The French Election

Ten days to go and we're maybe a little nervous.

Cosmopolitan Globalist Arun Kapil offers a typically excellent analysis of the state of the race:

Arun Kapil, Paris

Ten days to go and I’m feeling unsettled, indeed anxious. Since this campaign began—whenever one wants to date that—it has been a foregone conclusion that Emmanuel Macron would win a second term on April 24th, easily defeating Marine Le Pen, and certainly Eric Zemmour if he somehow made it to the second round. There was a Valérie Pécresse boomlet after she unexpectedly won the LR primary in December—and with her looking to pose a serious threat to Macron if she overtook Marine LP and Zemmour to qualify for the run-off—but that was short-lived. And with Macron’s poll numbers spiking after Vladimir Putin launched his war against Ukraine, his re-election looked to be a done deal. On March 14th I did an hour-and-fifteen-minute phone interview on the election with the Paris correspondent of the Australian newspaper The Age, and of the ten words of mine that made it into the article that appeared five days later was me asserting that “Macron’s gonna win this thing.” When I saw that line I winced, as I would have said no such thing had I been interviewed at that moment.

The fact is, Macron does not have this thing locked up. He remains the favorite but there is a very real possibility that Marine Le Pen—his very likely April 24th opponent—could win, as one may see in yesterday’s Elabe poll above. We’ve never seen a mere five point spread between Macron and MLP—and the poll is not an outlier, as IFOP is presently showing a 53-47 EM-MLP second round outcome. Smart commentators are sounding the alarm; e.g., Thomas Legrand—one of the two best political analysts in the French broadcast media—who matter-of-factly observed in his France Inter editorial on Tuesday (in French) that “Marine Le Pen can win this presidential election,” and with this Tuesday’s segment of France 5’s (excellent) late evening talk show ‘C ce soir’—which will surely be terminated in the nightmarish event that Mme Le Pen comes to power (as France Inter likely will too, BTW)—taking up the theme, “2022: the year of the extreme right’s victory?” And now the other best political analyst, Jean-Michel Aphatie, has titled his LCI commentary this evening, “yes, Le Pen can win.”

There has been a change in the race over the past two weeks, as Ukraine has settled in as a routine daily news story and with the media now focusing primarily on the election campaign. Through most of the winter, Le Pen, Zemmour, and Pécresse were all bunched together in the mid-high teens in the polls, with any of them a plausible second-place finisher on April 10. But then Zemmour started to drop into the low teens and was followed by Pécresse, who has run a truly bad campaign, adopting the far right, lepeniste rhetoric on the “four I” issues (immigration, identity, insécurité, Islam), which is what the LR base wants to hear, while striving to stave off defections by moderately conservative LR voters—not to mention high-profile LR politicos—to Macron, who is now firmly anchored on the center-right. The impossible triangulation. I attended Pécresse’s February 13 rally at the Zénith (I was in the overflow hall nearby), which was already seen as her make-or-break moment; and she broke it. It was a dud, on both form (amateurish production values) and substance (again, the impossible triangulation, and by one who is not a great orator to begin with). She’ll be lucky to finish in fourth place on April 10th.

As for Zemmour, if I were conspiracy theory-minded I would wonder if his candidacy weren’t a ruse to make Marine Le Pen look moderate, as that is precisely what he has done. His pathological rhetoric on the “four Is” is so virulent and extreme that it makes even Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National of the 1990s—when the FN was at its most demonized—look almost moderate by comparison. In the political history of modern France, Zemmour is simply off the map on these issues for a candidate with his notoriety and ability to pull in the crowds (30 to 40,000 at the Trocadéro last Sunday). And as the most Putinophile of the Russia-supporting and apologizing candidates, his poll numbers took a hit with the Russian invasion and his initial objection to France welcoming Ukrainian refugees. Even hardcore Zemmour fans don’t have a problem with refugees or migrants if they’re white and Christian. Until the third week of February I was opining that with Macron reelected and Le Pen and Pécresse having bitten the dust, Zemmour would be well-placed to reconstitute the extreme and hard right—“la droite nationale”—into a bloc and assume its leadership going forward to 2027. I’m less confident in that prediction now.

Marine Le Pen no longer has to worry about being overtaken by Zemmour or Pécresse. There is a consensus across the board that she has led a smart, effective campaign and largely succeeded in “dedemonizing” herself and her renamed Rassemblement National. With Zemmour the lightening rod on the issue, Marine has downplayed immigration, even taking pains to repeat that while she is opposed to “Islamism,” she has nothing against Islam as a religion, whereas Zemmour incessantly equates the two. And in appropriating the RN’s more middle class and bourgeois voters—and adopting an economically libéral (smaller state, lower taxes) rhetoric as a consequence—Zemmour has done MLP a favor of sorts in enabling her to focus her message on the couches populaires; i.e., the middling and working classes (and former Gilets Jaunes among them), notably on the cost of living issue—by far the nº 1 for French voters at the moment—and promise active state intervention to protect her voters’ actual and potential standard of living at a time of rising inflation, and now war, in Europe. She has been accused by more than one of sounding like a leftist, and though Zemmour calling her an “economic socialist” will hardly discourage his bourgeois libéral supporters from voting for her against Macron in the second round, it may well encourage a sizeable number of Macron-hating Jean-Luc Mélenchon voters to go for her on April 24. As for MLP’s longtime Putinophilia, she’s been avoiding the subject, hoping that it will go down the memory hole, and her supporters don’t care in any case.

Marine LP has also succeeded in softening her personal image, posting photos on Instagram of her with her cats, showing her emotional side, and even tearing up on live television when speaking of her father. De quoi faire pleurer dans les chaumières. And, as it happens, she attracts the second highest level of “sympathie” among the twelve presidential candidates in the latest Ipsos presidential baromètre (Macron is first; poor Anne Hidalgo is dead last).

If Marine Le Pen is closing the gap with Emmanuel Macron, it is also due to the latter’s campaign, or absence of one. With Ukraine and France’s presidency of the Council of the European Union as an alibi, Macron has kept his campaigning to a minimum, adopting much the same posture as President de Gaulle did in the 1965 presidential election. Jupiter above the fray. But Macron is no de Gaulle, loin s’en faut, and rather lacks the charismatic hold that the latter had over a large number of Frenchmen and women. He also lacks a political party worthy of the name—to call La République en Marche an empty shell would be an understatement—or surrogates who are not second-rate hacks (e.g. Christophe Castaner, Richard Ferrand). And then there’s Macron’s congenital arrogance and seeming inability to connect with “ordinary people,” or lording it over them when he tries to, which one sees time and again when he goes out to meet les vrais gens. One of the questions asked in the Ipsos presidential poll is if the candidate “understands the problems of people like yourself.” Macron is at 27 percent, with Marine LP topping it at 46 percent.

As for a rationale for his reelection, Macron has yet to provide one, though profiting from his post-Ukraine spike in the polls—and assuming that reelection was in the bag—he suddenly pulled socially regressive measures out of a hat, notably raising the retirement age to 65 and suggesting that a work requirement might be introduced for beneficiaries of the RSA. His overall economic record hasn’t been too bad, it should be said—though my friend Guillaume Duval would beg to differ—and unemployment has indeed fallen. Fortunately for Macron, most people have forgotten the inept management of the Coronavirus pandemic during its first year.

A new, potentially crippling scandal for Macron has erupted over the past week, involving the McKinsey consulting firm. Not a good moment for an affaire d’État.

The one thing that could save us from a potentially calamitous Macron-Le Pen face-off is an admittedly unlikely, though not impossible, late surge into second place by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose polling numbers have been inching upwards into the mid teens. My detestation of JLM is well known, though I have been hoping for him to overtake MLP, to both spare us the dreaded rematch—and the dangers that that involves—and offer the electorate a real left-right debate, which Macron does not at all want to have, as not only is JLM a redoubtable debater but Macron would be forced to clearly situate himself on the right. No more en même temps. Macron would win reelection handily—personally speaking, I would certainly vote blanc or nul in such a contest—but at least the left would go into the June legislative elections in a stronger position.

The moderate left candidates Yannick Jadot (ecologist) and Anne Hidalgo (PS) absolutely do not want Mélenchon to make it to the 2nd round, though, as not only do they despise him but argue that such an outcome, regardless of the inevitable Mélenchon defeat, would accord him and his party, La France Insoumise, the leading role in the post-election rebuilding of the left. Guillaume Duval, who, comme moi, will be voting for Jadot on April 10, concurs with this view, further contending that a landslide Macron victory would comfort the latter in his neoliberal agenda. Perhaps. I’ll have more to say about the candidates of the left next week.

Back to Marine Le Pen. It cannot be emphasized enough that despite her largely successful public “dedemonization” and softer, friendlier image, she has fundamentally not changed. On the “four I” issues, Europe, Russia and Putin, and just about everything else, she and her party are fundamentally no different from what they were five or ten years ago. Marine Le Pen and the RN remain on the extreme right. A Le Pen victory on April 24th would be an unmitigated disaster for France and Europe. I will spell out why after April 10.

Arun Kapil writes about these issues and more at Arun with a View.

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From Claire—I’m hard at work writing my own (long overdue) article for Politico about the French election, so I haven’t much to add today. But if you’d like my thoughts on Marine Le Pen, they haven’t changed since I wrote this the last time around:

• LAST MINUTE THOUGHTS ON MARINE LE PEN

That article is long, but I was exceedingly pleased when I searched for it and found that someone had described it as “the best essay I’ve read all year, hands down.”

(I have no idea who wrote that, but whoever you are, anonymous stranger, thank you. That was nice.)

In the same vein, I wrote the article below on the eve of the last election, and if Le Pen indeed proves to be Macron’s opponent in the second round, it’s just as relevant.

EIGHT POSTCARDS FROM PARIS ON ELECTION EVE

… So the remaining drama has to do with Macron’s margin of victory. The answer will depend on turnout and the way voters whose candidates lost in the first round reassign their votes. The risk is that Le Pen will do well enough to curse France with the National Front for another five years. Thus “victory” in this election need be redefined as “victory sufficient to demoralize and destroy the National Front, get her and her insane family out of French politics forever, discredit everyone in Europe tempted to emulate her, then salt the earth.” And “defeat” will occur if the Front does well enough to become, as the pundits put it, “normalized”—entrenched in French political life for good.

Only if she’s humiliatingly defeated will France be able to return to the two-round election system around which its constitution is designed. By making it to the second round, the Front confronts French voters with a choice not between two candidates with different, but respectable and defensible, views of France’s future, but with a choice between sanity and the abyss. Like passengers on a long-haul flight, colicky infants on either side, they find themselves trapped with a flight attendant cheerfully offering them the chicken or the plate of raw monkey eyeballs dipped in Ebola. No one can properly debate the future of France, because everyone’s too busy shrieking, “Monkey eyeballs? Ebola? No monkey eyeballs!” …

I wrote this NAQ—NEVER ASKED QUESTIONS—about French Elections last time around, too. I explained everything you need to know about what an election in France between Macron and Le Pen in a context of high voter abstention would look like. It’s five years old, but why reinvent the wheel? It’s still good to go.

Finally, if you missed it, you should read David Berlinski—my father—on Eric Zemmour:

• FRENCH TOAST, in English

• And LE PEN PERDU, in French

And you should also read Arun’s treatment of Zemmour:

• FANNING THE FLAMES

I now return to writing my long-overdue article. I’ll come up for air once it’s filed.

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