That was the atmosphere on the streets of Paris on the night of the first round. The Trocadéro, overlooking the Eiffel Tower, was occupied not by enthusiastic political activists but by tired partygoers who left the building littered with broken glass. The only detritus of the election were a huge “Zemmort 2022” tag (a contraction of Zemmour and the French word for death) and the occasional trampled campaign flier.

Even the presence of Le Pen in the run-off for a second time did not worry the locals, a stark contrast with 2002, when Marine’s father, Jean-Marie, made the second round and jolted the French youth into organising mass demonstrations against the threat of a far-Right presidency. This is the real story of the 2022 election so far. We are witnessing a phantom campaign.

Another striking example of the exceptional disinterest in this year’s campaign: TF1, France’s oldest and most popular TV channel, decided to broadcast the hilarious medieval time-travel movie Les Visiteurs at 10 pm, only two hours after the announcement of the official results. It was the earliest that the channel had ever cut away from its election debrief.

The impression of apathy is backed empirically. Of registered citizens, 26% abstained, the highest number since 2002. 68% found the election “uninteresting”, according to the pollster Ipsos. A month before the first round, “tiredness” was the strongest emotion associated with the election.

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Away from the verbal provocations of Zemmour, the electoral platforms this year were uniformly bland. Even the relatively lacklustre 2017 campaign entertained radical ideas like universal income, enormous public-sector spending cuts, and a potential French exit from the EU. Large-scale rallies, normally essential rites of passage for presidential candidates, were virtually absent from the last few weeks.

The election also suffered dearly from the absence of its main candidate, President Macron. The incumbent announced his campaign a mere four weeks before the vote and held one major rally before the run-off. He declined to show up for any of the debates with the other candidates, largely because he did not want to be reduced to their level at a time when the war in Ukraine imbued him with international stature. His platform was purposefully modest. It focused on Macron’s strongest attribute: his experience.

This lack of public interest in the election — and with it, the lack of any serious debate about the country’s future — will weigh heavily on the French Republic’s health. More than in any other European country, the French President commands immense executive power. He can fire his Prime Minister at will and call early parliamentary elections with virtually no restrictions. And unlike his American counterpart, he cannot be impeached.

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The French psyche is perhaps even more important than France’s institutional landscape. For all the mythology around France decapitating her king, the French have never broken completely from their long monarchic past. De Gaulle, when he founded the Fifth Republic, made it explicitly clear that he was building a “synthesis” between France’s monarchic and republican traditions — one that would give the president considerable power.

Macron has often used the symbolism of the monarchy for political purposes. In 2017, weeks after his election, he hosted Vladimir Putin at the Palace of Versailles, and twice during his term he used his constitutional right to give a speech in Versailles to the Congress in an apparent attempt to develop a French version of the United States’ ‘State of the Union’ address. Before he became President, he said of French politics that “we are missing a king”.

The French presidential election has replaced the coronation ceremony as the symbolic centre of French politics. This means, however, that the présidentielles must be a moment of democratic catharsis. Here is the occasion for France’s electorate to wrestle with all of its frustrations and desires. Debate and political conflict reach new heights, families and friends weigh on the various campaign pledges, and tempers sometimes get out of hand. All topics must be on the table because once the presidential ship has sailed, the opposition parties have few institutional means to steer public policy.

None of that is happening in 2022. And the lack of this ritual catharsis will have profound ripple effects. The next president will lack a strong mandate to implement his (or her) vision. Macron announced mezza voce that he would increase the legal retirement age from 62 to 65, but he has done little legwork in his campaign to get the French on board with this policy. Given France’s long tradition of strikes and Macron’s incapacity to pass a milder pension reform in his first term, this reform could well be political dynamite.

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The 2017 campaign was also underwhelming, albeit to a lesser extent. In its late stages, it was largely highjacked by the centre-Right candidate François Fillon’s financial scandals, which sidelined substantive debate over other issues. Strikingly, in a country that had been recently rocked by a series of high-profile jihadist attacks, the issues of political Islam and what would later be coined “separatism” were largely secondary, as was the question of climate change.

As a result, France wound up electing a president, Macron, that it did not really know. This came back to haunt Macron, who soon discovered that he lacked a mandate for much of his governing agenda. On questions of Islam and identity, for instance, Macron ran a campaign in 2017 that embraced the traditional multiculturalism of the centre-Left. He praised German Chancellor Angela Merkel for welcoming over one million refugees in 2015 and provoked many conservatives by stating that there was “no such thing as French culture, there is a culture in France and it is diverse”. In the aftermath of Brexit and Trump, he was heralded by the liberal international media as the new internationalist champion to slay populist dragons.

This very New Labour stance on identity did not hold. In a blend of tactical triangulation and real concern about France’s unity, Macron, once in office, steered sharply to the Right on immigration and identity. He gave a 12-page interview to the staunchly Right-wing magazine Valeurs Actuelles in which he echoed many of its concerns on immigration, and his minister of the interior, Gérald Darmanin, a former Nicolas Sarkozy ally, even called Le Pen “soft” when she argued that jihadism had nothing to do with Islam. Many of his Left-wing supporters in Parliament abandoned him in response to this about-face.

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But it was the issue of environmentalism that led to Macron’s first real setback in November 2018. Increasingly resentful rural French, who felt condescended to by a president who was accumulating a series of insensitive gaffes (including telling someone to “cross the road to find a job”), finally revolted when Macron went along with a scheduled green tax on diesel. Thousands of Gilets Jaunes rose up across the country, occupied roundabouts, and headed to Paris to manifest their profound discontent.

Macron undeniably paid for 40 years of governmental disinterest for what Christophe Guilluy has called “peripheral France”, but he also suffered from the lack of cathartic debate over his policies, including his green pledges. Although the French state was eventually able to repress the riots and protests, the Gilets Jaunes represented an outburst of revolutionary anger against the system. Denied a proper debate over the direction of their country, many ordinary people felt that taking to the streets was their only option.

So while over the next few days all eyes will be on the genuine, albeit still somewhat hypothetical, risks of a Le Pen presidency, the real poison for French democracy might already be in its veins. In 2017, the pollster Brice Teinturier published the prophetic “Plus Rien à faire, Plus rien à foutre” (don’t care, don’t give a damn), in which he demonstrated that 40% of French citizens were disappointed with French politics, 13% angry, 20% disgusted, 9% indifferent. Only 18% expressed positive emotions. Teinturier even hinted that anger might be preferable to apathy, because angry citizens still want to believe in a cause. Apathetic citizens have given up.

Assuming that Macron is indeed re-elected, France’s monarchical republic will give him all of the power he needs to muscle his agenda through the country’s institutions. But, after the experience of his first term, we should all be concerned that the French Republic will pay dearly for this year’s phantom campaign.

On paper, it seems like a straightforward political win. ENA is France’s most prestigious seat of higher education; an officer-training school for senior civil servants which has produced many leading politicians and (more rarely these days) captains of industry. In terms of its preservation of the elite, the closest British comparison might be Eton and Oxford — combined.

Indeed, when General Charles de Gaulle created ENA in 1945, his primary aim was to train a new, meritocratic elite, to replace the social elite whom he believed had betrayed France in 1940. By the 1990s, however, ENA was accused of a new form of betrayal: the creation of a self-perpetuating oligarchy which prevented more practical or inventive talent from rising in the French system.

Since then, the destruction of ENA has become a theme of French politics. The school has been constantly reformed, reduced in size and moved from Paris to Strasbourg. In fact, the all-powerful ENA of legend probably ceased to exist years ago. And yet it has remained a symbol of a know-it-all, elitist French state, with President Macron as its most perfect manifestation.

Macron graduated from ENA in 2004. A dozen years later he became President of the Republic. Laurent Fabius took only 11 years from graduation to become Socialist prime minister (1984-6). Jacques Chirac was an énarque. So was Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, François Hollande and more than a third of the prime ministers of the Fifth Republic.

And yet despite its reputation, ENA is not fee-paying. In theory, it’s open to people of all backgrounds: the 80 students in each year class are paid a salary by the state. Entry is based on tough exams after two years of “prépas” (preparatory courses). Once they’re in, the 80 students are graded from 1 to 80, with those in the top 15 — the “botte” or boot — admitted directly into a kind of praetorian guard of the French civil service, les grand corps, when they graduate. They are guaranteed a senior job and salary for life. (For what it’s worth, Macron came 5^th in his year.)

Although theoretically a place of learning, ENA is actually a place of permanent examination — of stress-testing — rather than education. An ENA graduate once told me: “You learn nothing… It’s a system for grading you, for deciding how well you will cope with the kinds of problems that might be thrown at you.” Another well-known product of ENA in the late 1980s told me: “It was a machine for discovering how flexible your spine was. If it wasn’t flexible, you didn’t do well in the final classification.”

The Covid crisis offers evidence both for and against the ENA effect. France has got many things wrong during the last year, partly because its administrative culture is so ponderous and averse to risk. And yet, on the other hand, its state-funded economic support programme has been exemplary and much copied (including by Britain). That was shaped by Macron (ENA 2002-4), his then Prime Minister Edouard Philippe (ENA 1995-7) and most of all by his finance minister, Bruno Le Maire (ENA 1996-8).

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Even so, ENA remains shorthand for the gulf between a struggling rural and inner suburban France and the administrative, political classes who are viewed as too abstract and too arrogant to grasp the harsh realities of daily life. Macron’s decision to suppress ENA from June and replace it with another smaller college, the Institut du service public or ISP, therefore made political sense.

Stymied by the pandemic, it is the only high-profile reform he can realistically offer before the presidential election next spring. Not that it hasn’t been a long time coming; Macron promised the death of ENA during the Gilets Jaunes’s rural and suburban revolt against the elite in 2018-9. But doing it now fits in with Macron’s wider campaign to seem less arrogant and aloof, along with his apology for failing to grasp sooner the need for a rapid roll-out of Covid vaccines. Destroying ENA in its present form also fits the original Macroniste offer and vision from 2017 of making France a land of opportunity — a can-do, start-up country where top jobs in government are open to clever young people from forgotten rural France and the struggling, multi-racial banlieues.

Though hardly reported, Macron has made other advances in that direction in recent months. Two policies have been introduced to fight social and racial discrimination and allow capable young people from rural or suburban backgrounds to climb the ladder more rapidly in state jobs. In other words, the suppression of ENA will be deployed in Macron’s election campaign next spring as a way of saying: “I have started to open up and change France for the better. The pandemic got in the way — so give me more time to complete the job.”

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In truth, however, abolishing ENA is more like a burial than a murder. The school has ceased in recent years to be the ultimate pinnacle of ambition for hyper-clever, young 20-somethings in France. “ENA was once the place you had to go to prove yourself and to be sure of success. No more,” one 2016 graduate told me. “Young people now strive to go to the HEC (the top French business school) or Polytechnique (the elite engineering college). They used to ‘do ENA’ afterwards. Now they want to go to McKinsey or to Silicon Valley and then come back to France to start their own business.”

Another recent student said that he had learned since graduating that ENA no longer has the same mystique within the French political and administrative system. Ministries, he said, were turning to the big consultancy firms, such as McKinsey, to make the strategic decisions that énarques once made. “Macron’s decision fits this pattern, I fear. It’s part of a trend that’s been going on for several years to downgrade the importance of the senior French administration, to move away from a specifically French approach to French problems and become more international. In the long run, I think that’s something France will regret.”

Is it still the case that, as I was told, you “learn nothing at ENA”?

“That’s certainly true of the 18 months you spend within the walls of ENA itself in Strasbourg, yes,” said my first source. “In the preparatory courses, you learn things. In the two six-month placements in France and abroad, you learn a great deal. But once you’re in Strasbourg, you are incessantly tested and, I would say, taught only that to succeed you must conform.”

The former student, who asked not to be named, was an atypical énarque, the only one in his year who came from a working-class family. “ENA was my dream from the age of 16,” he said. “It was the way I thought I could succeed in life. When I got there, I detested the place. Why? Because the whole ENA approach is detestable.”

After working for several years in government, he left to start his own business. My other informant still works in government but has started to build a political career for himself in the provinces because, he says, “being an énarque no longer helps you so much as all that”.

And so Macron’s decision is not the revolution that he claims — it is more like a recognition of changes that are already happening. Its replacement’s college will be housed in the same building and will have many of the same teachers. Perhaps the most obvious difference is that there will be only 40 students, not 80; hardly a sign that it will be more open.

How they will be selected is still unclear, possibly by high achievement in relation to their social background, rather than just by competitive exam. This approach has already been tried with some success at “Science-Po”, France’s “political university” which sends many of its graduates to ENA. The numbered classification will remain but the top 15 graduates will no longer enter the praetorian ranks of the state service directly. They will have to prove themselves in more lowly work for five years first.

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But will replacing the ENA alone help France to become the land of opportunity that Macron promises? Hardly. France has a baffling system of “first and second divisions” in higher education which will remain largely intact. State university courses, medicine and law apart, are inexpensive, easy to reach but extremely variable in quality. And clever students from well-off families aspire instead to go to a separate archipelago of state-run Grandes Ecoles, like Polytechnique, or to private, fee-paying business schools, like HEC. To reach them, two years of preparatory classes are needed.

Replacing ENA might remove the topmost pinnacle of the mountain. But for the great majority of French youngsters, the slopes to success will remain as forbiddingly steep as ever.