Ten years ago, Roland Lescure quit a high-flying finance job in Canada to answer Emmanuel Macron’s call for an economic and political revolution in France. The banker was lured back to his homeland by the opportunity to turn back the rising tide of the far right and hand the next generation of leaders a pro-European, business-friendly bastion.

“I was 50 and I had my mid-life of crisis,” Lescure, Macron’s fourth finance minister, said in an interview. “Some people change lives, some people change country, I just decided to change course and join the political movement.”But when Macron makes way for a successor next year, the movement will be effectively over. The revolution couldn’t crack France’s ambivalent relationship to capitalism. After a decade of political missteps and global cataclysms that made government spending his go-to solution, popular anger is rising, growth is sinking, debt is soaring and investors are dumping French assets in a global bond market rout that has made it the euro area’s weakest economic link.

Lescure is now leading a rearguard action to preserve what’s left of Macronomics, a campaign that gave way in the president’s second term to a struggle for political survival and made the reform agenda an afterthought. The last battle will be joined in the coming weeks when the minority government seeks to push through a budget that at least changes the narrative for money managers who now demand more interest to buy French bonds than Italian debt.

A credible financial plan may do little to stop the bleeding since candidates with momentum in polls ahead of next year’s presidential vote — Marine Le Pen on the far right and Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the far left — have pledged to reverse Macron’s reforms. Mélenchon promises an even more radical U-turn with calls to cancel some of France’s debt.

The messy end of Macron’s decade of economic management stands in stark contrast to his political ambition of turning France into the powerhouse of a retooled Europe with the heft to stand for itself as Donald Trump undermines NATO from within. Russia’s war on the continent’s doorstep and the danger of getting squeezed between the US and China have only raised the stakes for the EU’s second-largest economy against the populist wave that threatens to overtake what’s left of the post-World War II order.

“I’m not one of the ones who say, you know, populism is not an issue — it’s a massive issue,” Lescure says. A Le Pen presidency “would raise questions about the place of France in Europe, it would probably raise questions about the place of Europe in the world, and I think would destroy value when, with difficulties, we’ve created some.”Raised by a communist journalist and trade union official in the working-class Paris suburb of Montreuil, Lescure was in the value-creation business before becoming a protagonist in Macron’s pro-business makeover.

A graduate of France’s elite Ecole Polytechnique and the London School of Economics, the then-50-year-old was the chief investment officer of a Canadian pension-fund manager, Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec, when he ran for the National Assembly in Paris.

His return from an eight-year Canadian sojourn started well. He won a seat representing overseas citizens, joining Macron’s large parliamentary majority stuffed with political neophytes itching to apply their technical expertise and business acumen to policy making. Lescure took a leading role as chairman of the economic affairs committee.

“You need to be able to produce wealth in order to be able to distribute it,” he says. “To finance this, you need to create growth, you need to create prosperity.”With the tailwinds of economic growth above 2%, falling unemployment and the narrowest budget deficit in a decade, Macron pushed through the changes he’d promised including further loosening of labor laws and cuts to corporate taxes.

Lescure was appointed rapporteur of a bill known as PACTE — “Macronomics in practice,” he calls it — that set out to support entrepreneurship by “redefining the place of business in society in order to better involve workers.”The array of measures including state asset sales and rules to boost union representation on boards were prepared by duos of lawmakers and business leaders. But even before final passage of legislation, a major crack opened.

In November 2018, a proposed carbon tax on fuel triggered what came to be known as the Yellow Vest protests. They spiraled into a nationwide backlash against the cost of living and the president’s pro-business stance and gave the opposition on both the right and left a cudgel they have not stopped swinging.

“Supply-side economics spells guaranteed ruin for society,” said Mélenchon at the time. Le Pen decried the “downward mobility” that Macron’s policies were fostering and demanded the taxes be dropped.

The political miscalculation of voter appetite to pay for climate policies proved costly as the government ended up spending more than €10 billion ($11.3 billion) in tax breaks and bonuses for low-income workers in a bid to restore calm.

“To be fair, nobody felt it then,” Lescure says. “The presidency didn’t see it coming, oppositions didn’t see it coming. And that’s what’s hard when you’re a politician, to stay in contact with the real world with people on the ground, and to try to understand the fear and angst of people.”Macron had little time to recenter on his core economic reforms before Covid hit. The president’s response would mark a stark policy deviation as his order to support the economy “whatever-the-cost” saw the state spend vast sums to finance idled businesses and furloughed workers.

Thespending wasn’t much different from European peers, but he failed to turn off the spigot fast enough. Less than two years later, the president again ramped up spending to support households as energy prices rose and then surged when Russia invaded Ukraine.

Over three years from 2020, state auditor has totaled around €190 billion of crisis and stimulus spending linked to the Covid pandemic. In a later report, it estimated gross spending during the energy crisis at €72 billion (more than a year of defense spending), including almost €8 billion in untargeted subsidies at the pump.

The cash helped Macron fend off Le Pen’s challenge in the presidential vote in 2022, but he lost his majority in parliament.

By now, even insiders complained there was little sign of an ambitious agenda beyond stripped down pension reform that would rely on making people work longer rather than a root-and-branch overhaul.

“We didn’t really have a conversation about anything much more than, you know, there’s war at the edge of Europe,” Lescure says. “It was a bit of a default election where, you know, I think French people picked the guy that felt was best to handle the international situation.”France’s public finances and Macron’s political capital have not recovered. The president’s attempt to regain control over policy making with snap elections in 2024 made matters worse, returning a parliament that twice forced prime ministers to resign and delayed efforts to repair finances.

Amid the struggle for political survival, the killer blows to Macronomics have come in budgets for 2025 and 2026. Lescure is active on multiple fronts, defending pro-business policies, fending off a clamor for wealth taxes, and trying to rein in runaway of welfare spending.

Lescure is convinced Macronomics will have an enduring legacy. He highlights a better functioning labor market with more people employed than ever before, a still booming “start-up nation,” and economic growth that — measured over the decade — is surpassed only by Spain among major European countries. He says Macron’s leadership in crises from Covid to Ukraine has also cemented the idea that “France without Europe is not much, but that Europe without France is not much either.”Yet the losses have mounted.

Last year, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu suspended Macron’s pension reform and extended what was meant to be a one-off tax on large firms to convince opposition groups not to topple him in no-confidence votes of fiscal plans.

“Raising taxes on corporations at a time where growth is a challenge is never a happy move,” Lescure said. “It was important to find a political way to stability, and we did, but at a cost.”The final budget battle is the messiest yet as investors lose confidence in France’s capacity to address its fiscal difficulties, sparking a rout on bond markets that has driven the country’s borrowing costs to higher levels than seen at any point doing the euro crisis.

Lescure has proposed unusually sharp spending cuts including unpopular freezes to public sector wages and some pensions. But to get back on track with fiscal repair, he has also extended at least part of the one-off tax on big companies as well as closing other allowances and exemptions. The presidential election may deal the killer blow to Macron’s project.

Le Pen, riding high in the polls, hasn’t detailed her economic program. But she’s branded her plans as a new choice for society that would include undoing pension reforms to allow workers to retire as young as 60. The criticism from her National Rally party is unequivocal: “It is impossible to do worse than you,” RN lawmaker Jean-Philippe Tanguy said at a finance committee meeting last week. “You’ve failed at everything, you’ve ruined everything.”Mélenchon promises massive tax increases for business and the wealthy and sharply higher wages. He has dominated much of the economic debate in recent weeks with a proposal to wipe out or freeze France’s debts held by the central bank.

Asked if he will run for reelection to the National Assembly, Lescure says his 10 years is a “long stand” but he’s “not ruling out not running.”

“I’m convinced that when the dust settles, one year from now, two years from now, maybe five years from now,” he says, “people will realize how much France has changed over the last 10 years.”