A week ago I expressed anxiousness over the state of the race and the very real possibility that Marine Le Pen could win on April 24th. Today I rate the chances of that at 50-50. Almost all the polls now have a maximum six-point spread between Emmanuel Macron and MLP, with one earlier this week showing a bone-chilling three-point squeaker for Macron. And the momentum—the Big Mo’—is clearly with Mme Le Pen, as given the way election campaigns work in France, there is little that can stop it at this stage. If this campaign were happening à l’américaine—with American-style practices—the Macron camp would be flooding the airwaves with negative ads attacking Le Pen for her manifold weaknesses, extremist positions, and the dangers of her acceding to the presidency of the French Republic, particularly at this grave moment for Europe and the world (e.g. informing voters that if the Putin-friendly Le Pen is elected on April 24th, she will immediately assume the presidency of the Council of the European Union to the end of June, and for voters to meditate on this). And Macron surrogates and other politicos and commentators would be sounding the alarm in the media. But this is not possible in France, as campaign advertising on television is heavily regulated (a good thing) and with no tradition of negative attack ads (not a good thing), and now that we are in the official campaign period, the law mandating strict equality of coverage on television and radio for all presidential candidates—there are twelve—has kicked in, meaning that oddball Jean Lassalle and the laid-back post-Trotskyist Philippe Poutou, both polling in the very low single digits and with no manifest wish to actually be elected president of the Republic, are entitled to as much mention on TV, including in prime time, as are Macron and Le Pen. I had a whole AWAV post exactly ten years ago railing on against this ridiculous French law, which, in effect, deprives the electorate of serious debate and examination of issues in the final stretch of the campaign, and at precisely the moment when many voters are beginning to tune in. So Macron’s hands are tied in trying to stem the Le Pen surge, a surge that he and his campaign clearly did not anticipate.
Not that Macron would necessarily know how to effectively respond even if he had all the time in the world. His deficient political skills are continually laid bare, most lately in his refusal to participate in 1st round televised debates, arguing that, in addition to Ukraine and his other presidential responsibilities, the deck would be stacked against him in having to respond to the attacks of the eleven other candidates but in exactly the same allotted time as each of them. His reasoning is not entirely without merit, except that to the median voter in the Meurthe-et-Moselle or Tarn-et-Garonne, it just looks like he’s dodging debate. So instead of appearing on France 2’s two-hour campaign special on Tuesday evening and in the presence of five other candidates—though they didn’t debate one another—the Macron campaign supplied France 2 with footage from his Paris rally last Saturday—his only such campaign event—to use up his allotted temps de parole.
I attended the rally, which was held at the Paris La Défense Arena in Nanterre (a half kilometer past La Grande Arche), the largest domed stadium in Europe, with some 30,000 Macron fans in attendance. Very much a CSP+ crowd: educated, professional (or soon to be for the younger ones), well-off. La France qui va bien—the France that is doing well for itself—and that is not afflicted with cultural resentments or identity crises. Macron’s base. Les premiers de cordée. All the top macronistes were there on the stage—Edouard Philippe, Jean Castex, François Bayrou, Christophe Castaner, Manuel Valls et al—but none of them took the microphone. There were no warm-up speakers. Just Macron, who spoke for 2 hours and 10 minutes (with six teleprompters), which is long for one who is not only merely okay as an orator but doesn’t have anything really compelling to say. Much of the speech consisted of a laundry list of his presidency’s accomplishments, mostly small bore stuff that no one likely remembered five minutes later, or of promises to tackle problems in his second term but that have loomed or festered for years, such as the many crises in the health care system, to which one wanted to ask where he was on these issues in the three years before the pandemic hit. I spent much of the speech scrolling through Twitter and Facebook, only half paying attention. There was regular applause but little of it thunderous. A contrast with Macron’s 2017 Paris rally. At one point he said “il faut travailler plus…” I was waiting for him to finish the phrase with “pour gagner plus” but he didn’t (had he done so, his poll numbers would have surely tanked several points). Tepid applause. Telling people they’ll have to work more if he’s reelected: a sure-fire way to fire up the base and win votes while he’s at it!! He got better in the latter part of the speech, particularly when talking about Europe. One of the very few positive reasons—if not the only one—to vote for Macron in the 1st round.
But if Macron is finding himself in a fragile position vis-à-vis the extreme right-wing Marine Le Pen, perhaps he should look in the mirror to understand why. He is, as Mediapart’s Ellen Salvi put it, trying to put out the flames that he himself stoked. During the 2017 campaign, Macron ran as a liberal in both senses of the term: economic (more market oriented) and political (in the way Americans understand it), with the latter leading him to adopt a progressive-sounding rhetoric on immigration, laïcité, the legalization of cannabis, and other such societal issues. But there was no positive action on any of these once he was elected and two years into his quinquennat—after the country had been rocked with social contestation over the reform of the Code du Travail and then the Gilets Jaunes, and with the battle over pension reform looming—somehow decided, comme ça, that the French public was less concerned about economic and social issues than “regalian” ones—the “four Is”: immigration, insécurité, Islam, identity—and that these would drive upcoming election campaigns. And so he did a 180°, lurching to the right not only in his rhetoric and legislative action on civil liberties and the “four Is” but also in symbolic gestures and signals, e.g. publicly palling around with dyed-in-the-wool réac Philippe de Villiers, spending 45-minutes on the phone with Eric Zemmour and then soliciting his perspectives on immigration, exchanging textos with the Fox News-like CNews star host Pascal Praud, granting interviews on immigration and identity to the hard-rightist weekly magazine Valeurs Actuelles (a cross between National Review and Breitbart), et on en passe. The French hard right, as with its Trumpian kindred spirits outre-Atlantique, has been waging a full-throttled culture war—against something called “wokeisme” and “islamo-gauchisme“—and with Macron eagerly jumping on the bandwagon.
Macron’s rhetoric and action since 2017 on economic, social, and “regalian” issues have made him, in the words of sociologist-historian Pierre Rosanvallon, “the central figure on the French right.” There is nothing in Macron’s rhetoric today that recalls his roots—albeit shallow—in the Socialist party or youthful support of Jean-Pierre Chevènement, the longtime chef de file of the PS’s left flank before quitting the party in the 1990s. (For the record, Chevènement, now into his 80s and retired from politics, has declared his support for Macron and rejected the notion that he is on the right). Macron has manifestly decided that he does not need to appeal to voters of the left, that he has maintained his hold over 2012 François Hollande voters who defected to him in 2017—who are either content with Macron or feel, not unreasonably, that there is no credible alternative to him—and that a sufficient number of left voters who are hostile to him will nonetheless hold their noses and cast his ballot in the 2nd round to block Marine Le Pen. A risky assumption, if not a dangerous one.
As for the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has been climbing in the polls but, at 17%, is six or seven points behind Le Pen, who has been climbing even more. Paris-based journalist Cole Stangler has a good article in Foreign Policy arguing that “A Mélenchon vs. Macron runoff would be good for France,” but it looks most unlikely at this point that JLM will be able to overtake MLP to qualify for the April 24th 2nd round. JLM held his Paris rally on March 20th at the Place de la République, filling the square with some 30,000 supporters, which was almost identical to his march-rally in 2017. I thought he put on a strong show back then but found him unpleasant this time (or more unpleasant than usual). It was a diatribe, with JLM haranguing the crowd for an hour (a short speech for him). He had some good words on Ukraine and Russia at the beginning, but which, for some of us at least, cannot efface his fervent apologizing for Putin over the years. If it weren’t for his international stances, neo-Bonapartism, and insufferable public persona, JLM would have a strong chance of making it to the 2nd round.
He would also have a better chance if he hadn’t alienated the Communist party, which supported his candidacy in 2012 and 2017. So the PCF decided to run its own candidate this time, its new secretary-general Fabien Roussel. The last PCF candidate, in 2007, receiving a mere 1.9% of the vote, Roussel’s prospects of improving on that were objectively not promising but, thanks to his sunny persona and ‘happy days await us’ (Les jours heureux) campaign slogan—plus his reconnecting with the Communists’ working class patriotic tradition (admired by Eric Zemmour himself)—he has thwarted predictions in rising to 4% in the polls (though is now dropping, as strategically-minded left voters shift to Mélenchon). Intrigued, I decided to check out Roussel’s March 10th rally at the Cirque d’Hiver, attended by some 4,000 (half inside, the rest outside watching on the big screen) mostly older longtime PCF voters. Roussel didn’t disappoint. His speech was great, and with some good lines, e.g. on Russia and Ukraine:
Poutine est le serviteur zélé des oligarques qui se goinfrent depuis des années sur le dos du peuple russe.
Sur ses mains s’étale désormais le sang du personnel de la maternité de Marioupol.
Ce forfait devra être jugé. #RousselParis pic.twitter.com/yC8l0aiVhg
— Fabien Roussel (@Fabien_Roussel) March 10, 2022
And this one:
Ma France à moi, elle aime le drapeau rouge et le drapeau tricolore.
Elle chante la Marseillaise, et l’Internationale.
Elle est coco, et cocorico !#RousselParis pic.twitter.com/s7vIsEosEl
— Fabien Roussel (@Fabien_Roussel) March 10, 2022
How can one not like Fabien Roussel? If I had to choose between him and Mélenchon, the choice would be clear.
Likewise with Philippe Poutou of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, whom I’ve taken a liking to of late. I paid no attention to his (irrelevant) candidacy in 2012 or 2017 but decided to give it a look this time. As his afternoon rally at the Cirque d’Hiver last Saturday was at the same time as Macron’s, I missed it, so caught up with it online, watching his entire speech. He’s a worthy successor to Olivier Besancenot, whom I saw for the first time in person at a small NPA event in Ivry-sur-Seine on March 19th; as usual, he was fast as a rocket. Back to Poutou, I like his non-dogmatic, décontracté style, e.g. here:
Au 20h de TF1 hier soir: “Si on veut répondre aux urgences sociales, il va falloir prendre l’argent aux milliardaires qui volent la collectivité, comme votre patron Martin Bouygues.” pic.twitter.com/w1i30F0ihU
— Philippe Poutou (@PhilippePoutou) April 4, 2022
If I were a 19-year-old college student and with the political convictions I had at that age, I would very possibly join the NPA. The other extreme-left candidate, Nathalie Arthaud of the Uber-Trotskyist Lutte Ouvrière, is another matter. These are the Salafists of Trotskyism, the hardest of hard-liners, whose discourse has not changed an iota in their seven-decade existence. Their perennial presidential candidate, the pasionaria Arlette Laguiller, crossed the 5% threshold in the 1995 and 2002 elections, attracting votes from those who had no idea what Trotskyism was but liked her persona (as the auntie who has some zany ideas but whom we adore). Arthaud, who is on her third run—and will finish with 0.5%, as the previous two times—is not so charismatic but is every bit as dogmatic. I went to her rally last Sunday at the Zénith, with some 3,000 true believers in attendance. I applauded once, when she called for welcoming Ukrainian and all other refugees with open arms. Bien évidemment.
If it hadn’t been for the irruption of Eric Zemmour last fall, who dominated media attention for months, and the race on the far right, one of the big stories of this campaign would be the breathtaking collapse of the Socialist party and its candidate, Anne Hidalgo, who has been stable in the polls at a humiliating 2%. This for the dominant party of the left from 1978 to 2017, and which ten years ago had it all: the presidency, National Assembly, Senate, regional assemblies (21 of 22), mayors of cities. The PS maintains a presence, albeit reduced, at the regional and local levels, but nationally it barely exists. The descente aux enfers was set in motion at the outset of the presidency of François Hollande—who bears responsibility for the disaster—culminating in the failure of Benoît Hamon’s candidacy in 2017, when almost four-fifths of Hollande’s 2012 voters defected to Macron or Mélenchon. The fiasco of Hollande’s presidency merits a lengthier treatment than I can give it here—maybe I’ll take it up when I write the PS’s obituary—but suffice to say that it primarily had to do with Hollande’s governing style, the betrayal felt by the PS’s left flank at the social-liberal turn in economic policy (which Hollande had not announced during the 2012 campaign), and the rightist lurch on regalian issues. The PS was more deeply divided than it had ever been. More generally, the Socialists had no clear idea of what they stood for and with no coherent message to voters or argument as to why one should vote for them.
They also lacked a credible candidate for 2022. Once Bernard Cazeneuve made it clear that he wasn’t interested, that left Hidalgo as the only PS personality with any stature, though as mayor of Paris she wasn’t too well known in the rest of France. Hidalgo knew when she announced her candidacy in September that she had no chance of reaching the 2nd round in ’22. Her calculation was that the ecologists, whose primary was happening that month, would, as is their wont, select a radical left or otherwise flaky candidate who wouldn’t encroach on the PS’s potential electorate; that Mélenchon, whose La France Insoumise bit the dust in the 2019 European, 2020 municipal, and 2021 regional elections, would plunge into the single digits himself; and that she, Hidalgo, could outperform him, thereby emerging as the nº 1 candidate of the left in ’22 and, with Mélenchon retiring from politics, lead the left going forward to 2027. Not a totally crazy scenario, except that Yannick Jadot, the most moderate écolo candidate, unexpectedly won the aforementioned primary—and who would thus occupy the same social democratic space as Hidalgo—and JLM consistently led the left-wing pack in the polls from the outset. The notion that Hidalgo could better Hamon’s 6.3% in 2017 was illusory. And then there was the absurd episode of Christiane Taubira’s ephemeral candidacy and the half-baked Primaire Populaire, which only made the left look more pathetic. (In January I had a contradictory exchange on Facebook with a former colleague over the Primaire Populaire, which may be consulted here).
As for Jadot, he’s the candidate I’m voting for, as his social democratic convictions align with mine, as do his positions on my litmus test issues: immigration (the 2015 Angela Merkel attitude), laïcité (la loi de 1905 et que la loi de 1905), legalization of cannabis (just do it), and Russia/Ukraine (arms for the latter and no compromising with the former). I naturally went to Jadot’s March 27th rally at the Zénith, with some 4,000 in attendance. He delivered an excellent speech, on both form and substance. As for the attendees, who were of all ages, this is the France with which I most identify. If Jadot reaches 6% on Sunday, that will be good. Less than 5% will be a disappointment.
Le vote utile, le vote efficace au premier tour d’une élection, c’est le vote de conviction. #ZenithJadot #Jadot2022 pic.twitter.com/YbhcdAiWwI
— Yannick Jadot (@yjadot) March 27, 2022
Several very good articles in English on France and the election have appeared in the past few days. I’ll link to them tomorrow.
This is the first time in several decades where I may have gotten it wrong in a presidential election – let’s cling to the last bits of hope for 2 days in spite of the Big Mo -.
I am becoming very scared and I cannot control it and keep having these images in my mind and remember that two grand-parents were not French, that my mother was thrown out of school in 1940 and had to be clandestine for four years while the French police eventually caught up with my grand father late in the war and he was eventually sent on a march east – he came back – probably as a political and not what his real name would have suggested, that my wife became french less than 40 years ago and that my son looks Central Asian – thankfully though I miss him all the time he does not live in France. This is likely totally irrational but I mention it to outline the level of uncontrollable fear that some of us feel at this time. It is as if the devil is about to visit town and no one knows or cares.
What I see among voters on the left is that to avoid that risk, the “dam” must be in the 1st round so they’re switching to Mélenchon in the hopes he’ll make it to the 2nd round, without any illusion he’ll win but just to keep Marine le Pen from getting so close (and EM really can’t help himself so he’s likely to say/do something that’ll alienate some of the left voters, with whom he has little cred left, whereas she’s got a good number of voters who’ll switch for the 2nd round from Z to her.)
I can’t stand JLM but I understand the reasoning. I just don’t know whether it’s possible for him to make up that much lost ground. He’d need BOTH 1° disaffected voters massively turning up and choosing him AND 2° a round up error in poll numbers due to overestimating her numbers for fear of underestimating her score. An issue is that typically people who aren’t sure they’ll vote, especially low-information voters, vote for whoever seems likely to win, so not sure Mélenchon is on their radar and whether they’d pick him if they felt a leftist affinity. Another issue is that MLP has coasted and targets “cost of living” issues, so that her racist policies are swept under the rug.
And I agree, French law doesn’t give EM the tools to target her – he’s ran a very poor campaign. Changing the minimum age for retirement to 65 sounds cruel, all the old French people I know would have been broken if that policy had been in place (despite this, some would be willing to vote for EM since “it’s the only way I can be sure to collect my pension”…)
I still remember G.Darmanin telling MLP she was too “soft” on Muslims and her replying “Unlike you, I don’t confuse Muslims and Islamists”.
That rang huge alarm bells for me.
I remember the interview to Valeurs, the radical/racist right paper: that’s when I knew his #1 task, his ONE job in my opinion, ie., making sure the FN’s position becomes fragile because some of their claims rang hollow, would not be completed and his promise to make that vote unappealing and unnecessary would be broken. In fact he’s cynically exploited fears since MLP is an opponent he knows and whom he thought he could easily beat.
So, here we are.
For the record, Eternal France is the eldest daughter of the Church, the fatherland of Human Rights and the Patron of the Arts and Letters. It is also twice world champion in soccer.
Apart from that, if the polls are right, a little more than one French voter out of three will vote for the extreme right to : 1) shut the borders, get rid of the Arabs and other savages, once and for all; 2) have the chicken in the pot and a full tank of cheap gas guaranteed on Sundays. They don’t give a damn about the rest.
One in six French voters believes that salvation will come from a new spring, less work, more cash, financed by the rich.
One in twenty French voters who has heard about global warming and endangered biodiversity plans to vote Green. I, for one.
As Juvenal, who was the Desproges of his time, wrote: Panem et circenses. Bread and games. In short, same old, same old, stable situation, no evolution in sight.