The Election in France

An up-close look at the French Presidential Election

There has long been a certain excitement about being an American in Paris. It is April in Paris right now. Ernest Hemingway called being there in the 1920s a "moveable feast." George Gershwin wrote an orchestral piece, An American in Paris. Gene Kelly starred in a movie with that name. 

College classmate Steven Wolfram has lived in Paris for the last three decades. Until his recent retirement he worked as a lawyer in the field of cross-border mergers and acquisitions. He follows U.S. and French politics.

Guest Post by Steven Wolfram

Perspective on the French Presidential Election and the Limits of French Populism

Intense international press coverage of the run-up to this Sunday’s final round of the French presidential election is a clear reflection that the vote is about a lot more than simply whether the liberal centrist Macron wins a second five-year term or whether--reminiscent of Trump in 2016— the far-right populist Marine Le Pen pulls off a surprise victory. At stake are no less than the future of the European Union, the integrity of NATO and whether France--one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—will continue to play a meaningful role in global affairs generally aligned with the UK and the US against Russia and China.

Against the background of Russia’s defiance of the rules-based post-WWII international order in its violent attack on Ukrainian sovereignty, a vote for Le Pen would bring solace to a beleaguered Putin. With the far-right at 32% (including Le Pen’s 23.2%) after the April 10 first round compared to Macron’s 28%, Vladimir has had no reason to give up hope. While Macron still holds a narrow lead in the polls--substantially reduced from his whopping 32% margin over Le Pen in 2017—Macron’s natural reserve of second-round voters on the center-right and left has been substantially reduced. The consequence is that Macron’s victory this time is heavily dependent on his carrying a substantial portion of the fickle far-left voters who brought Jean-Luc Mélenchon a strong third place at 22%—just behind Le Pen—in spite of a high abstention rate among voters 18-30 who otherwise chose the charismatic far-left candidate by impressive percentages. Can Le Pen take enough of an increasingly fluid far-left vote to deny Macron victory? To what extent, in contrast to 2017, will Mélenchon voters consider a vote for either Macron and Le Pen an impossible choice between the bubonic plague and cholera and simply stay home? Overall abstention in the 2022 first-round increased to 26% from 22.2% in 2017. Will fear of an extreme right-wing victory mobilize votes for Macron or, on the contrary, will that prospect help Le Pen mobilize possible latent support on the far-right?

Yes Vlad, this election seems still up for grabs. Wednesday’s single face-to-face debate four days ahead of the vote may prove crucial.

In spite of a seductive makeover to a softer image, Le Pen offers little change in substance from her populist extreme right-wing 2017 platform. Though she has dropped the idea of leaving the EU and the Euro, Le Pen is open about her eagerness for France to retreat within its borders and to pull up the drawbridge, to venture out only to strike alliances with EU members such as Hungary and Poland which openly challenge—as she does—the fundamental principal of supremacy of European over national law. To top off her foreign policy goals, Le Pen is advocating bringing the Russian wolf into the NATO chicken-coop after the end of the Ukraine conflict. And if her foreign policy platform were not sufficient cause for alarm, her domestic France-First, Make France Great Again agenda includes, among other populist measures, radical plans requiring constitutional amendments to crack down on immigration and to implement her promise of “priorité nationale” to limit access to medical, public housing and other social services for non-French citizens.

As with Trump and similar demagogic populists, Le Pen replaces real policymaking with slogan-laden cant featuring a series of promises without serious regard to whether she can deliver on them. While Macron as a traditional politician in the democratic mainstream accepts the notion of accountability and only promises what he believes he can deliver, Le Pen--with respect only for the form of serious policy--worries most about what she can say to mobilize her base, with very little concern about execution. As with Trump’s promise that Mexico would pay for The Wall, it is the message to a resentful and less-educated base that feels left behind that is paramount both for her and her followers, with the base caring much less about whether she will ultimately deliver. And if she fails to deliver, just like Trump, she will always find someone else to blame. As later discussed, it is only because of differences in French and US electoral laws, custom and culture that the Le Pen brand of populism may have less potency than that of Trump.

The finalists are the same as in 2017 in name as well as largely in substance. But the political dynamics this time around are remarkably different.

First, with Macron’s “neither left nor right” centrism again at work, the 2022 first round witnessed the final collapse of the center-right Gaullist party and the moderate left Socialist party which had together prior to 2017 largely dominated French politics since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958. Their disastrous first-round results in 2017 (20% for the Gaullist candidate and only 6.5% for the Socialist candidate) were just bad enough to permit Le Pen (with 21.3%) to eke into the run-off against Macron. The first-round this year was the coup de grâce, with the center-right Gaullist party reduced to a measly 4.7% and the Socialists to a pitiful 1.7%. While Macron increased his 2022 first-round vote to 28% from 24% in 2017, the near-extinction of the Gaullist center-right and the Socialists has substantially reduced the second-round reserve of “never Le Pen” votes that made possible his ultimate 2017 victory even without substantial far-left support from the Mélenchon base that in the end transformed what would have been a narrow win into a 66%-34% landslide.

Le Pen is now able to count on a safe second-round reserve of 9% represented by Eric Zemmour’s 7% ultra-national vote and the 2% vote for a minor sovereigntist candidate. Macron is only able to count with reasonable confidence on second-round support from a maximum of only just over 13% in the aggregate of “never Le Pen” votes from the remains of the Gaullist center-right party, the Socialists, the Communists and the Greens. Generous support from a solid portion of the disgruntled far-left is thus no longer just a “nice to have” for Macron but becomes essential to his path to victory.

The increased volatility of the far-left vote, together with its durability and increase in size (22% versus 17% in 2017), must thus be considered the second major change in the political landscape since 2017. Like the Sanders movement in 2016, the Mélanchon movement strongly appeals to the young and to lower-earning or unemployed urban blue-collar workers that Mélanchon has fired up with both a vision of a new Sixth Republic. It would replace the stodgy Fifth Republic of General de Gaulle and would be suffused with direct democracy through popular referenda and a strong constitutional commitment to saving the planet from climate change to be achieved in part by much higher taxation of the rich. Unlike the Sanders base, which never wandered from the Democratic Party, it is far less clear that the Mélanchon vote will accept returning to the fold as nearly as much as it ultimately did in 2017, when only 7% ended up voting for Le Pen in spite of the initial threat of a much higher number doing so. In 2022, the anger of young voters with their complacent elders—Macron’s strongest demographic—for failing to do enough about climate change and income inequality is more acute and comes on top of a widespread and deeply rooted virulent antipathy toward Macron—illustrated by the gilets jaunes movement—that has continued to flourish within the Mélenchon base. Even though the eloquent Mélenchon has vigorously urged his followers to provide “not a single vote to Le Pen," he has pointedly refrained from an explicit endorsement of Macron. How many Mélenchonists will ultimately go over to Le Pen is uncertain, but it is likely to be significantly higher than the 7% who did so in 2017. While a substantial portion of Mélenchonists can still be expected bring themselves to vote for Macron as the lesser of two evils, a significant portion of the rest may give way to the temptation just to stay home or vote a blank ballot.

The ultimate split in the Mélenchon vote will determine the outcome of the election. Not surprisingly, since the instant the first-round vote was announced on April 10, the two finalists—one extreme right and the other solidly centrist—have engaged in a strange ideologically acrobatic spectacle of competitive seduction of the far-left. Le Pen underscores her plans for financial support to counter the effect of inflation on family budgets and her proposal for no income tax on anyone under age 30. Echoing Mélenchon on the theme of direct democracy, Le Pen proposes to override representative democracy by submitting to popular referendum portions of her platform that require amendment to the Constitution or other reform. For his part, Macron immediately signaled his willingness to compromise on his planned reform for a minimum retirement age of 65 (down to 64, compared to 60 presently) and has been talking much more about what he has done and plans to do about climate change.

At the same time, with Zemmour out of the way, Le Pen has dialed her populist rhetoric way up in her effort to fire her base with visceral anti-Macron sentiment that she shares with the far-left. Macron has countered with dire warnings of economic devastation and capital flight that would result from Le Pen’s program and with acid reminders of Le Pen’s past association with Putin, including the indirect bank financing provided to her 2017 campaign through a Russian-controlled Czech bank. For good measure, he never misses an opportune moment to remind voters of her recommendation of the Russian Covid vaccine and Covid treatment with hydroxychloroquine. Macron has also targeted the significant block of Muslim voters who voted heavily for Mélenchon by highlighting Le Pen’s proposals to crack down on the wearing of traditional Muslim dress in public and to prohibit family regrouping in her immigration policy.

A third major difference from 2017, when Le Pen ran an awkward, “not ready for prime time” campaign that culminated in a disastrous second-round debate performance, is that Le Pen is a more able candidate who shows that she learned important lessons of gamesmanship from her earlier experience. In addition, with the passage of time and Biden now in the White House, she is no longer as burdened with her past association with Trump, whose 2016 election was generally poorly received in France across the political spectrum. She has demonstrated tactical agility, most notably in reshaping her image to become less unacceptable beyond her traditional base and in her managing the first-round competition on the far-right from Eric Zemmour. Rather than taking on Zemmour in frontal attack, she ably used him as a foil, letting him do most of the dirty-work of firing up, and even expanding, the hard-right with sharp, xenophobic zeal while she remained discreetly and single-mindedly focused on expanding her appeal beyond the far-right on other less ideological issues, such as consumer purchasing power. While Zemmour succeeded in broadening hard-right support among urban and comfortable suburban bourgeois voters outside Le Pen’s lower-class rural and exurban base, Le Pen played relatively warm and fuzzy, even to the point of vaunting her love of pets in her platform!

Fourthly, Macron no longer enjoys the advantage of being the clean-slate newcomer but is rather the incumbent. His personal style and his determination to reform the minimum retirement age and to pursue reduction of greenhouse gas through increase fuel taxes at the pump triggered the gilets jaunes movement and earned him a considerable degree of virulent enmity as the “President of the rich” on both the hard-right and far-left. Particularly in the two-week home stretch, Le Pen has doubled her efforts to tap into that enmity, hitting hard on Macron’s image as the smarty-pants, first-in-the class, Parisian elitist out of touch with, and insensitive to, the problems of the common men and women who wash at the end of the day. Though choosing their words carefully, she and her campaign have not shrunk from frequent reminders to the far-right and the far-left of Macron’s past as a Rothschild banker—a paradigm of the wealthy, elitist cosmopolite that rhymes conveniently with a dark trope lingering in the collective psyche of voters on both extremes. While recently put on the defensive by her history of mutual sympathy with Putin, she deftly pivoted to a pious condemnation of the Ukraine invasion. On substance, her dominant and effective “go to” issue has been the decline in consumer purchasing power.

Shot through with populism as the election may be, it is worth pausing on the eve of Wednesday’s crucial debate to note the ways in which French law, custom and culture nevertheless may serve to dilute French populist potency significantly below the toxicity of the Trump version:

1) The two-round structure of the election requiring an absolute majority to permit a candidate to assume the mantle of especially broad French presidential power is a critical difference. With a base representing only a minority of the electorate, Trump has never won the popular vote, much less an absolute majority. To win 50+% in France, even Le Pen recognizes that she has to moderate her tone and try to appeal beyond her base by at least appearing to move to the middle.

2) The “culture wars” that are the peculiar fuel for the Trump brand of populism around matters such as guns, abortion, sexual identity and school curricula are largely absent from French politics. Anti-Muslim feeling exists but is expressed not so much in religious terms as in the sentiment that the Muslim community is reluctant to accept integration into French society, in contrast to wave after wave of previous generations of Italian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Asian and Eastern European and Mediterranean Jewish immigrants. While a minority of traditionalist Catholics have stirred a noisy debate about non-traditional families, it is a marginal issue. Most other “culture war” issues that so distract the public discourse in the US are long-settled in France and of little interest to the electorate. Relatedly, the US spectacle of focusing on “family values” in campaigning, where the whole “happy family” has to be on full display, is totally foreign in France, where protection of the intimacy and freedom of private life is unanimous across the entire spectrum.

3) Radical as it might seem to a Trump populist, there is an expectation in France that political campaigns, and especially the presidential campaign, should focus on issues and not personalities. Jeb Bush was famously wrong in warning Trump that he could not insult his way to the White House. In contrast, while Le Pen can play freely on the anti-elitist theme and Mélenchon can attack the rich as energetically as he wants, no French candidate could come out ahead in constructing a campaign largely on Trump-style base, childish personal taunts (starting with Jeb, but running the whole gamut from Rubio, Fiorina, Cruz to Clinton and Biden.) The ultimate Trump populist tactic of campaigning without any written platform as he did in 2020 or ignoring the party platform as he did in 2016, would be unthinkable. Indeed, before every election, each candidate summarizes the key aspects of the candidate’s position in writing and these documents are mailed to every registered voter in time for reflection prior to the vote. Trump has proven that populism works a lot more easily when it isn’t reduced to writing that can be closely analyzed and challenged.

4) As Trump has demonstrated, populism also depends to a significant degree on showmanship to connect the candidate to the voter. In the US, relaxed limits on campaign finance facilitate the ability to put the candidate on the stage time and time again over a long period, regardless of any notion of parity among candidates. The candidates with the most resources can freely use them to maximum advantage. In contrast in France, there are strict limits on campaign financing and expenditures (no corporate contributions allowed and an overall expense cap of a little less than €17 million ($18.5 million) per candidate (plus €5 million more for the two-finalists)—a pittance by U.S. standards. Furthermore, there are strict requirements for aggregate equal time on all broadcast media (private and public) for each candidate. The Trump media show that so excites his base would be impossible to duplicate in France. 

5) Finally, I would venture to say that the potential for the success of Trump-style populism in France is limited by the strength and durability of the dominant French intellectual tradition of rationalism. No candidate could prosper as Trump has by denying the importance of reading and dialogue in decision-making in favor of judgements based solely on his gut-feeling and instinct. Trump-style populist success is only possible in a culture like that of America with a potent strain of anti-intellectualism, where lack of education and disrespect for rational thought and dialogue are too often badges of honor rather than shame. A good reflection of this important difference is in the structure of televised debates. Unlike the format and short duration of U.S. presidential debates, where soundbites, gotchas and showmanship count heavily in a one-and-a-half-hour to two-hour timeframe, French televised debate will go on—with no breaks—for as long as three to four hours. There is ample opportunity for soundbites, but they are heavily diluted in a serious discussion of substantive issues. Gotchas count for very little compared to a candidate’s ability to discuss the issues coherently and in depth in convincing fashion. As proved by Le Pen in her miserable 2017 debate with Macron, a Trump-style candidate in a French-style debate is at a distinct disadvantage.

In conclusion, a word of cautious optimism. Even if Le Pen were to win the election, there is reason to doubt that she would succeed in realizing some of her more radical aspirations. It is probable that there would be an immediate electoral backlash uniting most of the electoral spectrum against her in the June parliamentary elections that would deny her a working majority, forcing her into a “co-habitation” with a Prime Minister of a decidedly different flavor (whether from the center or the left), thus clipping her wings, especially on domestic issues. And even if she were to manage a working majority in Parliament, the powers of the firmly independent Constitutional Council guaranteed by the Constitution would stymie many of the constitutional amendments that she recognizes she would need to achieve many of her domestic and international goals. Nevertheless, with broad regalian powers in matters of defense and foreign affairs, her tenure would be highly disruptive in Europe, to NATO and to the West generally, with serious ripple effects around the globe. France would ultimately come through it, as it has time and again after national catastrophes, 1870 and 1940-1945 being only the most salient examples. But, as with Trump’s four years in the White House, how much damage would occur in the meantime would be the question should Le Pen come out ahead on Sunday evening.