If we were to pick a date when the long unwinding of France’s party system began, it would likely be May 29, 2005. A much-awaited constitution for the then-rapidly expanding European Union was put to the test of a referendum. The country’s two dominant parties—the center-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP, now known as the Republicans) and the center-left Socialist Party—came together to support the proposed constitution. This bipartisan unity was immortalized by the joint appearance on the front cover of Paris Match of UMP’s Nicolas Sarkozy and the Socialist leader François Hollande, both calling for the treaty’s ratification. Despite the near universal support of the country’s political and media establishment, however, the fiercely fought campaign ended in a resounding victory for the “no” side, which won with nearly 55 percent of the vote.

The pursuit of a European constitution would only pick up again in 2009, with the passage of the Lisbon Treaty. When it came for ratification, however, Sarkozy, then president, bypassed a popular referendum and passed the treaty by a simple vote of parliament.

The 2005 referendum debate set the tone for the politics of the subsequent decade. The “yes” vote was sold as an embrace of globalization and openness—an endorsement of a modern France committed to the European project. That the “no” campaign boasted such supporters as Marine Le Pen of the hard-right National Front and Philippe de Villiers, a celebrity figure on the nationalist fringe, enabled the easy narrative that any and all criticism of European unification was tantamount to xenophobia and proto-fascism. Little did it matter that the opposition counted a number of establishment politicians, from conservatives fearful of losing national sovereignty, to Socialist Party leaders who saw in the proposed constitution a vast democratic deficit. They saw a potential threat to social harmony across the union: a blank check for labor deregulation and free-market reform.

Twelve years later, as France prepares for the first round of a presidential election next week, the political debate has largely clung to these terms. They have gained even greater resonance in the aftermath of the Great Recession, which, combined with vicious austerity policies dictated by Germany, plunged France, along with much of Europe, into sustained economic misery. (France’s unemployment rate remains at a staggering 10 percent.) Hollande, whose center-left government succeeded Sarkozy’s in 2012, bears a fair share of the blame, especially given the fact that Hollande campaigned on renegotiating the very treaties that Sarkozy ratified without popular consultation.

In the vacuum created by the crisis of the two establishment parties, a former Socialist economy minister and radical centrist, Emmanuel Macron, has seized the mantle of modernization and reform, hoping to reaffirm France’s faith in European integration and push through substantial supply-side economic policies. The backers of Macron across French, European, and American media—“Macron-mania,” as it’s rightly called, is an international phenomenon—could find no better foil than Marine Le Pen. Known for her smoldering denunciations of globalization and multiculturalism, she stands for everything that Macron does not.