The Economist April 9th 2022 BriefingThe French presidential election 17cluding 48% of the Green vote and 49% of
Mr Mélenchon’s, will abstain or spoil their
ballot papers rather than support Mr Mac
ron against her.
No longer seeming beyond the pale is
Ms Le Pen’s great success. Some of it is cos
metic; changing the name of a party hardly
changes its essence (though there have
been some expulsions). As Gilles Finchel
stein and Raphaël Llorca note in a study for
the Fondation JeanJaurès, a thinktank,
Ms Le Pen’s written programme is still fo
cused on immigration, “Islamism”, and
“national preference” for the French. The
fact that Mr Zemmour makes the running
on such matters, though, allows her to
speak about them less, and to seem more
moderate in the process.
She has, on the face of it, moderated her
stance on the eu. She no longer talks of
abandoning the euro. But her vision of Eu
rope is a long way from Mr Macron’s. She
looks for inspiration not to its centre, but
to its edge, in the form of Hungary’s “illib
eral democrat” Viktor Orban, a thorn in
Brussels’ side (see Europe section). After
Mr Orban was reelected on April 3rdMs Le
Pen tweeted a photo of herself beaming
alongside him and the message: “When the
people vote, the people win!” She calls Mr
Macron “the president of chaos”.
By concentrating on the cost of living,
pictures with her many cats on social me
dia and a nationalist promise to restore or
der as a “president of French unity”, Ms Le
Pen is offering an improbably calming ap
peal. She has positioned herself as a leader
close to the people and their concerns—
something Mr Macron has never managed.
Rural voters respond to this positioning
well, with 32% saying they will back her in
the first round, compared with 12% in the
Paris region. Finegrained analysis of last
time’s results in southwest France by Jé
rôme Fourquet, a political analyst, shows
that her vote was particularly strong in for
mer agricultural communes, places where
vineyards have given way to new housing
estates and outoftown shopping centres.
They are places where concerns about
identity, globalisation and change are easi
ly played to, and Ms Le Pen is campaigning
there accordingly.
In “Révolution”, a book he published as
a candidate in 2016, Mr Macron himself
warned about the danger of neglecting this
“peripheral France”. “If we don’t pull our
selves together”, he wrote, “in five years or
in ten years the National Front will be in
power.” But on taking power he ignored his
own warning.
In 2018 it was in this cardependent se
mirural France, where McDonald’s drive
throughs sit next to newly built round
abouts decked out with kitsch sculpture,
that people first put on highvisibility jack
ets—gilets jaunes—to complain about the
way in which an increase in carbon tax
ation had pushed up the price of motor
fuel. Their protests spread throughout the
country. As French uprisings always do,
they evoked echoes of 1968, 1848 and 1789.
The government backed down.
It was the lowpoint of Mr Macron’s
presidency and a wakeup call. He has
since tried to put aside his imperious go
verning style and show that he can connect
with ordinary people. But nothing he has
done has provided a lasting bridge for the
gap between him and them. He has never
really shaken off his image as the “presi
dent of the rich” and embodiment of the
Parisian elite. Between the tramlines and the oxen
His policies, though, belie that image. By
introducing a flat tax of 30% on invest
ment income and ending the wealth tax in
favour of a lighter “mansion tax”, he has in
deed helped the rich. But France is no out
lier when it comes to poverty or inequality
of the sort that might explain an unusually
high protest vote. Jobs are not just more
plentiful; an expansion of apprenticeships
and training schemes is helping more
young people into work. During the pan
demic Mr Macron vowed to spend “what
ever it costs” to keep businesses going and
people in jobs, and he did, pushing the lev
el of public spending up from 55% to 59%
of gdpin 2021. To some extent, though, the
reward for success is to have it taken for
granted. Unemployment was the voters’
third biggest worry in 2017. Now it does not
make the top ten.
Instead, they worry about the cost of
living, where Ms Le Pen is focusing her ef
forts. Mr Macron, who since 2018 has
known better than most the political risk
of rising fuel costs, has subsidised petrol
prices and capped energyprice hikes. Ms
Le Pen goes further, promising to cut vat
on petrol and energy bills to 5.5%, to lowermotorway tolls and, for good measure, to
bring back the wealth tax. Some former
supporters are aghast at how leftwing her
programme is.
A centreright or centreleft party might
easily do much the same. But such has
been Mr Macron’s success at building a
broad centrist church, and so poor have
been the legacy parties' efforts to reestab
lish themselves, that there is no strong,
credible moderate opposition available. Mr
Macron’s vision of a realignment to bring
together progressive proEuropean cen
trists from the old left and right in order to
beat conservatives and nationalists of all
sorts has ended up legitimising the popu
list politics he promised to fight as the only
opposition left.
On April 2nd the Macron campaign held
a glitzy rally in a packed indoor sports are
na in La Défense, west of Paris. In front of a
crowd waving euflags as well as French
ones, Mr Macron warned that “the extrem
ist danger today is even greater than it was
a few months ago, a few years ago” and that
his victory was not guaranteed. Playing to
fear, rather than hope, is not his strong
suit. But as Roland Lescure, a deputy in Mr
Macron’s campaign team, points out, “Pan
demics and war don’t lend themselves eas
ily to optimistic politics.”
For all his faults, Mr Macron remains an
energetic, serious, ideasdriven leader
with a knack of defying expectations. “The
way he managed the pandemic was better
than we could have expected,” says Cindy,
an amateur marathon runner from Mont
pellier who did not vote for him in 2017 but
went to his rally in La Défense. Rasmane
Sawadogo, an accountant from Lille who
also travelled to Paris for the rally, points
approvingly to Mr Macron’s “energy, clair
voyance and pragmatism” over matters
such as Europe and nuclear power.
The lines on his face and grey in his hair
speak of the crises Mr Macron has faced in
the presidency. The less haughty tone he
has begun to adopt hints at lessons learned
from past mistakes. His campaign’s slo
gans are “Avec vous” (“With you”) and
“Nous tous” (“All of us”).
But the campaign—a toxic one, tinged
with genuine worries, halftruths, and out
right lies—is not helping him. Among oth
er things, a lack of serious policy debate
means that the specific policies on which
he is campaigning are unexamined, which
may make them harder to implement even
if his party and its smaller allies maintain
their majority in the legislative elections
set for June, especially if his victory over
Ms Le Pen is narrow. The change he prom
ised in 2016 is at best only half delivered,
and the strangely unifying insurgency that
brought him to power is illsuited to win
ning over the voters who remainuncon
vinced. Governing France couldturnout to
Picture this be even harder next time around.n