Can French politicians learn to compromise ?

 

From all the breathless comments on election night and the radio the next morning, one could be forgiven for thinking that Emmanuel Macron, re-elected by 58% of voters on April 24^th, was about to be forced to resign. “An electoral tsunami”, said one opposition politician, “a crushing defeat”, said another. Political commentators normally more reserved in their judgements, also sounded as if a dam had broken by systematically qualifying what happened in polling stations on Sunday as a “slap in the face”, “a humiliating defeat”, etc. etc. It was all a little reminiscent of May 10^th 1981, when François Mitterrand beat Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to become the first left-wing President of the Fifth Republic – and some alarmist commentators saw Soviet tanks rolling down the Champs Elysées!

 

In reality, all that has happened is that Emmanuel Macron’s party En Marche and its allies (“Ensemble” as it is now calls itself) has simply lost its parliamentary majority. Certainly a shock for a party that won a handsome overall majority in the 2017 parliamentary elections, but the Ensemble alliance remains by far the largest group in the Assemblée Nationale with 245 out of 577 seats. The “Républicains” who pride themselves on being a “republican right-wing party”, as opposed to Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement Nationale (National Rally), have 61 seats. On the hard left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s “La France Insoumise” (LFI or Unbowed France as it usually called in English speaking media) won 83, and in its recently formed alliance with the Socialists, the Greens, and the Communists boasts 131 seats. The real shock to the system came from a highly unexpected and unpredicted 89 seats won by Marine Le Pen’s hard right National Rally. Le Pen herself was re-elected in her constituency in the North of France with 61% of the vote. Ironically, it was the spokesperson of her party who summed up the situation most appropriately when she said in a Monday morning interview that “Parliament looks a lot more like France than it did before”.

 

And indeed, no commentator seems to have made the point that, despite an abstention rate of over 50%, it is perhaps no bad thing that France’s lower house of parliament now reflects a far wider spectrum of opinion than it did before. On the face of it therefore, this is not a very different situation from that which prevails in many comparable European countries where it is rare for any one party or electoral grouping to enjoy an overall majority and compromises are required to implement a programme of government. France’s politics however, by their history and tradition, are far are more confrontational and not at all used to compromise. Reviewing only the history of the Fifth Republic, there have been two periods of “cohabitation”, the first between 1986 and 1988 under President Mitterrand and the second from 1997 to 2002 under President Chirac. A situation akin to that of the U.S when an elected President faces a hostile Congress. During these two periods, the relationship between the President and the majority party in parliament was more of a permanent stand-off than anything else, with, in both cases, the President trying hard to prevent the parliamentary majority from implementing its policies and the majority party trying hard to minimise the power of the President. Since the seven-year presidential term was replaced by a five-year term in 2002, running concurrently with the term of the Assemblée Nationale (but not the upper house (Sénat) which has a different electoral cycle) Presidents Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron, from 2017 until today, have enjoyed an overall majority in the lower house. Emmanuel Macron’s idea in 2017 was that by combining elements of the moderate right and the moderate left into a broad centre party, that he called En Marche, the country would be governed in line with the wishes of the majority of voters and that the extremists would be relegated to the political fringes.  

 

As I wrote in a previous post (The extremes fight back – April 20th 2022) it has not turned out like that at all. The first warning that governing from the centre and for the centre was not going according to plan was the emergence in the autumn of 2018 of the often violent “gilets jaunes” revolts of the left behind, the disaffected and the working poor. It was not clear at the time where the political sympathies of the movement lay. Some thought on the extreme right, some on the extreme left. Any gilet jaune who tested the political waters by trying to channel the movement in one political direction or another was promptly howled down. The election results of June 19th go a long way to answering the question: the gilets jaunes clearly came from both ends of the political spectrum and have now found some representation in parliament. Once again, Le Pen’s National Rally has 89 MPs and the hard left LFI 83. The shock for many commentators is that for once, a very large range of France’s different communities, young and old, comfortably paid executives and lowly workers, public and private sector employees, urban and rural dwellers, can now consider that they have some degree of representation in the Assemblée Nationale.  

 

How all this will play out in the coming weeks and months is very uncertain. In all logic, political battles could now be fought out in parliament rather than in the streets. Now that all sections of society have some level of representation, pension reform, for instance, could be negotiated first and foremost among the political parties rather than with the unions, whose main legitimacy is in the public sector, which has the most generous pension system and is therefore, quite naturally, the most resistant to change. But in a country that prides itself on being “logical”, the logic of compromise is not very much in evidence! The heated debates, not to say mud-slinging, between winners and losers on election night are not encouraging. President Macron, in an attempt to gauge attitudes of the political parties, has just invited them all for consultations and almost all have emerged from the Elysée Palace announcing that they do not intend to enter into any coalition and even less to a government of national unity.  LFI’s programme is indeed so radical that is hard to imagine their MPs compromising on even those measures that would be favourable to their electorate. Readiness to compromise cannot be expected from Le Pen’s National Rally either, even more so as their MPs see themselves as long time victims of the political system and are triumphant at winning 89 seats in the Assemblée Nationale. The radicality of these two parties at the extremes of the political spectrum is also fostered by the two-stage voting system in France, something that is not always appreciated within the country, let alone outside it.  Contrary to the British first past the post (FPTP) system, with which it is often wrongly compared, the first round eliminates all but two or three candidates and only the second elects the candidate with the most votes. Voters whose candidate is eliminated in the first round can only choose therefore between what is on offer in the second and often choose by default, spoil their ballot paper or abstain. The system was designed precisely to channel voters towards the centre ground of politics and away from the extremes. But for the first time, many of those who voted Le Pen or Mélenchon in the presidential election were able to vote for a candidate of their choice in the second round of the parliamentary elections, given the 60 duels between LFI and the National Rally, explaining to some extent the  large number of seats won by both parties: many right wing or even centre right candidates will have voted RN to keep out LFI and vice versa, in the same way that in the presidential election, many left-wing voters voted  Macron to keep out Le Pen.

 

 

But even more moderate parties like the Républicains have been unusually virulent in their opposition to the President and have said that they will stay in opposition. It is possible of course that the feverish statements on election night will give way to calmer and more rational behaviour as the media spotlight dims and the 577 members of the Assembly meet and work together in the corridors and committee rooms of power. Only if all-round intransigeance were to persist, the President could use the powers he has to dissolve the Assemblée Nationale and organise fresh elections, although it is difficult to see how they would return a substantially different result. Unless therefore compromises can be found, France could be heading for the situation prevalent in other Latin countries, like Spain, Italy or Romania, or, harking back to its own history, the “revolving door” governments of the Fourth Republic in which shaky coalitions were made and unmade in quick succession and any meaningful reform proved elusive.

 

It remains a mystery that Macron did not involve himself more directly in the election campaign, defending his governments’ record, countering the outlandish claims of his opponents that he would continue to “tear down” France’s welfare system and urging voters to give him the powers to continue the sensible, middle of the road policies that he has always advocated. But now that he has landed himself in a hole from which he will struggle to extricate himself, his only choice seems to be to initiate and practise the type of compromise common in comparable countries but that with France’s confrontational politics will be no easy task.  To prevent many of the largely beneficial measures of his first term being neutered or reversed, he must now use his considerable political skills to reach out and negotiate balanced compromises, starting with those MPs and parties closest to him before, perhaps, going further. If he were to succeed, he would leave a positive  - and lasting - legacy to his country.

Shifting the blame !

 While a British minister declared the other day that Boris Johnson was in “yellow card territory” over allegations of partying during lockdown, the French satirical weekly “Le Canard Enchaîné” in its latest edition, promptly held up a red card to the French police for their chaotic and heavy-handed crowd management on the night of the Champions League final at the Stade de France in Paris. And that is not the whole story by far. The French authorities in general and Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior in particular, have since engaged in a momentous exercise of shifting the blame. After the “incidents” at the entrance to the Stade de France, during which many Liverpool fans were prevented from getting into the stadium, delaying the kick-off by over 30 minutes, the message consistently pumped out by the French authorities has been that the Liverpool fans had only themselves to blame by turning up late and trying to get into the stadium without tickets or with counterfeit tickets.  On Monday morning, after a hastily convened meeting of the organisers at Stade de France, ministry officials and senior police officers, the Minister gave a press conference in which, while apologising for the chaos, he went even further in the blame game by claiming that the Liverpool fans were responsible for a “organised fraud on an industrial scale” to the tune of 30 000 to 40 000 fake tickets.

 

For anyone wearily familiar with the French tendency to blame the British or, as they always say, even if, for once, the description was accurate, “les anglais”, for many things, particularly in relation to football, it was interesting to hear the other side of the story on a BBC radio news programme on Sunday morning.  Many Liverpool fans reported that they had been prevented from getting into the stadium because there weren’t enough gates open and that the automatic turnstiles didn’t work; many complained of police “twitchiness”, others of being sprayed with tear gas – an accusation duly substantiated by numerous short video extracts on social and even mainstream media. Others said that they had been surrounded and mugged by local youths, variously described as “thugs” and “gangs”, both before and after the match, when the police had largely disappeared.

 

 

Herein seems to lie one of the keys to the disorders that occurred and of which Liverpool fans, far from being the instigators, were largely the victims. The police “twitchiness” and readiness to spray tear gas on fans waiting at the turnstiles seems to have been caused by the presence of large numbers of local youths who took advantage of the technical hitches and long queues to jostle unsuspecting fans and try and steal tickets and phones; some were captured on video climbing over the high railings to enter the stadium. The same youths also seem to have preyed on fans leaving the ground after the match, carrying out muggings and robberies. It was subsequently reported that 100 people were arrested and taken into police custody. By Monday morning, 20 were still being held. None of them were English. The next day, the news came that six people, all of them French, had been charged with mugging and robbery and would appear in court.

 

 

A contributing factor to the presence of so many local youths wanting to watch the match in the stadium may have been the fact that the Real Madrid star striker, Karim Benzema, was playing that night. Benzema, one of the most talented strikers of his generation, is a bit of an outlier among French professional footballers. He was born in a poor suburb of Lyon of Algerian parents. Talent spotted at an early age, he entered the First Division Olympique Lyonnais training centre before graduating quickly to the first team and helping the club win a number of trophies in France before transferring to Real Madrid in 2005, where he is now the team captain and one of the artisans of its recent string of successes. However, although he played for the French national team early in his career, his attachment to France has often been in question and contributed to his being dropped from the team for a fairly long period. To the disappointment and disbelief of his many fans, he was not selected for the French squad that won the World Cup in 2018.  One of the problems for the national coach is that he has never concealed his emotional allegiance to his Algerian origins and has consistently and conspicuously abstained from singing the French national anthem at the start of international matches. Such attitudes have come in for a lot of criticism, especially from right-wing politicians who have always had an axe to grind about immigration from former French colonies in North Africa, particularly Algeria. Didier Deschamps, the French national coach, stated that he left Benzema out of the squad in 2018 on “purely sporting grounds” but Benzema himself went on record as saying that he believed Deschamps had yielded to the pressure of “racists”. However, given his sporting performances at Real Madrid it was difficult for Deschamps not to recall him, which he has duly done, and he will undoubtedly be in the squad for the next World Cup in Qatar, where France will attempt to retain its world title. Away from the pitch, Benzema has also been embroiled in a couple of court cases, one of which involved the attempted blackmail of a former team-mate that earned him a one-year suspended sentence.

 

In short, the combination of pure talent and a transgressive, anti-establishment streak has made him into somewhat of an idol for second and third generation immigrants of North African origin in France and he enjoys a huge following on social media.

 

There is absolutely no suggestion of course that Benzema even suspected what was going on outside the stadium as he was preparing to lead his team onto the pitch for the most prestigious final in European football. But his presence at such a high-profile match may well have been an additional magnet for his many followers among the disaffected young men living in the area around the Stade de France. Interestingly, no disorders of this magnitude have been reported at previous football or rugby matches or concerts which are regularly staged in this stadium.

 

It has emerged this week that the Ministry of the Interior was warned about possible “public order disturbances” and the “circulation of fake tickets” three days before the match. A strike on one of the metro lines leading to the stadium as well as the technical problems with scanning tickets at the turnstiles probably set up the conditions for the chaotic scenes around the stadium in the run-up to the match. However, admitting to frequent lawlessness in the areas around the stadium, or that the police were  heavy-handed and clumsy in their handling of the crowds or even, however obliquely mentioned, that the integration “of certain populations”  is still a  big problem around Paris and other large cities, would be unthinkable for the French authorities, just two weeks before crucial parliamentary elections in which the radical left-wing alliance headed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the far right Rassemblement National of Marine le Pen seem likely win many more seats than they previously held.

 

In the circumstances, it was far more expedient to lay the blame at the door of English football fans who in general do not enjoy a favourable image in French public opinion. We have learned more recently that the French government, in an attempt to mend fences and make up for publicly uttering manifest untruths in the days after the match, has sent three English-speaking police officers to Liverpool to gather evidence of wrongdoing and allow fans to lodge formal complaints before the French courts.  

 

Be that as it may, once the media circus has moved on, vox populi will be happy to conclude that the whole uproar was caused by “English” football fans up to their usual tricks!

 

The extremes fight back !

 Five years ago, Emmanuel Macron, a political novice, won the French Presidency by a large margin over the extreme right-wing Marine Le Pen. This widely applauded political feat consisted in combining the moderate wing of the Socialist party, widely split during the Hollande Presidency, with the moderate wing of the Républican party into a “radical centrist” movement. In the ensuing parliamentary elections, Macron’s infant party “En Marche” won a decisive majority in the “Assemblée Nationale” the lower house of parliament and Macron formed his first government with political talent poached from both the socialists and the “Républicains”. This, Macron claimed, was in essence the centre ground of politics in which sensible politicians could develop sensible policies that infighting among the main political parties had prevented for too long. And that these policies would benefit a large majority of French voters. An idea that sounded a lot like Giscard d’Estaing’s theory that 2/3 of the French want to be governed from the centre and that he theorised in a book called “Démocratie Française” in 1976! The extremes of the left and the right would, the theory goes, be relegated to the fringes and the renewed centre encompass a large majority of voters.

 

Five years later, after the first round of the presidential election in which Macron is standing for a second term, it has become clear that all has not gone according to plan. Even though Macron increased his first-round score from 24% to 28%, Marine le Pen has increased hers by four percentage points too and, above all, Jean-Luc Mélenchon a former socialist, now much further the left, at the head of a party called “La France Insoumise” (that most Anglo-Saxon media translate as “Unbowed France”) has run a close third at 22%. Adding in the 7% of Eric Zemmour an upstart extreme right-wing polemicist and a few marginal figures on the hard right and the hard left, the extremist vote is now well over 50% of those who voted, with an abstention rate of 25%. Although Macron still has a good chance of winning a second term, the race will be tighter than it was in 2017, perhaps a lot tighter, and Marine le Pen has never been closer to becoming France’s next President.

 

The obvious conclusion that can be drawn from this picture is that Emmanuel Macron has not yet convinced a majority of the French that France is better off governed from the centre, or that he is the best person for the job, or both. In a country that is far more sensitive to the distribution of wealth than its creation, and where voters are quick to scapegoat either the “rich” or “immigrants” for their perceived predicament, Macron’s first move in 2017 to emasculate the wealth tax went down badly in many quarters and tarred him with the label of “president of the rich” that he has never been able to shake off. The “gilets jaunes” revolt, that started in the autumn of 2018, was sparked by a rise in fuel prices aimed to reduce carbon emissions but was considered grossly unfair by many people in rural areas who need one or two cars to get around. It morphed into a lasting revolt against the “Parisian elite” of which Macron, a former investment banker, was seen as the ultimate incarnation. During his five-year mandate, a number of cruel murders by Islamic terrorists of a priest, church worshippers and a schoolteacher have highlighted once again the dangers of radical Islam and the issue of security, that didn’t appear to be on Macron’s radar, and has drawn attention once again to the dire situation of some neighbourhoods around large cities in which Islamism is making increasing inroads.

 

As a result of Macron raiding the traditional parties of the right and the left for the talent necessary to help him govern, the parties concerned have seen their substance sucked out of them and have imploded. Valérie Pécresse of the Républicains, who looked initially as if she might be a decent match for Macron (see my previous post, “Let battle commence”) ran a lacklustre campaign and polled under 5% of the votes. Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris but carrying the banner of the Socialist Party, polled under 2%. And these are the two parties who, between them, governed France in various capacities from 1981 to 2017. This is more than just an electoral setback; it is the clearest indication yet that voters have abandoned them.  Most commentators put this down to Macron, who has skilfully siphoned off their best talent. There is certainly a degree of truth in this, but it can also be argued that if the two main French parties had proved able to resolve their internal divisions, put French public finances on an even keel, reduce unemployment and generally help create greater prosperity for all, in an era of European integration and globalisation, they would not be in the dire situation they find themselves in now.  It can even be argued that the French economy has never really recovered from Francois Mitterrand’s decision in 1981 to cut the retirement age from 65 to 60 at a stroke as well as the decision by the government of Lionel Jospin, a socialist disciple of Mitterrand and Prime Minister during the presidency of Jacques Chirac twenty years later, to introduce the 35-hour working week with no productivity strings attached but with massive subsidies to enable industry to adapt. Jacques Chirac, in power for 12 years, including five with a socialist Prime Minister, was singularly unable to do anything positive for the French economy. Neither the impulsive Nicholas Sarkozy, in power from 2007 to 2012, nor the hapless François Hollande in power from 2012 to 2017 were able to stop the rot in their respective parties and in the country. Seen against this background, the results on April 10^th are simply the end game of a slow but steady decline that has been going on for years.

 

This decline in support for the traditional parties of government has been accompanied by  the rise of protest figures like Eric Zemmour, who looked for a time as if he would take much of the protest vote from Marine Le Pen, until that is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed his obvious sympathies for Vladimir Putin and his autocratic regime. Ironically, Marine le Pen, while certainly not reneging on her anti- immigrant stance, has been able to pretend that she is less radical than Zemmour and wage a skilful and seemingly mainstream campaign focused on the bread-and-butter issue of cost of living, capitalising on the sharp increase in the prices of fuel and basic food stuffs.  Both she and Mélenchon have promised a series of seemingly painless quick fixes of subsidies and handouts to alleviate the “pain and “anger” of those who consider themselves hard done by.

 

 

And yet there can be little doubt that over the past five years, gilets jaunes and COVID notwithstanding, Macron’s unglamorous but long overdue policies have put the French economy on a firmer footing for the first time in many years. Despite ballooning deficits, largely due to the “whatever it takes” policy during the pandemic, he has cut taxes for industry and consumers, unclogged the labour market, invested successfully in apprenticeships and vocational training schemes, made a start in reducing inbuilt inequalities in the public education system and started to bring down unemployment. France appears attractive once again for business investment and wealth creation both from inside and outside the country. Unfortunately for him, he is given little credit for this by voters, especially young voters who are seemingly put off by his sometimes aloof manner and more attracted to fiery diatribes from the likes of Mélenchon on the hard left or Marine le Pen on the hard right.

 

On the evening of April 24^th, we shall find out  whether a majority of voters is prepared to give Macron another five years to show that the economy can continue its revival and bring greater prosperity to a greater number or whether, on the contrary, they will blame him and others for their hardships, perceived and otherwise, and entrust the future of their country to an untested populist, a mini Ms. Trump, sympathetic to the Euro-sceptic views of Hungary’s Orban and Poland’s Law and Justice Party and  onetime admirer of Vladimir Putin.

 

France’s immediate future as a respected power in Europe and the G7 and leader of a more forceful EU will depend on their verdict.

 

 

Let battle commence !

 With less than three months to go before the first round of voting in Frances’s presidential election, the campaign is at last starting to look interesting. Although this interest does not extend to the left-wing parties, who are still hopelessly split between seven candidates, the right-wing party of the “Republicains” seems at last to have got its act together and its designated candidate, Valérie Pécresse, is starting to look like she may offer a serious challenge to President, and not yet officially candidate, Macron.

 

In almost two hours of a of a wide-ranging interview on the rolling news network, France Info, the other day, Valérie Pécresse was able to outline her programme, putting forward a cogent set of policies that show big differences with the largely populist ones of all her rivals and certain differences with Macron’s, as well as pointing up some weak points in his record.

 

It is predictable of course that a candidate from a right-wing party will criticise the huge run-up in public debt for which Macron’s government is responsible and the attendant danger of a serious financial crisis once interest rate starts to rise. Contrary however to previous candidates from her camp, like Sarkozy in 2007 or Fillon in 2017, Pécresse did not simply say that the solution was to slash civil service jobs in order to cut public spending but spelled out what public services she would boost and where the cuts should be made to pay for them.  More jobs for the police, the judiciary, hospitals and schools, and much less for what she called administrative overlaps - the number of procedures and regulations that duplicate each other at the many levels of the French administration and that require a small army of civil servants to manage. On the strength of what she claims she has already achieved in the Ile de France (the greater Paris metropolitan area) that she has run since 2015, and where she was re-elected last May, she attacked the repetitive administrative hoops that any applicant for a subsidy, planning permission or benefit has to jump through. And there is indeed, as has been attested in any number of official reports, a crying need for a streamlining of the multi-layered French administration that has existed for so long and that the so-called regional reform of 2013 has tended to exacerbate rather than simplify. During his term of office, President Hollande even set up a “simplification commission” whose results have sunk without trace. And it is true that Macron has done little over the past five years to improve the situation. 

 

She also made her view clear that nuclear power would continue to be the main source of France’s electricity for the foreseeable future but that she would also push for more renewable sources in the energy mix, again as she says she has done in the Ile de France, in which, it should be noted, there are no nuclear power plants!

 

It was also interesting to hear her answer one pensioner who phoned in to complain that his pension had not kept up with inflation, that with €288 billion of public debt, France could simply not afford to raise pensions until there had been a root and branch reform of the pension system. Only by raising the retirement age to 65, she claimed, could France relieve the demographic pressure that, in the absence of reform, would incur even more debt or drive pensions down. Pension reform has been France’s most intractable reform for the last 30 years, as every President since Jacque Chirac has found, and it was refreshing to hear a candidate for the presidency refrain from economic populism. It was also a swipe at a serious blemish on Macron’s record, who has failed to reform the pension system in line with his bold promise of 2017. The reform’s collapse amid endless demonstrations and strikes cannot simply be put down to the onset of Covid but also to the fact that it was ill thought out, badly presented and antagonised too many vested interests at once. Pécresse will undoubtedly dwell more on this point as the campaign progresses.

 

In a nod towards to more radically minded voters who have not deserted the party to the extremes of Marine Le Pen or Eric Zemmour, and in an attempt to win them back, she advocated not only temporary prisons to house offenders sentenced to short prison terms but also, in a more conciliatory approach, measures to support school dropouts and make every attempt to get then back on the ladder of education and training. It sounded a lot like Tony Blair’s old mantra “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime”. And although she cannot reasonably disagree with Macron’s policy of reducing class sizes in primary school, she can legitimately point to the still high number of school dropouts and the despair and lawlessness in some blighted suburbs from which they too often come.

 

Finally, to show that she also has a grasp of foreign policy, she mentioned that she had studied Russian as a student and worked in the French embassy in Moscow as a trainee at ENA. This gives her an insight, she claimed, into what makes the Russians tick – and that they only respect strength in an adversary. A timely reminder as Vladimir Putin throws his weight around in Europe and whom Macron is often accused of trying to appease.

 

It is easier of course to criticize than to act. But what her interview showed was that she was not afraid to face some divisive issues, that Macron has either failed to face or to solve, and propose solutions that sound sensible, backing them up with a record of competence and good management that she is generally credited with at the head of the Ile de France region.

 

So far in the presidential campaign, Macron, who is almost certainly a candidate for a second five-year term but has not yet declared himself as such, has had an easy ride. With his opposition weak or divided or both, he has been able to skilfully manipulate the focus of media attention to his record in office and above all his grand vision for France’s future. In addition to his management of the pandemic, which is generally seen as creditable, he does have a record to defend on other issues too, and will be keen to do so, plucking it from the obscuring fog of the almost year-long gilets jaunes episode, followed almost immediately by the arrival of Covid 19.

 

Since 2017 however, France has moved towards the right politically. The left, from which Macron emerged in the Hollande administration, has receded, largely though its own failings, into irrelevance.  Whether he can be described as someone who has “governed as a liberal conservative” (Ben Hall in the FT on December 29^th) or a “Surreptitious Socialist” (Charlemagne in “The Economist” in July 2021) Macron’s challenge in the forthcoming campaign will be to offer a centre-right defence of his record and a centre-right vision for the future, while not alienating the centre-left electorate who voted for him in 2017. Pécresse on the other hand, will have to defend her own centre-right platform, while not alienating the further-right leaning voters of Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour.

 

Assuming for the time being that the two extreme right wing candidates are able to gather enough signatures to stand but then end up cancelling each other out in the first round of voting on April 10^th, letting Pécresse come out narrowly ahead, assuming too that the gaggle  of left-wing candidates poll little more than 5% each, the middle ground, where all presidential elections have been won since 1958, will be fought over in the run off by two politicians with similar backgrounds, experience and vision. That may well turn out to be the main attraction of the 2022 campaign!

The beginning of the end for Marine le Pen ?

 Maybe it’s wishful thinking but I can’t help feeling that the unusual and unpleasant hectoring to which Marine le Pen subjected her voters on Sunday evening after the publication of the results in the departmental and regional elections is an indication that her strategy of “detoxifying” her party, the “Rassemblement National”, has failed.

 

True, Sunday’s elections recorded an unprecedented number of abstentions: only a third of registered voters went to the polls. Many undoubtedly remember that the municipal elections last March, without masks nor hand sanitizer, were probably a factor in spreading the Coronavirus. This time, there was also a glitch in the distribution of electoral propaganda that deprived many voters of candidates’ biographies and programmes. The beginning of summer and the end of the curfew may also have tempted many to take a long-delayed weekend trip or visit family and friends they hadn’t seen for more than year.

 

All that being said, the “Rassemblement National” could usually count on an extra dose of voter motivation. Last Sunday however, they stayed away as much as anyone else. And it was particularly damaging this time as the party had ambitions to conquer power in four or five French regions. But it won’t happen. The RN was about 19 points down compared to the regional election in 2015 and it now look as if it will not win even one of the 15 regions next Sunday, although the PACA (Provence Alpes Cote d’Azur) region may be a close call.

 

As I wrote in a previous post, Marine Le Pen has put a lot of time and effort since her failed presidential campaign of 2017 into attempts to jettison her party’s  antisemitic and xenophobic elements and turn it into a presentable and credible party of government: a strategy described by most commentators as “detoxification” (dédiabolisation in French) The idea was to turn the party from a protest, anti-elite, movement into a structured party with a coherent right-wing oriented policy programme, able to win and exercise power, first in regional executives and then in another pitch at the presidency.  Many of the party’s traditional gripes about the Euro, “uncontrolled immigration” and the “creeping islamisation” of French society have been toned down. The French are no longer threatened with leaving the European Union; previous talk of ditching the Euro and reinstating the “national currency” has disappeared. In the recent debate about whether Covid-related debt should be gradually repaid or summarily abandoned, Marine Le Pen defended the orthodoxy as opposed to those, particularly on the far left, like Jean-Luc Melenchon, who argued for the more radical solution.

 

But the crucial question is surely this: do Marine Le Pen’s voters want the party to become a respectable and potential party of government, or do they want to keep it as a radical protest movement? The question has arisen more trenchantly since the gilets jaunes protests from the end of 2018 through most of 2019. Many still remember how the French communist party threw away its influence and support by going mainstream.  It too used to be the party of protest but was gradually reduced to political impotence once François Mitterrand had coaxed it into an alliance in the run-up to his presidential victory in 1981 and subsequently invited some of its leading figures into government. Interestingly, sociologists who have studied the gilets jaunes movement have found as many protestors from the radical right as from the radical left.  Once again it would seem, like so many times in French history, real protest has moved onto the streets and no longer needs a political party to embody it. In addition, Marine le Pen herself has still not regained much credibility after her failed campaign in 2017 and particularly her disastrous TV debate with Emmanuel Macron. And do her supporters really believe, as she put it on Sunday evening, that Macron’s government “is leading France into chaos”? Surely not.

 

My conclusion is that many RN voters, at best, do not understand and at worst, reject, the attempts to drag their party into the mainstream. We shall see how they respond to their leader’s bad-tempered injunctions to get out and vote next Sunday but given the poor results in the first round of voting and the “republican” alliances that other parties have put in place to keep the RN out of power, even a larger turnout and a greater share of the vote is unlikely to make a big difference.

 

I have always thought that a second failed attempt by Marine le Pen to run for the presidency in 2022 would spell the end of her political career. It now looks as if the day of reckoning with her party could come even earlier than that.

 

 

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.