Emmanuel Macron can no longer run for a third consecutive presidential term, but he can still shape the France that will emerge after him. That is why the Élysée Palace’s recent appointments are not merely administrative decisions. They have become part of a much larger political drama.
A year before the 2027 presidential election, Macron is steadily placing allies in key state institutions. These include the Banque de France, the Court of Audit and the Constitutional Council — bodies that do not govern France day to day, but can limit the authority of any future president.
Formally, these decisions remain within presidential powers. France’s political system has always allowed the head of state to shape the upper layer of institutional life. But the context makes the appointments unusually sensitive: the far-right National Rally is entering the 2027 campaign from the strongest position in its history.
As Daycom has previously argued, Macron is trying to do institutionally what he can no longer easily do electorally: protect the center through inertia rather than mobilization. If voters choose a more radical course, the state’s key organs will still be partly configured to slow abrupt turns.
The most visible decision is the nomination of Emmanuel Moulin to lead the Banque de France. He has a strong financial background, experience in state administration and, most recently, the role of Macron’s chief of staff. It is precisely this combination of professional suitability and personal proximity to the president that makes the appointment politically charged.
The central bank is neither a party headquarters nor a ministry, but its role in the French state goes well beyond a technical mandate. It carries financial credibility, the connection to the European Central Bank, the discipline of public debt and the signal France sends to markets. For a future president, it is not a decorative institution but a center of economic weight.
No less revealing is the appointment of Amélie de Montchalin to head the Court of Audit. A former budget minister now leads the body responsible for scrutinizing public spending and assessing the quality of governance. Critics see a risk to independent oversight; supporters see someone who understands the state’s finances from the inside.
The most politically charged case remains Richard Ferrand. One of Macron’s earliest allies and a former president of the National Assembly became head of the Constitutional Council. His appointment passed by the narrowest of margins and immediately raised the question of where the line lies between experience in government and political loyalty.
The Constitutional Council could become a central institution if a future far-right president tries to change the rules through referendums, migration restrictions or a rebalancing of power between the executive and Parliament. It is here that Macron’s appointments stop looking like rewards for allies and start to resemble a system of safeguards.
The far right already portrays these moves as an attempt to lock the state before a possible transfer of power. For Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, that is a useful argument: they can present Macron not as a defender of republican institutions, but as a president trying to extend his influence beyond his mandate.
Yet that criticism has a weak point. Independent institutions exist precisely so that those in power cannot instantly rewrite the country in their own image. If a future president treats any form of oversight as an obstruction of the people’s will, the clash between electoral legitimacy and legal limits will become the central drama of French politics.
Macron is acting at a moment when the old system for containing the far right no longer works automatically. The “republican front” that for decades kept extreme forces away from the highest office has weakened. Voters have grown used to the National Rally’s presence, business circles are more cautiously treating it as a possible governing force, and the center has lost its monopoly on responsibility.
That is why Macron’s personnel strategy looks both rational and alarming. Rational, because the president is using legal tools to preserve the continuity of the state. Alarming, because the very need for this kind of reinforcement shows how fragile France’s political balance has become.
There is also a personal dimension. Macron is still under 50, and the French Constitution bars him only from a third consecutive term, not from returning later. In theory, he could run again in 2032. Every major appointment today therefore carries a double meaning: protecting the state after him and preserving space for a future return.
But institutional sealing has limits. Neither the Constitutional Council, nor the central bank, nor the Court of Audit can replace political trust. If a majority of French voters chooses a radical shift, overly visible safeguards may only deepen the feeling that elites are protecting themselves from the electorate.
That is Macron’s central dilemma. He wants to leave France strong enough to absorb a possible political shock. But the more actively he places allies inside independent institutions, the easier it becomes for his opponents to speak of a closed republic afraid of its own people.
France is entering the pre-election year with a strange balance: the president is weakening electorally while still strengthening institutionally; the far right is gaining political force but may face a state not built for rapid revolutions; the center is losing its electoral shine while trying to leave behind a mechanism of restraint.
This is not a guarantee against a Le Pen or Bardella victory. Nor is it proof of a conspiracy against the future choice of French voters. It is, rather, Macron’s last major gesture as president: an attempt to ensure that France remains governable after him, even if its political direction changes sharply. The real stake is not holding power. It is holding the state together.
