Campaign posters for President Emmanuel Macron of France, a candidate for re-election to the centrist LREM party, and Marin Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally (Rassemblement National) party, as seen at Mitry-Mory, outside Paris, on March 22 Benoit Tessie / Reuters)
As everything from European Union cohesion to NATO power hangs in the balance, the unexpectedly strong challenge of far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen to centrist President Emmanuel Macron gives many French citizens a sense of déjà vu mixed with fear.
“France’s social climate is tense,” Matthias Bernard, a political historian and president of the University of Clermont-Auvergne, told Yahoo News.
In 2017, Macron defeated Le Pen in the presidential election, winning 66% of the vote against her 34%. Since then, traditional loyalties have become more divided, with the urban-rural divide deteriorating as energy prices soar. Macron and Le Pen, winners of Sunday’s first round, which reduced the lead from 12 to two, will now face each other on April 24th.
French President Emmanuel Macron on election night at his headquarters on April 10 in Paris. (Thibaut Camus / AP)
Macron himself highlighted the uncertainty of the moment, warning his supporters last Sunday when he garnered more than 27 percent of the vote that “nothing has been decided”.
After touring the country with a charming offensive during which she promised to be the “voice of the forgotten”, Le Pen garnered more than 23% of the vote in the first round – the highest for a far-right candidate – and told fans on Sunday that she is confident that in the final round the French will “vote for our civilization, our culture, our language”.
Far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, who won a solid 21 percent of the vote on Sunday, called the upcoming run-off between Macron and Le Pen a “choice between two evils.” “We know who we will never vote for,” Melenchon said, adding: “No vote should go to Mrs Le Pen.”
French far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon has commented on the preliminary results of the first round of the April 10 presidential election in Paris. (Michelle Spinger / AP)
As the end result depends on the decisions of those who initially supported Melanchon, “the result of the second round remains uncertain,” Bernard said, in part because Melanchon refused to support Macron. Polls also show that one-third of the 47 million people who voted for him may indeed support the far-right candidate, and another third may miss the final round, making the election bad. A poll after Sunday’s election showed Macron with 51% support to 49% for Le Pen. Other polls give Macron an eight-point lead, but analysts warn that the situation is changing and that the final results could change the game not only for France but also for the West.
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“This election could probably reshape not only France but also Europe and reshape the world security order,” historian Andrew Hussey, a political essayist for the British magazine New Statesman, who has lived in Paris for two decades, told Yahoo News. The White House is also worried, fearing that Le Pen will rip France out of NATO – or at least from the military side of the alliance.
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen posed for a selfie with a supporter of a pre-election rally in Perpignan, southern France, on April 7th. (Joan Mateu Parra / AP)
Philippe Wachter, head of economic research at Ostrum Asset Management in Paris, called Le Pen’s impressive turnout a “wake-up call” – and not just for the financial markets. He fears that Le Pen’s victory will weaken the EU as a single political institution, especially in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “With Le Pen as president,” he told Yahoo News, “we risk working more with Putin than with Europe. And in this case, Europe’s ability to be strong and to be a real negotiator with Russia will disappear.
What makes these elections more volatile and unpredictable is that French society is in a state of heightened discontent over the rapid rise in the cost of living, which voters in a recent poll identified as their number one concern. to more than $ 8 a gallon in recent weeks, electricity prices have tripled this winter and inflation has surpassed 7%.
President Emmanuel Macron speaks while Brigitte Clinkert, a junior minister for economic inclusion, pays a pre-election visit to Chateaune, near Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine, France, on April 12. (Johanna Geron / Reuters)
“The economy is doing quite well in terms of jobs and purchasing power,” Wachter said. However, “people feel that inflation is high and the government is not doing anything for the poor.” Moreover, he said, Macron doesn’t seem to be able to get rid of the feeling of being “president of the rich”, a nickname he earned in some circles after cutting taxes on the rich and cutting subsidies for low-income citizens in his early days. weeks of fasting.
The close difference between the candidates who will run in the runoff shows how Le Pen has adapted. In fact, she beat Macron in every age group in the first round, with the exception of voters aged 60 and over.
Despite reducing unemployment from 10% to 7.5% and boosting the economy, Macron has angered those who believe he has neglected the needs of non-urban residents. Others are outraged that he has failed to achieve his climate change goals and has embarked on a failed shuttle attempt with Putin. The invasion of Ukraine ranks only 14th among the biggest concerns of French voters. In the weeks before the first round of voting, Macron ran almost no campaign. He held only one rally in Paris. Macron has become like Jupiter, the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Zeus, and, like Romain Melz, a sociologist and political researcher in Lyon, commented dryly, “He forgot to come down from Mount Olympus.”
Emmanuel Macron spoke with women protesting against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine during his first campaign trip on March 28 in Dijon, France. (Aurelien Monye / Getty Images)
Le Pen, meanwhile, is campaigning across France, holding rallies in rural cities, promising to drastically reduce energy taxes and reduce taxes on workers under the age of 30 and reduce the retirement age from 62 to 60. In contrast, Macron said he hopes to raise the national retirement age to 65.
The 2017 presidential election in France also pitted Macron, a former banker and something of a political question mark at the time, against Le Pen, the successor to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s fiercely anti-immigrant National Front. The hard-line nationalist party was so controversial that in 1976, when Marine Le Pen was eight, a bomb blew up her family’s Paris home in an apparent assassination attempt on her father. 2015 and softened some of his stance after he chose to reject the Holocaust as a “detail of history”. Four years ago, she changed the name of her party to the National Rally, further distancing herself from her father.
In the 2017 elections, however, the contrasts were clearer. Le Pen, who had flown to Moscow weeks earlier to meet with Putin and campaigned the same year with a $ 10 million loan from a Russian bank, then pledged warmer ties with Russia and called for the euro to fall. , the expulsion of France from the European Union and a moratorium on all legal immigration into France. Macron has vowed to build closer ties with the EU and tackle the country’s high unemployment rate.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, poses with Marin Le Pen at the Kremlin in Moscow in March 2017 (Mikhail Klimentiev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo by AP)
After the last election, even Le Pen’s opponents noted that she had polished her image and further softened her rhetoric. Now she says she wants France to stay with the euro, opposes parting with the EU and belittles her relationship with Putin.
“Le Pen was extremely charming and charismatic,” Hussey said in a recent interview with her. However, he added, she still hopes to drastically tighten immigration – this time by putting the issue to a vote – and vows to ban the public use of the veil by Muslims. Analysts fear that under all this she is the same old Le Pen, only more skillful.
Analysts also see this year’s tough elections as highlighting growing tensions between residents of French cities, which are served by an impressive public transport system, and those in loosely connected cities and villages that rely on cars – and thus are more vulnerable to rising gasoline prices.
Marin Le Pen has a few words about the cow at the 58th International Agricultural Fair at the Porte de Versailles Exhibition Center in Paris on March 2. (Johanna Geron / Reuters)
“People affected by rising living costs are not just the poor, who now make up 15% of the total population,” Bernard said. “These are also people who live on the outskirts of urban agglomerations and suffer from debts and travel expenses.
The same dynamic was evident during the Yellow Vests protests in 2018, when violent demonstrations over rising diesel prices brought the country to a standstill.
Although the left-wing candidates, who lost in Sunday’s first round, encouraged their supporters to block Le Pen, Bernard is not convinced voters will listen.
“Emmanuel Macron is no longer the candidate for change,” he said, “but he is responsible for the record, which has been condemned by many voters on the left. Le Pen, meanwhile, has pushed identity and nationalist themes into the background and is instead developing social proposals: She no longer wants to run as a far-right candidate; it prefers to be the candidate for purchasing power, which can attract left-wing voters. “
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