by Aldo Cazullo
The unknown abstention and rain forecast could hold the outgoing president back. Macron’s eventual victory will not be overwhelming as of 2017
Many of the fifteen million French who will vote for Marine Le Pen today know that Emmanuel Macron is better. more prepared, more cultured, more experienced, despite being eleven years younger; However, he spent two at the Economy Ministry and five at the Elysée while she held rallies and voted against everything in Parliament, including the price freeze. However, being better is not always an advantage during this period. During this time, a skill, a knowledge, a technique, an experience can make you an enemy of the people. For this reason too, Macron’s victory, certain in the polls, still carries a risk associated with abstaining; and if there is still a clear victory, it will certainly not be as overwhelming as in 2017.
Populism that wasn’t born with the economic crisis and mass narcissism of social media being the detonator. As early as the 1950s, the intriguing Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson, twice defeated by Eisenhower, came to intentionally inserting syntax errors into his speeches so as not to embarrass the average American; Stevenson was then appointed Ambassador to the United Nations by Kennedy and was a bitter opponent of Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as seen in the film Thirteen Days, dedicated to the thirteen days that the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war between Russians and American (Stevenson played by an effective Robert Duvall). Once again the very high international tension; and today in the polls, Macron will benefit. But trying to please the average French didn’t. And his intellectual superiority always appears on the verge of arrogance.
Macron didn’t even do a big campaign. He also avoided the big final rally; he limited himself to a few walks, more for the news than for the people. He tackled for the demonstrators. He replied to a teacher from Le Havre, Normandy, who thought he was a marine: I hope for the sake of your students that you will pay more attention to the facts in class. He yelled at those who booed him in Figeac, Occitania: Thank you for having a president you can mistreat like this when the other wins, I don’t know if you can go on. Nervousness is the only way he knows how to show empathy, wit is his greatest concession to the spirit of the people.
The other, Marine Le Pen, has not changed in spite of everything. Marine is just different than her father. He is happy to leave the question of Vichy and French Algeria to him and Eric Zemmour. Unlike her father, she would never describe the gas chambers as a detail of history (for her, the dead Ukrainians are a detail of history, Macron said with a telltale allusion). Marine rejects the right-left dichotomy, preferring that between the top and bottom of society. But his program is always the same: the French first. National preference for living and working, the abolition of Schengen, the reintroduction of borders, the supremacy of French law over Community law: in short, the abolition of the European Union. A disastrous program: France now has a national debt of almost €3 trillion, an absolute number more than Italy (slightly less relative to GDP), but it is financed at zero interest rates; Without the financial umbrella of the ECB and without the privileged relationship with Germany, the state budget would collapse and take with it the small saver that Marine Le Pen wants to defend.
That won’t stop Marine Le Pen from being much closer to Macron tomorrow night than he was five years ago. The polls conducted in the Paris newsrooms give between 42.5% (Ipsos) and 47 (Odoxa), ranging from 45 for Ifop to 44.5 for Elabe. The only danger for Macron is a collapse in turnout.
On the evening of the first round, the President gathered his wife Brigitte and his followers – Alexis Kohler, Secretary General of the Elysée, Clment Leonarduzzi, Head of Communications, Jonathan Gumas, who writes the speeches – to announce a change of strategy. Something new was needed. A great project to get the majority of the French back on his side. A renewal proposal that would revitalize his presidency. Macron wanted a victory of advance and conquest, not by default, by rejection of the opponent. But within a few days he changed his mind. He has given up ambitions. He realized that he had exhausted his reserves of votes: reform socialists and the moderate right had voted for him since the first ballot; today the second will gather around his compatriots who do not love him but know that Le Pen’s victory would be Putin’s victory and a catastrophe for France and Europe; those who expect nothing from him but expect the worst from her.
At the final rally in Arras, the city besieged by Cyrano and the Gascony Cadets, Marine dealt very harshly with the President. This is all the more true privately: for her, Macron is not only arrogant and disturbing; a mysterious and soulless man, technically strong but humanly fragile because he has something to hide; Chosen, if not created, by the French establishment to bar her way.
There might even be some truth in it. Manu and Marine do not get along, although they are both French from the north, they come from Gothic and Atlantic France, he is Picardy from Amiens, she comes from a Breton family (but of Parisian education). The two Mediterranean countries, the Berber Jew Zemmour – by his definition – and the Marseille tribune Mlenchon, were eliminated.
Only Mlenchon has the keys to the second round. Its divided constituency. The urban one, made up of teachers and other intellectual workers who identify with the ideas of the traditional left, hates Macron but will instill hatred in him for the extreme right. For the banlieue, popular lineage, he sees Macron as the man of the system, and out of hatred of the system he will choose Marine or, at most, stay at home.
The irrational in history also exists in the land of the Enlightenment, but to lead Le Pen to victory would require an even more complicated astral situation than the one that brought Trump to the White House: France is not a federal country, there are no states in the Record for a few thousand votes. Because today it’s raining on the cities of the north-west and the reservoir of the south-west of Macron: the elderly of Brest and Rennes, of Bordeaux and Toulouse could be forced to stay at home … And if the President is forced to check it he wants to tell the weather that something is wrong in France and in Europe.
April 24, 2022 (Modification April 24, 2022 | 07:11)
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