34 Saturday April 9 2022 | the timesComment
W
hen the price of diesel reached €1.40 a
litre in 2018, Nathalie Bouchaib had
had enough. A care home assistant in
Dreux, west of Paris, she put on a
yellow vest and joined hundreds of
thousands of other provincials protesting against what
she perceived as President Macron’s failure to
understand the difficulties of ordinary families. “And do
you know what we got for our troubles?” she said while
putting her weekly shopping in the boot of her black
Citroen in the car park of E.Leclerc supermarket in the
rundown Bâtes district of Dreux this week. “Tear gas in
our faces. That’s what we got. We wanted to tell
Macron that we were struggling to make ends meet,
and his answer was to send out the riot police.”
On Sunday Bouchaib, 54, will vote in the presidential
election with diesel topping €1.80 and her resentment
towards the head of state greater than ever. She has yet
to decide who will get her vote but it will not be
Macron. “He has humiliated us, treated us with
disdain,” she said, citing a litany of complaints that
includes the cost of living, the police response to the
yellow-vest protests and the obligation for health
workers and care home staff to be vaccinated against
the coronavirus.
Macron probably hoped voters would forget such
gripes in gratitude for his efforts to bring peace to
Ukraine. He has had at least 17 telephone calls and one
meeting with President Putin since mid-December.
That does not seem to be the case. Renaud Dély, a
commentator with France Info, the rolling news radio
station, said the electorate only appeared concerned by
the war insofar as it affected the price of petrol.
It is a truism that France is divided. It has been split
for centuries, between provincials and Parisians,
intellectuals and labourers, peasants and nobles. Ever
since the Revolution battle lines have been shaped by
the confrontation between left and right. For much of
that time, they fought it out in the streets. In recent
decades, the ballot box sufficed. On one side were
centre-right leaders like General Charles de Gaulle in
the 1960s, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in the 1970s,
Jacques Chirac in the 1990s, or Nicolas Sarkozy, who
was in office between 2007 and 2017. On the other were
the Socialists, François Mitterrand, president between
1981 and 1995, and François Hollande, from 2012 to 2017.
Yet the fault lines have shifted over half a decade to
open up a gap at the heart of French society that is
fraught with danger. Macron says the new division is no
longer left-right but between a progressive camp,
embodied by him, and populists led by Marine Le Pen,
the leader of the right-wing National Rally. She argues
much the same, albeit with different terms. The
election, she said this week, would be a fundamentalWhoever wins the
election, France’s
pressure cooker is
ready to explode
minister, triumphing in elections last weekend, and
President Vucic of Serbia, his political bedfellow,
scoring a similar success, Le Pen feels the wind is in her
sails. Could she win? Unlikely, if the pollsters are to be
believed, although it can no longer be discounted. It
would be the biggest upset at least since 1981, when
Mitterrand won power after allying his Socialist Party
with the French communists.
Yet even if Macron wins a second term his troubles
will be far from over. They might get worse. Despite his
intellectual prowess, his grasp of policy detail and his
high-flown rhetoric, he remains anathema to millions
of French people who seem willing to contest his
choices in the street if they fail to stop him in the
polling booth. Could his return to power produce a
repeat of the yellow-vest movement that led to months
of demonstrations in favour of a multitude of demands,
ranging from cheaper petrol to direct democracy and
even, at one stage, an overthrow of the regime? Could
the movement take a more threatening form?
Christèle Lagier, a lecturer in political science at
Avignon University in southern France, said: “When
you talk to voters you often hear this idea that the
elected representatives are far removed from the people
they are supposed to represent, that there is a big
distance between the elites and the citizens. It is a
source of much frustration. And when frustrationschoice between “the nation and globalisation”. The risk
for France is that the gulf between these camps is so
wide, the mutual incomprehension so deep, that neither
will accept the victory of the other. In a country with a
history of political violence, the prospect is alarming.
On one side of the divide is a solid block of well-
educated and well-off voters, mostly city dwellers who
tend to work for international companies, master
Franglais — the art of spattering English words around
French conversations — watch Netflix, view the EU as
a force for peace and prosperity and think nothing of
paying €1.20 for a baguette at their local artisan baker.
Macron is their unquestioned champion, having
annihilated other mainstream leadership pretenders
from both the Socialists and Republicans. On the other
side are the likes of Bouchaib, people who tend to live
and work in small provincial towns, who have not
spoken English since school, who watch French soap
operas like Plus Belle La Vie or Ici Tout Commence, who
view Paris as distant and Brussels as another planet,
and who prefer to pay €0.29 for a baguette at E.Leclerc.
Their votes are likely to scatter on Sunday. Many will
back Le Pen. Others will plump for Jean-Luc
Mélenchon, a lefwinger who makes Jeremy Corbyn
look moderate, or Éric Zemmour, the anti-Islam pundit
and political novice trying to become the French
Donald Trump, or even a range of minor Trotskyist and
nationalist contenders. Although these candidates come
from across the spectrum, they have much in common:
a distrust of Nato, a history of benevolence towards
Putin, euroscepticism and a willingness to countenance
Covid-19 conspiracy theories.
Le Pen told The Times that France should maintain
“equidistance” between Russia and the US when
questioned after the invasion of Ukraine. Such a shift
would cause a diplomatic earthquake in the West at a
time when it is striving to maintain a united front
against Russia but there is no evidence that this would
alarm voters in France, roughly half of whom are likely
to back an anti-Nato candidate this weekend. None of
the dozen or so journalists present in Hénin-Beaumont,
Le Pen’s stronghold in northern France, as she
explained that she wanted Paris to move away from
Washington and closer to Moscow, even bothered to
report her views, they seemed so banal.
Macron may have entered the election as an
overwhelming favourite but the race appears tighter
than he expected. He defeated Le Pen by 33 percentage
points in the second round head-to-head of the 2017
election and was 20 points ahead in the polls a month
ago. The gap is now down to less than eight points. A
couple of recent surveys have suggested it may even be
three or four points, which is within the margin of error.
With Viktor Orban, Hungary’s populist primeweekend essay
Progressives versus populists has replaced left versus right as a dangerous new
fault line in France, says Adam Sage. With the nation’s tempers fraying and
Marine Le Pen closing the gap on President Macron in the polls, some experts
have issued warnings about a contested result and potentially violent aftermath
Millions of
French people
seem willing
to contest
Macron’s
choices in the
street if they
fail to stop
him in the
polling booth
“