President Emmanuel Macron of France during a re-election rally on Saturday April 2, 2022, on the outskirts of Paris. (Dmitri Kostyukov/The New York Times)
PARIS – Emmanuel Macron finally emerged. The French President entered a huge arena plunged in darkness and lit only by spotlights and glowsticks in front of a crowd of 30,000 supporters at a domed stadium in a Paris suburb last weekend.
It was a highly choreographed performance – his first campaign rally for an election now less than a week away – with something of the atmosphere of a rock concert. But Macron had come to sound the alarm.
Don’t think “that everything is decided, that everything is going to be fine,” he told the crowd, a belated admission that a presidential election that seemed almost certain to return him to power is suddenly wide open.
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The diplomatic attempt to end the war in Ukraine was so time-consuming for Macron that he had little time for France’s elections, only to be aware of the growing danger that France could stagger to the anti-immigration right Moscow-friendly politics and its skepticism towards NATO.
Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader who is making her third attempt at power, has come a long way in recent weeks as her patient focus on cost-of-living issues resonated with millions of French people who afterwards struggle to come to terms with the To make ends meet a rise in gas prices of more than 35% in the past year.
The latest poll by the respected Ifop fiducial group showed Le Pen garnered 21.5% of the vote in Sunday’s first round, almost double the vote of dwindling far-right upstart Éric Zemmour’s 11% and closing the gap on Macron 28%. The two top candidates will enter the runoff on April 24th.
Of even more concern for Macron, the poll showed he would beat Le Pen by just 53.5 percent to 46.5 percent in the second round. In the last presidential election in 2017, Macron beat Le Pen in the runoff by 66.1% to 33.9%.
“It is an illusion that this election was won for Mr. Macron,” said Nicolas Tenzer, an author who teaches political science at Sciences Po University. “With a high abstention rate that is possible and the level of hatred towards the President among some people, there could be a real surprise. Imagining Le Pen winning is not impossible.”
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Édouard Philippe, a former prime minister in Macron’s government, warned last week that “of course Ms Le Pen can win”.
That idea would have seemed ridiculous a month ago. Le Pen looked like a former after trials and failures in 2012 and 2017. Zemmour, a slick anti-immigrant TV pundit-turned-politician with more than a hint of Donald Trump about him, had staged her on the right-hand side of the political spectrum, suggesting that Islam and France are irreconcilable be.
Now, however, Zemmour’s campaign appears to be mired in bombast as Le Pen, who said last year that “Ukraine is in Russia’s sphere of influence,” is reaping the rewards of her milquetoast makeover.
Zemmour may have done Le Pen a service in the end. Outflanking her on the right by becoming the candidate of choice for outright xenophobia, he aided the National Rally (formerly Front National) candidate in her quest for “banalization” — an attempt to gain legitimacy and look more “presidential” by they become part of the political mainstream in France.
Macron has fallen two or three percentage points in polls over the past week and has come under increasing criticism for refusing to debate other candidates and for generally having more important things like war and peace in Europe on his mind than the grind of French democracy.
A recent front-page cartoon in Le Monde daily showed Macron clutching his phone and turning away from the crowd at a rally. “Vladimir, I’m just finishing this chore and I’ll call you back,” he says.
With a colorless prime minister in Jean Castex – Macron tended to be wary of anyone who might mar his aura – there were few other compelling political figures capable of running the president’s campaign in his absence. His centrist political party, La République en Marche, has not gained traction in local and regional politics. It is widely seen as a mere vessel for Macron’s agenda.
His administration’s widespread deployment of consultancies, including McKinsey & Co. — spending more than $1.1 billion, some on the best ways to combat COVID-19 — has also prompted a wave of criticism of Macron. A former banker, Macron has often been attacked as the “president of the rich” in a country with deeply ambivalent feelings about wealth and capitalism.
Still, Macron has proven adept at occupying the entire central spectrum of French politics, insisting that liberalizing the economy is compatible with maintaining and even strengthening the French state’s role in social protection. Prominent left and center right figures attended his rally on Saturday.
Over the past five years, he has shown both faces of his politics, first simplifying the labyrinthine Labor Code and spurring a startup corporate culture, then embracing a “what it takes” policy to protect people’s livelihoods during the coronavirus pandemic rescue. Its management of this crisis is widely viewed as successful after a slow start.
“He was absolutely up to the task,” said Tenzer.
Still, much of the left feels betrayed by his policies, be they environmental, economic or Islam’s place in French society, and Macron struggled on Saturday to counter the view that his heart is right. Citing investments in education, promises to raise minimum pensions and give workers a tax-free bonus this summer, Macron expressed concern for those whose salaries are disappearing into “gas, bills, rents.”
It felt like catching up after Macron decided his image as a statesman and peacemaker would be enough to earn him a second term. Vincent Martigny, professor of political science at the University of Nice, said of Macron that “his decision to remain head of state to the end prevented him from becoming a real candidate”.
The worrying scenario for Macron is that Zemmour’s vote would go to Le Pen in a runoff, and that it will be supported by the broader left, who feel betrayed or just deeply hostile to the President, as well as some centre-right voters immigration is a key issue.
On the president’s first campaign trip to the provinces, a visit to Dijon last week, where he spent time in a working-class neighborhood in the company of the socialist mayor, Macron offered this explanation for his sometimes vacillating politics: “If you walk, you need two legs . One left and one right. And you have to place one at a time to progress.”
It was the kind of clever phrase that enrages Macron’s opponents and makes them unsure of which direction to attack him from.
Le Pen has focused relentlessly on economic issues, promising to cut gas and electricity prices, tax hiring foreign workers in favor of locals, keep the 35-hour work week and keep the retirement age at 62, while Macron lifted it 65 wants to raise.
Macron has warned that the French need to “work harder”, a phrase dear to former centre-right President Nicolas Sarkozy and a means of luring Sarkozy’s loyal supporters to the Macron camp.
If Le Pen wanted to appear as a toned down politician, she hasn’t changed from the anti-immigration zealot as she likes to claim. Their program includes a plan to hold a referendum that would lead to an amendment to the constitution that would outlaw policies that “result in the settlement of such large numbers of foreigners on national territory as to alter the composition and identity of the French people would .”
“France, a country of immigration, is finished,” she said in February. She also said the French must not allow their country “to be buried under the veil of multiculturalism”. In September 2021, she declared: “French criminals in prison, foreigners on the plane!”
Working-class votes are essentially split between Le Pen and far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has also gained ground in recent polls as voters begin to focus on which voice would most effectively propel a candidate forward the second round. But with around 15%, Mélenchon seems to be well behind Le Pen in the race for the runoff.
For the first time since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958, the French left has proved chronically divided to the point of political irrelevance. of votes in the Ifop Fiducial poll.
Although Le Pen has tried to distance herself a bit from Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom she met in Moscow in 2017 and whose policies she supported up until the war in Ukraine, she remains allergic to harsh measures against Russia. A win on their part would threaten European unity, alarm French allies from Washington to Warsaw, Poland, and confront the European Union with its biggest crisis since Brexit.
“Do we want to die?” she asked in a recent TV debate when asked whether France should stop oil and gas imports from Russia. “Economically we would die!”
She added, “We have to think about our people.”
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