Where the buck stops

When the full story of Covid 19 comes to be written in France, the date of January 29^th, 2021 will probably be considered as key. For it was on this date that France’s President, Emmanuel Macron, in the face of mounting evidence of an acceleration in the number of cases, chose to overrule his scientific advisers and decided that there would be no strict national lockdown, as everyone, even within his government, had been expecting. That evening, the Prime Minister, Jean Castex, visibly surprised by what he had just been told by the President, appeared at a press conference broadcast on national TV, fumbled nervously with his facemask and proceeded to announce that only a few further restrictions would apply from then on: stricter checks on the observance of the 6pm. curfew, closure, until further notice, of large shopping centres, but above all that schools would remain open and that employers should do everything in their power to impose working from home. 

 

Three months later seems a good time to consider the consequences of these decisions, both from a health and a political viewpoint. 

 In terms of the spread of the epidemic, at the end of January there were between 20 and 25 thousand new cases every day and just over 3000 patients in ICUs. Between 250 and 350 people were dying every day in hospital and over 200 in care homes. What the French call “the English variant” of the virus and the British call the “Kent variant” was only just beginning to make inroads in France. Today, it accounts for over 80% of new cases, there are twice as many patients in ICUs and the total number of deaths has exceeded 100 000.The number of new cases recorded every day is around 30 thousand. A larger proportion of Covid patients is therefore ending up in ICUs, meaning probably that the relatively new variant is more aggressive and possibly more lethal with the number of deaths continuing at around 300 every day. Indeed, two hospital doctors I have talked to in the last week have confirmed this impression and added that the patient profile has changed considerably since the beginning of the year, with more younger people seriously ill.

 

And yet, paradoxically perhaps, as shown by the Financial Times’ excellent Covid Tracker, even if the number of new cases and deaths at the end of April is slightly higher than in Italy, Spain, and the UK and lot  higher than in Germany, all countries which have imposed far tighter restrictions over the past three months and are only just starting to relax them, the number of deaths per 100 000 people in France remains below these comparable countries, with the exception of Germany.

 

In terms of everyday life and in spite of the “lockdown light” imposed by Macron at the end of March, to be relaxed at the beginning of May, little has changed since the end of January. Most shops remain open, with the exception of a much smaller sample than a year ago, schools, which had a convenient two-week holiday over the Easter period, have remained largely open and even if levels of traffic at rush hour are lower than before the pandemic, many people are clearly still driving to work in offices or factories every day. Cinemas, theaters, restaurants and gyms have now been closed for the best part of a year. After a chaotic start, the French vaccination campaign is now running at about 450 thousand jabs a day. The fact that most people over 75 have now been vaccinated probably explains the sharp fall in the number of older patients in hospital, while schools have not in general turned out to be super spreaders of the virus. Judging by the TV pictures from neighbouring countries on the nightly news, masks appear to be worn more widely in France than in the other countries referred to above. Most people in the street, and even sometimes in parks and on woodland paths, wear facemasks. In public transport, the “mask mandate”, as it is called in the US, is almost universally observed.

 

Politically, by his decision of January 29^th, Emmanuel Macron indubitably asserted his political leadership in the fight against the pandemic and has continued on the same path ever since. He chairs a meeting of ministers and advisers called “The Health Defence Council” (Conseil de Défense Sanitaire) every Wednesday morning before the regular cabinet meeting and it has become clear that he considers it a forum for information and discussion but that he alone is the final arbiter of what to do next.  Even by the standards of the Fifth Republic, the constitution of which was designed by General de Gaulle to vest ultimate power in the hands of an elected Head of State, it is a bold move, especially as Macron has made no attempt, like some of his predecessors, to hide the fact that he is in charge.  By all accounts, ministers and even the Prime Minister have been reduced to purely executive roles, implementing and explaining decisions taken by the President.

 

Of course, such a stance has many risks. The opposition from the left and the right, even if it is in no position to seriously challenge the President’s supremacy, at last until the presidential and parliamentary elections of May 2022, has not been slow to blame him for everything that has gone wrong, and there have indeed, as everywhere, been many bumps in the road since March 2020, hoping that the criticism will stick and influence the electoral outcome, when and if Macron stands for re-election. For the moment, he can take comfort from the fact that both the traditional left-and right-wing parties are in disarray, incapable of agreeing on common leadership and a common electoral platform, not even able to put forward a convincing narrative of what they would have done differently - or would do differently in the future. Marine le Pen, generally considered as Macron’s principal opponent once again in 2022, has of course jumped on the bandwagon. Will it be enough to win her the presidency, as some polls are predicting at the moment? Will those who voted for Macron in 2017 and who have told pollsters that they will not do so again, abstain or vote for Le Pen? Or will they hold their nose and vote for him again, just to keep Le Pen and her party at bay?

 

Notwithstanding these political hypotheses, Macron’s Covid strategy is now becoming clearer. He once said that the French will have to learn to live with the virus and that is precisely what they are having to do. Leaving schools open is clearly a case in point. Not only has Macron always made it clear that the fight for equal opportunities starts at primary school, but, given the very large number of working mothers in France, it has also enabled the economy to keep functioning as much as possible.  This is all the more important as the French expect the state to be generous with financial support to maintain their living standards. To meet those expectations, which are probably higher in France than in comparable countries, it has borrowed billions of Euros, propelling the national debt to record levels. Despite the brave promise of “Whatever it takes” (“Quoi qu’il en coûte”) made at a time when nobody could have predicted the extent of the second and third waves of the pandemic, this upward trend must have a limit. Living with the virus is also therefore a matter of economic necessity. Reading between the lines, the main yardstick guiding Macron’s decisions appears to be the number of patients in ICUs. The current figure of around 6000 has been flat for the past two weeks but capacity could be made available, by dint of a radical and ongoing reorganisation of hospital departments, to accommodate nearer 10 000 if necessary. There were about 7000 at the peak of the first wave a year ago.

 

In every country, the fight against Covid19 was always going to involve a balancing act between health and economic imperatives. Emmanuel Macron is staking his political future on the way he has struck that balance in France: keeping the country open as much as possible while supporting the hardest hit people and sectors with massive amounts of aid and subsidies; gambling that hospital capacity will be sufficient to treat a large number of patients in ICUs while tolerating around 300 deaths a day and pushing hard for high vaccination coverage as quickly as possible. By making it clear that he is, and will remain, responsible for the eventual consequences of his decisions, Macron is walking a tightrope. If he can keep his balance for a few more weeks, hoping that the warmer weather and high vaccination rates will allow a return to a semblance of normality by the autumn, he stands a good chance of standing for re-election in 2022, being re-elected and continuing to pursue the reform agenda he outlined in 2017. But if he falls, there will be no safety net to catch him.  

Marine Le Pen - past her sell-by date!

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.