According to a recent opinion poll, 70% of
the French electorate do not wish to see a re-run of the 2017 duel between
Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen at the presidential election in 2022. For the time being in line with a
time-honoured tradition observed by incumbents everywhere, Macron has not yet
declared whether he will be stand for a second five-year term, but the general
view is that, barring accidents, he will and that he will wait until the
beginning of 2022 to announce it publicly. After all, the thinking among his
supporters goes, the start of his first term was not entirely unsuccessful; the
labour market was made more flexible, considerable emphasis was placed on
education, with a 50% drop in class sizes for primary schools in deprived areas
and the age for compulsory schooling reduced from 5 to 3 while, at school
leaving level, vocational training opportunities and apprenticeships were
successfully expanded. These promising measures and the concomitant slow but
steady fall in unemployment that would have undoubtedly continued, were however
overshadowed by the “gilets jaunes”
protests which started at the end of 2018, followed by nationwide protests
against proposed pension reform in 2019 and the plague of COVID 19 since the
beginning of 2020. Many reforms are therefore on hold while the fight against
the virus has monopolised the unceasing attention of political authorities at
all levels, as in all other countries. Macron has let it be known that he will
take up this and other reforms again in due course, but if he is to do so, he
will need a second term to bring as many of them as possible to a conclusion.
Marine Le Pen on the other hand, on the
grounds that no other opposition politician can in her view command nearly as many
votes as she obtained in the presidential run off in 2017, continues to see
herself as the main opposition figure and has already gone on record as saying that
she will be a candidate again in 2022.
Given the lack of serious alternative
candidates from one end of the political spectrum to the other, for the time
being at least, her political gambit is clear: to act as magnet not only for
her own long-standing supporters but also for more moderate “Republican” right-wing
voters who have traditionally been hostile to her and everything she stands
for. But is she a more credible candidate than she was in 2017? Despite some
favourable opinion polls that give her a fighting chance of coming much closer,
and perhaps even winning the presidency this time, there are several reasons to
doubt it.
The first is that many French people, including
her close political allies and supporters, still remember her disastrous
performance during the televised presidential debate a few days before the second
round of voting in 2017. In that debate she seemed incapable of landing a point,
let alone a knock-out blow, and was visibly outclassed by Macron who seemed
perfectly right when he said that she had nothing to propose. He emerged from
that debate as the only one of the two candidates capable of running the
country, even if some of those who voted for him were voting against Le Pen
rather giving him their full endorsement.
Thinking back over that debate again however, there is surely a broader
question about the credibility of Marine Le Pen’s current strategy. Does she
simply lacks debating skills or, more seriously, is unable to propose a range
of attractive and properly thought out policies? These doubts returned when she squared off
again Macron’s Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, a few weeks ago on
TV. Darmanin is a young and ambitious politician, former member of the right
wing RPR, and former ally of Nicolas Sarkozy. Many see him as bringing just the
necessary touch of right wing authority, if not authoritarianism, to Macron’s
government. Be that as it may, in a debate that focused on new draft legislation
about “Safeguarding the principles of the Republic”, as it is now called, after
starting life as a law against “separatism”, that Darmanin is defending in
Parliament, he clearly gained the upper hand. Marine Le Pen who had brought
along an ostensibly marked copy of Darmanin’s recent book “Le séparatisme islamiste -
Manifeste pour la laïcité” (Islamic
separatism – a manifesto for secularism)
no doubt in an attempt to point up the contradictions between the views
expressed in his book and the legislation he is sponsoring, was unable, once
again, to land a point. As she has spent her political career denouncing “laxism”
of all governments of the Fifth Republic on immigration and the link she
constantly harps on between “uncontrolled” immigration, crime and terrorism,
one would have expected her to tell Darmanin in so many words that his draft
legislation does not go nearly far enough and denounce the Islamic threat to French
society. Instead, she simply questioned whether the legislation should not
treat all religions equally, in the secular tradition of French society since
1905, but mention the specific danger of Islamic extremism and its increasing hold
on a number of deprived neighbourhoods in the suburbs of large cities. Darmanin
was unrepentant, stating that the draft law does indeed aim to fight such
tendencies and quoted a letter he had received from a Senator of Le Pen’s own
party calling for the closure of a couple of mosques in the South of France
that, the writer claimed, were hotbeds of Islamic radicalism. Darmanin asserted
that he would be unable to take such a measure unless the law that he is sponsoring
gives him power to do so! Whether this
is strictly true or not is debatable. France has a definite tendency to pass new
laws rather than properly applying existing ones and some go so far as to say
that the 1905 legislation is fully up to the task in hand anyway. Be that as it
may, in a tense televised debate, it was Darmanin who, throughout, appeared
more on top of his brief. He even allowed himself the luxury of accusing Le Pen
of being too “soft”, to which her only response was a pained and contorted
expression.
It is of course a standard trick of political
combat to try and steal the opposition’s clothes but for Le Pen, the problem surely
goes deeper. Having spent most of her career roundly denouncing the French establishment
and its craven deference to “Brussels” and “globalisation”, can she now ditch
that stance, as she is attempting to do, and move toward to the centre in a bid
to give herself an aura of responsibility and moderation without profoundly
destabilising her party faithful and traditional voters? In the recent debate
about whether the debt contracted by France to fight the pandemic should be gradually
(and painfully) repaid or simply “cancelled”, for instance, while Jean-Luc
Melenchon, the left-wing firebrand, has called for outright cancellation, Marine
Le Pen has defended the orthodoxy. And this is the same candidate who in the
run up to the 2017 election, seemed to be suggesting that France should “take
back control” to coin a well-known phrase, by abandoning the Euro and strictly
policing the countries’ border in defiance of the Schengen agreements.
By abandoning her rhetoric of protest, all
the more radical as she was distant from real power, she therefore runs the
serious risk of alienating her existing electorate while failing to attract the
more moderate right-wing opinion that she now appears to be courting. She too
is attempting to borrow other parties’ clothes but, for the time being at least,
her disguise fits badly and looks unconvincing. She would do well to remember
the words of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the uncompromising former leader of
a party that simply called itself “The National Front”: “Don’t vote for the copy, vote for the real thing”.
Le Pen’s situation is not helped by the
fact that, as an MEP (Member of the European Parliament), she is under
investigation with a number of her colleagues for allegedly siphoning off the
generous allowances granted by the European Parliament to help finance her own
party in France. True, she is not the only French politician to be facing such
allegations, but it is common knowledge that her party is deeply in debt, and
that French banks are unwilling to extend more loans. Rumours, never denied,
have it that her party is being propped up by Russian banks. The Russian connection,
not to say sympathies, is reinforced by a report in the “Kyiv Post”, a
Ukrainian English language newspaper, that the Ukrainian authorities have
banned three of Le Pen’s parliamentary colleagues from entering Ukraine because
of a recent visit they made to occupied Crimea, presumably at the invitation of
the Russian authorities.
There is of course a long way to go before
the presidential election of 2022. Whatever else happens, however, Marine Le
Pen’s main political opponents, whoever they turn out to be, but particularly
those whose clothes she is trying to steal, will surely not be slow to present
her and her party as shifty, contradictory and incompetent. In addition, in the
current climate of tension between the EU and Russia, a denunciation of her
forced complacency towards Putin’s Russia or the slightest hint of Russian
meddling in her favour in the campaign, will also fall on fertile ground. Even
if the mainstream right-wing parties have a lot to do to find themselves an
undisputed leader and present a convincing political programme for 2022, their
voters are unlikely to fall for the strategy that Marine Le Pen has chosen to
pursue. That is how I interpret the poll that says that 70% of voters do not want
to see a re-run of the 2017 run off. It is her they no longer want to see
contesting the highest office in France. She is past her sell-by date and the
elections of 2022 could well be the death knell of her political career.