What you sense loudly on the street is the relentless hatred of Macron among those large, amorphous social strata, little known as the yellow vests, or among those who tremble at his arrogance and majestic significance.
Part of Corbinist’s 20 votes for Jean-Luc Melenchon will draw Le Pen in the runoff on April 24. It is less clear how many of the intellectual bourgeois left or the green youth movement will abstain instead of voting again for the man who deceived them in 2017 with a false prospect.
At least they thought he was a leftist. But as two Le Monde journalists vehemently made clear in The Traitor and the Abyss, the Socialist Party was only his step towards power.
Le Pen has turned her party into a statist, anti-globalist, Francais supporter since taking office in 2011. She had to “walk on two legs”, she said. He could never gain strength with an anti-immigration ticket alone.
This was her way of detoxifying (dédiaboliser) the brand, accompanied by a purge of anti-Semites and Vichy nostalgia left over from the original Front National.
Broadcaster Eric Semmore made it easier for her by taking on the ideological periphery of the far right, even to the point of rehabilitating Marshal Petten, a strange button to be pressed for an Algerian-born Jew. Zemmor made her look respectable.
Le Pen is adamant about his bread and butter scenario, resisting the urge to fight a cultural war, even when part of its base seems to be moving away and the press is writing it off.
Institut Montaigne estimates that its economic plan will cost a net 105 billion euros a year. It is clearly insolvent for a country that already has levels of public debt in Club Med and almost the highest structural budget deficit in the OECD. But austerity is out of fashion. The “whatever it costs” pandemic reflex made it difficult to close the locks again.
Macron himself inflated the economy by 50 billion euros or more from election distributions. He limited the rise in electricity prices to 4 percent, for both the rich and the poor, at a high price for the French state. This is a subsidy for energy consumption, which erases the price signal when it is necessary to limit energy loss.
And yet Le Pen is the one who makes up most of the shock of the cost of living. Paradoxically, she should benefit from a disorder caused in part by the invasion of Ukraine, given her ties to Vladimir Putin. But unlike Zemmore or Donald Trump, she quickly saw the dangers of this association. She supported the open door policy for Ukrainian refugees.
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