importance of left and right in political thinking, restated their significance. The left/right dichotomy was characterised by contrasting perspectives on the concept of equality: specifically, the left being ‘more egalitarian’, and the right ‘more inegalitarian’ relative to one another (Bobbio, 1996: 65). As Drochon noted (2022: 334), less remarked upon is Bobbio’s thinking on the centre, an intellectual byproduct of his analysis of left and right. Bobbio set out three different kinds of centre, in different relations to left and right: an ‘included middle’ that pushed left and right away from a centre, an ‘inclusive middle’ that produced a new ideological trajectory, taking from both left and right (à la third way), and a very different ‘transversal third’ moving ‘through the spectrum’ of left and right (Drochon, 2022: 335). This latter category, Bobbio (1996: 10–11) suggested, could be applied to green parties, though he suspected the left-right dichotomy would ultimately accommodate different kinds of green thinking.

While dubious of the third way claim, Bobbio did recognise a political centre (Bobbio, 1996: 6–8; Drochon, 2022: 334), albeit – I want to suggest – of the centre-left or centre-right variety, at least in practice. For how a centre can be ideationally distinctive from left or right, when considered alongside Bobbio’s egalitarian/inegalitarian divide is a conundrum. It is certainly possible to position oneself between very egalitarian and very inegalitarian poles, yet to locate this position within the world of decision-making and public policy, one would – case-by-case – still be making choices that were measurably more egalitarian or inegalitarian, resulting in a balance characterised as either centre left or centre right. Bobbio hinted as much. In Left and Right, he suggested the inclusive middle option could be understood as ‘the intention. . . of saving whatever can be saved of one’s own position by drawing in the opposing tradition and neutralising it’ (Bobbio, 1996: 9). Tony Blair’s early leadership of New Labour in the UK was widely considered to be an instance of this approach, and in an exchange with Perry Anderson, Bobbio emphasised some egalitarian left concerns of Blair and New Labour (Bobbio, 1998: 84–85).

What Bobbio called the included middle, the pushing away of left and right from the centre, can spark further discussion of another distinction: moderate vs extreme, with a centre pushing extremes to the periphery. On this point, Drochon (2022: 337–338) suggested another metaphor borne from the experience of the French revolutionary period: top/bottom, the Mountain and the Plain, to describe the changing location and extremity of governance. The political dichotomy here, also noted by Dunt and Lynskey (2024: 23) was not left and right, but one of ‘centre/extremes’, which can – at least conceptually – be applied to more contemporary political analysis (Drochon, 2022: 341). A left/right understanding comes ‘only after this centre/extremes antagonism has been settled’ (Drochon, 2022: 333). Bobbio (1996: 78–79) considered similar territory, offering a ‘different attitude to freedom’ as a partnered distinction to the left/right binary, e.g. egalitarian authoritarianism (extreme left) and egalitarian libertarianism (centre left), with the same on the right. For Bobbio (2001: 68), ‘democracy is where extremists do not prevail’, which is why he considered himself a moderate; a defender of pluralist, liberal democratic norms.

What can we draw from this set of arguments regarding the role of ideology, in relation to moderation and centrism? From Giddens, and from Craiutu’s extensive exploration of moderation, we can see an attempt to deprioritise ideologies of left and right relative to other things – be they societal changes, modernity, or the virtues of the moderate lexicon. From Bobbio, we have a questioning of the practicality of moving beyond, or transcending left and right, at least in practice. Bobbio recognised, as with Hindmoor, a political battle for the centre ground, including moves away from extremes of left and right towards positions that are closer together, though not the same. Here, moderation becomes relevant again, in a subjective and highly contingent form. Do interpretations of a centre deaden politics, or does the fight for the centre remain politically meaningful? It is likely a bit of both. Centre-left and centre-right ideologies retain differences, along the lines suggested by Bobbio, but there are subjective standards of ‘sensible’ politics that can act as constraints upon left/right politics. Some of these constraints are short-lived, others more enduring. Centrism as a set of political ideas lacks distinctive political concepts, but it may operate in a less tangible, more contingent space. With an antagonistic posture towards traditions of left and right – at least those embodied in the political context of the centrist actor – the centrist may not be, in practice, moving the centre ground beyond left and right, but instead acting with reduced consideration of what it is to be on the left or right.

Emmanuel Macron: en même temps to Oscillation

There have been a number of phrases and labels attached to Emmanuel Macron’s political career: ‘en même temps’, or ‘at the same time’, which became a much-repeated Macronism in the presidential candidate’s – and then president’s – speeches (Pedder, 2019: 157–158); ‘president of the rich’, an accusation levelled at Macron on the basis of some early economic policy choices as president, notably reforming France’s wealth tax, l’impôt de solidarité sur la fortune (ISF), and introducing a flat tax on capital gains (Chassany, 2017; Pedder, 2019: 191–192; Piketty, 2020: 803); a ‘Jupiterian’ mythology wrapped around his early presidency, seeking to project the grandeur and power of the office (Carrère, 2020: 282–283; Pedder, 2019: 167); and his role as a ‘disruptor’, which aptly describes his effect on French party politics, from his candidacy and election as French president in 2017, to his decision to call snap National Assembly elections in 2024 following the electoral performance of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) in the European Parliament elections of that same year (Fieschi, 2024: 123). All four feature in the analysis that follows, which is focused on interpreting Macron’s (2017: 32) centrism, and his ‘desire to go beyond the conflict between the Left and the Right’.

Macron’s meteoric rise to the top of French politics began while working for the man he would succeed as president. As an economic advisor to François Hollande, who became president in 2012 after winning for the socialist party, Macron worked in the Élysée and was seen as a voice for liberal economic reform in France. Hollande was elected on a left-of-centre platform, including tax increases on high earners, of which Macron was reported to have quipped: ‘Cuba without the sun!’ (The Economist, 2016). Hollande’s presidency soon became unsettled. Economic policy changes and the appointment of Macron as France’s economy minister aimed for a more pro-business posture. Macron was soon talked about – amid Hollande’s struggles – as a popular, free-thinking politician, with liberal-leaning publications highlighting the shared, more centrist politics of Macron and Manuel Valls, who was prime minister at the time (The Economist, 2016). As Macron’s analysis of left and right crystalised – that French politics, and so France, was incapable of reform because of entrenched political positions – he began to consider a politics that offered an exit for ‘centrists’ and liberal reformers from existing party machines (Pedder, 2019: 69). Macron launched En Marche! in April 2016, the organisation that would become his political vehicle to the presidency.

Then entered the circumstance. The centre-right primary process saw François Fillon emerge as the candidate for Les Républicains. Yet Fillon’s early status as the favourite to defeat the incumbent Hollande in the 2017 French presidential election was short-lived, with Fillon’s candidacy engulfed in a financial scandal. Hollande opted not to stand for a second term (a historic decision in itself), amid poor ratings and challenges to his leadership. In the primary process, the Parti Socialiste chose the leftwinger Benoît Hamon over Valls. With the centre-right and centre-left establishments experiencing very different political difficulties, a space opened for Macron. Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen, presidential candidate for the far right, was expected to make the second round of the 2017 vote (Chassany, 2016). Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a left-wing former socialist, would overtake Hamon and also be a contender, having stood in 2012 (Damiani, 2017). Macron’s strategy was to take control of the centre by wooing the left’s more liberal and disenchanted voters (Fieschi, 2024: 116) along with voters from the mainstream right (Herman and Lorimer, 2024: 428). It was sufficient to dynamite the mainstream parties and emerge in the lead in the first round, whereby Macron then defeated Le Pen in the second round with two-thirds of the vote.

Macron’s idiosyncrasy – in terms of his political rise, his politics, his governing style and character – has remained in the context of a tumultuous presidency. His early approval ratings bounced around as Macron got on with implementing economic reforms, overcoming objections or advice to delay. As one of Macron’s senior advisors told the Financial Times, ‘in France, people had gotten used to leaders who would start their term with an audit and end up changing their plans six months later’ (quoted in Chassany, 2018). This emphasis upon speedy delivery collided with a French tradition of political protests in 2018/19 with the ‘gilets jaunes’, or ‘yellow vests’ social movement, which sprang from opposition to increased taxes on fuel. Macron’s tax cuts for the wealthy, and commitment to sustained reductions in corporation tax – policies Macron saw as vital to business investment and growth – positioned these taxes on motorists in a harsh, regressive perspective, in contrast to more progressive alternatives (Fieschi, 2024: 117–118; Piketty, 2020: 668–669). Macron’s approval rating took a nosedive, reaching the low 20s (IFOP/Le Journal du Dimanche, 2025), gradually recovering – after abandoning fuel tax increases and bolstering welfare (Pedder, 2019: xvi) – up to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and further improving as Macron’s approach to economic and social recovery – through French and European spending – appeared to be well-received (Fieschi, 2024: 117; IFOP/Le Journal du Dimanche, 2025).

Les Républicains presented a similar economic policy platform to Macron’s in the 2022 presidential elections (Lorimer and Herman, 2023: 82), struggling for support – suggesting the ideological and electoral space of mainstream French conservatism had been taken by Macron (Ivaldi, 2024a: 81), who won re-election. French politics had become three electoral and ideological spaces: the more ‘radical’ left of Mélenchon’s support base, the far right of Le Pen’s RN, and then Macron (Lorimer and Herman, 2023: 84). Macron’s economic reforms in his first term were geared around liberalising the French economy, and were characterised as both centre right (Hewlett, 2017) and liberal centre left (Pedder, 2019: xix). Into his second term ‘Macron governed as before – with minimal consultation and disregard for dissent’ (Fieschi, 2024: 118), despite having lost his presidential majority in the 2022 National Assembly elections. Economic reforms continued, though the scale of public spending remained problematic in the context of European Union deficit rules. Macron’s recognition that many French citizens voted for him in the second round not to support a mandate, but to prevent a Le Pen presidency, appeared short-lived, with contentious pension reforms – an increase in the retirement age – forced through without a vote; a mechanism used with increased regularity (Bernard, 2023).

As the writer Emmanuel Carrère (2020: 280) noted in an early profile of Macron as president, saying you are neither left nor right can be a sign that a politician is indeed on the right. The literary and cultural theorist Terry Eagleton (2007: 6) once made a similar point about political actors denying they had an ideology. The claim from a centrist political actor making either of these points – beyond left and right, and a denial of ideology – is similar: that existing ideological configurations, or political terminology, do not accurately describe their politics. That is where ideologues, or existing left and right political movements, are inflexible and constrained by tribalism; they – the representatives of a new politics – are unconstrained and able to make progress. As Macron (2017: 34) wrote in his political treatise prior to the 2017 election, ‘our Republic is ensnared in political machinations’. Existing parties of left and right are presented as tired components of a faltering machine, reheating old messages ahead of presidential elections in a faux democratic exercise, all the while gradually strengthening extremists – principally the far right – through a lack of action and the resultant addition of more disgruntled citizens voting for extreme parties. ‘The political class and the media are a band of sleepwalkers’, Macron (2017) wrote, ‘who refuse to see what is coming their way. . . They spout the same points. . . I regard this form of communication as a sickness’.

Macron (2017: 35) wanted a politics that would provide French citizens with ‘direction and vision, and fight this party [the far right] that is manipulating their anger’. Grand plans were the order of the day for Macron, in part to rebut charges of technocracy, in part owing to his belief in the leadership potential of the French presidency and the cultural wishes of French society (Pedder, 2019: 162–164). Second-term Macron still put forward arguments of this kind, despite deep unpopularity. He told The Economist in 2024, ahead of elections to the European Parliament, ‘what kills me, in France as in Europe, is the spirit of defeat. The spirit of defeat means two things: you get used to it and you stop fighting. Politics is Eros versus Thanatos. That’s politics. If Thanatos is hungrier, death wins’ (Macron, 2024). There is undoubtedly rhetorical and emotive potential in this centrist critique of existing party politics, particularly in a political context where existing party establishments do appear tired and incapable of seeing through long-standing objectives. The extent to which this centrist urge to move beyond existing political parties is shared with a key antagonist – populism – has been noted, including in the case of France; so too the many fundamental ideological differences between Macron and Le Pen, from the avowed pro-Europeanism of Macron to Le Pen’s Euroscepticism; Macron’s internationalist outlook to Le Pen’s nationalism (Drochon, 2022: 338–341; Herman and Lorimer, 2024: 429–430; Pedder, 2019: 74–76). There is also a key difference in the critique itself. This is not ‘anti-system’ politics as understood in relation to populism (Arzheimer, 2024). It is almost unashamedly elite-led in proposing to the people that while the tired establishment, and many lazy state institutions are a problem, they can be revolutionised through stronger, liberal democratic leadership – the ‘Jupiterian’ narrative of a powerful leader who knows how to make change happen.

What Macron (2018) called the ‘challenge’ of ‘en même temps’ – ‘at the same time’ – and how it worked in practice is also instructive for understanding centrism. Macron used the phrase to communicate how France – and French politics – needed to achieve better outcomes in two or more issue areas that appeared as trade-offs. For example, France needed more flexibility in its labour market, and a more competitive tax regime, while at the same time it needed to create an economy that did more for ‘those left behind by globalisation’ (Macron, 2018). This approach to resolving dilemmas was hardly new, as with the familiar tools of a liberal enabling state proposed by others around the Macron project (Fabre, 2022). But Macron caught public attention both through repetition – ‘en même temps’ – and a politics that presented centre-right supply-side reforms as reasonable for a country that had become uncompetitive in the global economy, yet still sought a more responsible capitalism through greater global coordination. He stressed that his policies were means and not ends (Macron, 2018). Yet the ends remained unclear (albeit with some recognition of managing inequalities), with success measured by the French public’s acceptance of globalisation as a good.

Here we can consider the centrist claim of moving beyond left and right, which Bobbio (1996: 8) also called a ‘transcended third’. With en même temps, Macron was often interpreted as attempting to bring together ‘the best parts of both left and right’ (Chemin et al., 2024), which Bobbio (1996: 8) understood as not ‘neither. . . nor’ but rather ‘both. . . and’. Rhetorically, this meant reaching for good things – economic competitiveness, no workers left behind – and inferring novelty from the recognition of multiple and (arguably) competing objectives. Yet in practice, these kinds of objectives are rarely completely ignored by either centre-left or centre-right politics. They are goods that competing ideologies suggest can be reached in different ways, proposing a left or right path and opposing each other simultaneously. The distinctiveness of centrism here is not ideological. It is more that if left and right establishments are rejected, the obstructiveness of a dichotomy represented by those establishments – leading to intransigence – will be pushed to one side too. The ideological dilemmas, however, do not disappear. They still require resolution, either through a genuine synthesis or by falling back upon traditions of left and right. For Bobbio (1996: 8–9), the past offered ‘thousands of examples of such third ways’, which he suggested proved ‘fruitless once they are put into practice’. Instead of creating something truly new, attempts at a synthesis lead to the mundane. With Macron, the commitment to ‘synthetic thought’ (Bobbio, 1996: 9) gave way to a recognisable centre-right politics. ‘You’re pursuing a right-wing policy’, former president Hollande reportedly told Macron in the spring of 2024, as they discussed the building of legislative majorities (quoted in Gatinois, 2024), ‘you have to form an alliance with the right’.

Macronism has since been described by Gabriel Attal (2025), who served as prime minister for much of 2024 having been appointed by Macron, and then led Macron’s Renaissance party (the successor name to En Marche! and La Republique En Marche!), as both a ‘method’ and a set of ideas. The method, according to Attal, was principally cross-party working and cross-party coalition building – a much more fluid politics compared to when power moved between the conservatives and the socialists, and reminiscent of the moderate lexicon. The core ideas Attal (2025) listed were pro-Europeanism, liberal (centre-right) economic reforms, being ‘firm’ on security, justice and migration, and concern for the climate. Understood relative to ideological families across western Europe, this set of ideas would be considered centre-right, excepting specific country cases where mainstream conservatism has become much more nationalist and nativist (e.g. the British Conservatives). The distinction made by Attal is an important one. The centrist case is based upon a rejection of left and right establishments, which can lead to a more flexible politics (in terms of cross-party working and ideological switching), but does not lead to being ideationally distinct overall (Macron’s project is recognisably centre-right). One can perceive a sleight of hand on matters ideational, where observers are expecting something more from centrism than it produces in practice.

Following the RN topping the 2024 European Parliament poll, Macron stunned French politics by triggering fresh elections to the National Assembly, seemingly on the assumption the left would struggle to organise themselves, positioning the presidential coalition as the obvious alternative to the far right. Instead, after much political drama, the left coalition topped the second round of voting, further entrenching divisions (Ivaldi, 2024b; Sanchez, 2024), and making 2024 an ‘annus horribilis’ for French politics, according to one analyst (de Royer, 2024). The ‘snap’ elections solidified Macron’s reputation as a disruptor, upturning the legislative political environment with his demand for no politics-as-usual (Fieschi, 2024: 123). A big political question around Macron’s presidency has always been the long-term impact of his disruption. As one Macron advisor said at the start of his first administration, ‘the really scary scenario is that Macron was a one-shot pistol’ (Pedder, 2019: xxv): what happens next? Macron vanquished the traditional centre-right in 2022, with forces to the right of him going to the far right. The successors to Macron’s political space are broadly centre-right contenders (AFP, 2025; LeMonde/AFP, 2025). The centre left is showing some signs of recovery, but the left as a whole is divided. While Macron was the centrism-as-moderation choice in two consecutive presidential election second rounds, ideologically he has not arrived at a distinctive centrist synthesis, beyond left and right (Devellennes, 2024: 24). Macronism has been many things, but above all it has been a strategy for oscillation. Elected on a platform of ambiguous liberalism – with a core of centre-right supply-side reforms and some centre-left rhetoric – Macron spent big during periods of protest and emergency (Chemin et al., 2024). Having reportedly told his advisors during his first term that France was ‘on the right’ (Chemin et al., 2024), Macron’s rightwards turn, notably on migration (Herman and Lorimer, 2024: 431; Ivaldi, 2024a: 81–82), was perhaps to be expected.

Macron has himself used the phrase ‘extreme centre’ to describe the different political ideologies that could be incorporated in a project that is flexible about the means it adopts (Halimi, 2022). If Macron’s rhetoric and earlier positioning is taken seriously, this form of centrism is defined not by distinctive ideas, but a willingness to change and adopt different ideological positions. This oscillating centre is a strategy for managing the ideational environment, rather than introducing a synthesis. If Macron’s earlier catchphrase, en même temps, signalled a project to reconcile apparently clashing objectives, later Macronism appeared to have abandoned it: ‘He [Macron] turned it into ‘one day I appeal to the right or far right and the next to the left’. In the Élysée, they call it triangulation, but it is a betrayal of the original Macronism’, one advisor from Macron’s earlier period argued (quoted in Abboud and Hall, 2024). For the former socialist president, François Hollande, his successor ‘broke’ the political system, but did not build ‘a doctrine’ (quoted in Khalaf, 2023). Instead, Macron ‘will leave a meagre ideological legacy’ (Fieschi, 2024: 117).

Centrism as a Structure for Political Action

In the third part of this paper, I set out a new theory of centrism: centrism as a structure for political action. This theory recognises both the lack of political concepts within centrism and the inclusion of a political strategy which makes centrism an observable phenomenon. Within liberal democracies, centrism offers a strategy for action, but it does so in a political context largely shaped by existing ideologies of left and right, moderate and extreme. In what follows, I continue to refer to examples from contemporary politics, as an aide to explanation. The theory builds upon two key points discussed so far: First, that centrist antagonism towards traditions of left and right privileges ideological flexibility; Second, that a centrist synthesis in political thinking and in political practice has proven to be elusive, highlighting the difference between flexibility and the existence of a distinct set of political ideas. The analysis of Macron’s centrist political project demonstrated the absence of a synthesis, with Macronism characterised as a strategy for oscillation, landing in a recognisably centre-right space overall. Fundamental to centrism is its foundational problematic: that traditions of left and right, understood in the context of an actor’s polity, are a hindrance to change. However, the centrist political case, for now, begins and ends with this critique. It does not move beyond left and right, it oscillates between them, with the frequency and extremity of these moves dependent upon the political judgement of centrist actors: a structure for political action. Furthermore, it is inevitable that, for a politics that operates within existing ideological parameters, outcomes will be recognisably left or right, more egalitarian or more inegalitarian.

From a critique of left and right politics, centrism offers interpretive tools to political actors looking to manage their ideological environment, though they are somewhat intangible. Centrists argue for the necessity of change – of ‘reform’ – as an end in itself (Blair, 2024b: 68), building out from criticism of the political establishment, principally political parties, and a lethargic governing system that accepts indecision (Macron, 2017: 3). A notable centrist restlessness is observable in this regard. Traditional bases of political motivation and action are perceived to be sources of intransigence. Existing political parties and actors, stuck in their ways, are considered inseparably from traditions of left and right. Whether the left or right are wrong because of the institution, or the institution is wrong because it is left or right is not entirely clear – but it is here the centrist seeks to disrupt. Actors located within parties of left and right sometimes discover that change can be painful in terms of ideological compromise. If they fail to act, opting only to argue among themselves, then the dichotomy survives but frustrates the work of change. This is a problem, and for Emmanuel Macron (2017: 32–34), this has been a particular target. Reforms that are ideologically difficult, but could be considered necessary, have become a cause for centrists, because the centrist actor should not – by centrist logic – be hindered by the discomfort of ideological compromise.

An article by Tony Blair, published in Le Monde following Macron’s 2017 election victory, provides a further example of these centrist themes. Blair (2017) suggested that Macron had won ‘on a platform with remarkable ideological clarity: moving beyond old paradigms of left and right’. In so doing, Macron was positioned to deliver the change France, and its people, knew was required; where the electorate had ‘tried all the alternatives’ and now turned to a new politics to make change happen. Blair (2017) offered advice on ‘strategy and tactics’ in the article. While reform was the objective, how to get there could involve being ‘infinitely flexible, combining the toughness of necessary reform with some sweetening to make it achievable’ (Blair, 2017). Taking up the en même temps refrain, Blair (2017) set up political issues that, rather than necessitating trade-offs, could be solved through achieving two objectives at the same time: ‘We need an active government to be on the side of the people displaced by economic change’, he wrote, ‘at the same time as we acknowledge that change will happen and that the promises that it can be stopped are false’. It is clear Blair had an ‘old’ dichotomous response in mind here: a right that lets the market rip, and a left that tells people change does not need to happen. Yet this characterisation of left and right is not the only one that can be made. When applied to many centre-left and centre-right parties across Europe, it appears to be a false dichotomy, more applicable to political extremes.

Macron’s presidency has left little ideological mark upon French politics, though that is not to say a centrist like Macron lacks any values. As one centre-right politician told Le Monde in 2025, ‘Macronism is Macron’ (Segaunes, 2025). There is no distinctively centrist ideological framework, embodied in an ongoing institution, that will follow his presidency (Segaunes, 2025). Macronism is what Emmanuel Macron has opted to do with his political power, over two presidential terms: a pro-European, now recognisably centre-right project, focused on economic reforms, and a more restrictive approach to migration. These are values-based choices, but they are not specifically centrist values. Centrism does not inscribe distinctive political ideas in the process of political action. Instead, the priority is to act, within existing ideological parameters, and without the commitment to ideological traditions that can make compromising on values a difficult, politically fraught judgement for actors firmly rooted within them. Oscillation between left and right is, for the centrist, an intellectually legitimate – if not politically unproblematic – approach to managing politics. Charges of inconsistency – for Macron, the perception of having abandoned the centre-left themes from the early period of his project – are likely.

If this is correct – that was is distinctively centrist here is the urgency and necessity of change, not ideational reconstruction; and that the embrace of shifting ideological identity is an intellectually legitimate way of achieving change – we must return to the centrist claim of moving ‘beyond the conflict between the Left and the Right’ (Macron, 2017: 32). Such rhetoric has long been ambiguous. Looking ahead to the French presidential election of 2027, Gabriel Attal returned to Macron’s insight of ‘overcoming political divides’ rather than ‘a half-hearted synthesis between left and right’ (quoted in Darame and Segaunes, 2025). Not privileging one political party over another in the working of a political system is one thing, but it should not be mistaken for establishing a politics that is beyond left and right. In practice, centrism manages the dilemmas and trade-offs of existing ideological politics. On this point – the claim of a centrist synthesis beyond left and right – there is more than a hint of ‘artificiality’ about centrist politics. The language of centrism suggests a new, distinctive ideational agenda, yet the political practice suggests something more mundane: the political sleight of hand I noted earlier in this article.

Runciman’s (2023: 19) thinking on artificiality helps in further theorising this point. Developing a thought from Hobbes – the state as a Leviathan, an artificial man – Runciman elaborated on how we, as people, created states to act in ways we cannot. States can act more fully, in a coordinated way, with simultaneous decision-making and action. For Runciman, we have done something similar with corporations, though the state retains a specific form of authority. ‘The Leviathan’, Runciman (2023: 38) wrote, ‘inaugurates the world of modern artificial persons in two senses: as an artificial person itself, and as the creator of artificial persons’, the latter being corporations. Artificial agents do not think, people do that, but they do act on the basis of prior thinking, and to far greater effect than human beings (Runciman, 2023). While centrist political actors are not artificial agents, centrism is an artificial ideology. A centrist synthesis has proven – thus far – to be a mirage. The ideological ‘knowledge’ here is preexisting. It is neither overcome nor abandoned. Rather, action is given precedence, and oscillation encouraged to supersede the political establishment. The strategy allows for greater political flexibility, but the ideological forces being managed are the result of an existing ideational environment. Centrist actors give the appearance, through rhetoric, of moving beyond left and right, but they are doing no such thing.

To go beyond left and right – in a meaningful sense – would be to ‘decontest’ ideological dilemmas in a distinctive way, setting out particular understandings of the relationships between substantive political concepts, like liberty and equality (Freeden, 1998, 2020: 20). Centrist projects may be suspicious of ideology, but the critique of left and right includes what is – by most definitions – an ambitious ideological claim: arriving at a synthesis. Analogous with Runciman’s understanding of an artificial agent, an artificial ideology resolves, through non-contestation, what would otherwise be ideological dilemmas around how to balance different conceptions of the good. Centrist strategy deprioritises left and right coherence, clearing a path to more flexible political action. The political actor is not being duped, here. It is not a form of false consciousness. Centrism, avowedly, offers very little in terms of political concepts. Rather, the significance of left and right is deprioritised in a very specific way, where consistency is not privileged, and where ideological compromise – outside of a values core most actors likely retain – is not seen as painful. The political presumption is action, and through strategic oscillation between left and right, different groups – be they voters, economic interests or political elites – can be managed. For how long is an empirical question.

The theory of centrism as a structure for political action can help clarify the term. I have argued that a centrist politics of moving beyond, or transcending left and right is – in practice – a strategy for oscillation between left and right. This is a much more specific definition than is typical when considering centrist politics. In addition to the concepts of centrism I set out earlier, derived from the existing literature – centrism as moderation, and the fight for the political centre – the term centrist is often used in political analysis as a descriptive shorthand: in particular, when comparing political actors to others – opponents or colleagues – perceived as to the left or to the right of centre-left and centre-right actors. Take the 2020 Democratic Party primary process in the United States, for example, and the comparisons between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. Biden was described as ‘more centrist’ than Sanders (Weissert, 2020), meaning he was less left than Sanders. That is, as I said at the start of the article, a relatively uncontentious use of the term (whether one agrees with the ideological analysis or not), so long as it is understood in that way. The theory I present in this article would resist a more contentious interpretation of centrism, one derived from a left critique of centre-left politics: centrism-as-neoliberalism, also used to describe Biden’s politics (Burgis, 2023). This concept of centrism ignores too many differences between centre-left and centre-right politics, including differences of political economy. What became ‘Bidenomics’, with its pro-worker, pro-industrial policy themes, had a recognisably centre-left intellectual architecture and in large part defined Biden’s domestic policy as president (Rodrik, 2024).

It may be that centrism as a structure for political action, as with ideologies and their different levels of commitment, has a ‘gradation of. . . intensity’ (Freeden, 2020: 26). Centrism can be utilised by actors (or indeed one actor, over a career) with different levels of intensity, affecting ideological consistency in markedly different ways. Macron’s willingness to adopt centrism so intensely has led to increased confusion among observers, and a more noticeable artificiality, as political outcomes have diverged from the promises of synthetic politics. Actors who have demonstrated ideological flexibility may see centrist political strategy as a route to action – displaying varying levels of intensity, depending upon their choices. The UK Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, has repeatedly shuffled his combination of centre-left beliefs, and at times oscillated between left and right in government. As I have argued, centrism can ease political decision-making through the non-contestation of long-standing ideological dilemmas. When contradictory demands of a government or political project are made, centrist strategies can provide a way of accommodating them through oscillation. Yet, this approach carries political risks too, as Starmer has discovered (Shrimsley, 2025) and Macron has experienced: confusion about a political project, leading to the possibility of (further) political fragmentation, and – in one ideational sense – a lack of agency. Centrists become managers of an ideological context shaped by others.

Conclusion

As with the relative political terminology of left and right, centrism will always have a multitude of semantic uses, with varying levels of specificity. The aim of this article has been to more clearly define centrism as a set of political ideas – the centre beyond left and right. I have offered a theory – centrism as a structure for political action – that recognises a simultaneous lack of political concepts within centrism and a distinctive political strategy which makes it an observable political phenomenon. Importantly, it reveals that the claim of centrism as something which moves beyond left and right is not accurate. The ideational effect of centrism, so far, is limited. Rather, it is an oscillating centre, that moves between existing ideological parameters, and – in the aggregate – is recognisably centre left or centre right.

As for the long-standing left/right dichotomy, there are some conclusions that can be drawn, particularly if it is understood in the way Bobbio suggested: relatively more egalitarian or more inegalitarian, including on issues like migration. It would be foolish to rule out alternative categories defining politics in the future. Other dichotomies, such as open/closed (Dunt and Lynskey, 2024: 134), or global/nationalist can be read into and alongside left and right, to varying extents in different polities around the world. Whether that will remain the case is an open question. What can be said, for now, is that left and right – as Bobbio argued thirty years ago – still retain meaning. Centrism – as a ‘new’ politics, beyond left and right – has yet to attain significant meaning.