French Letter: Bretons love to be snooty about Macron – and then they vote for him

What do the French people really want from their government?

Two months from now, on April 10 and 24, elections will be held to decide the next President of France. Six weeks after that, on June 12 and 19, voters will turn out again to elect the 577 deputies to sit in the Assemblée Nationale. 

Why the gap? I don’t know. It’s probably just one of those things. The law says that parliamentary elections must be held within 60 days preceding the expiry of the powers of the outgoing Assembly, which is a bit like legislating the length of a piece of string. 

The reality is that the newly-elected President has up to two months in which to establish himself (never thus far herself) in the minds of voters before they have the chance to either rein him in or give him extra backing when it comes to passing Bills and generally getting things done. 

Emmanuel Macron looked to have had it easy in 2017 when, having been elected himself by a landslide, he then secured 308 seats in the Assembly for his back-of-an-envelope party, La République en Marche. The reality was that En Marche (“neither left nor right”) had yet to work out what it stood for at a time when the challenges were mounting. 

First came the revolt of the gilets-jaunes — whose main complaint was that diesel had become too expensive and, conversely, that they could no longer drive fast on country roads. 

Then came the cheminots, the railway workers, all 275,000 of them, divided into 22 categories, whingeing about the fact that they were being asked to retire a little later and work slightly longer hours. 

Next up, just about everybody in the public sector, indignant that they, too, should be asked to work beyond 55 in return for a more tightly assessed pension. Paris at the weekend became a battleground, with anarchists and “ultras” joining in the fun. And all of this before Covid. 

It only goes to prove what I have long contended, that the French are perfectly willing — indeed keen — to vote for a radical programme, but only on condition that it is not implemented.

In central Brittany, as generally across rural France, what the average voter wants could be summed up by the following: higher wages, lower taxes, improvements in public services, better opportunities for their children, more effective and less oppressive policing, fewer rules governing driving, safer roads, less “Europe,” more EU subsidies, a clamp-down on immigration, a cleaner environment and a lot less talk about net-zero. 

In our local bar, Dédé, who spent thirty years servicing nuclear power stations and retired at 55 on a full pension, is scathing about Macron, whom he regards as an arrogant connard. 

He has just had both hips replaced, making it easier for him to ride his high-power motorbikes, but regards the President as someone who only cares about the rich and wants to take all the fun out of life, most notably by reducing the general speed limit from 90 kph — a restriction routinely ignored by just about everybody — to 80 kph (ditto). 

So will he vote Socialist again this time around, given that the party of Mitterrand (an arrogant fils de pute if ever there was one) faces almost certain obliteration at the polls, or will he opt for one of the parties of the far-right? Dédé isn’t saying. 

Eavesdropping on casual conversations down the year has convinced me that what ordinary Bretons really want — apart from being left alone to live their lives without government interference — is just a little bit more of everything. 

They don’t expect to be well off. Nor, having paid their social charges, do most of them contribute so much as a sou in income tax, which starts at levels well above average earnings or else (in the case of farmers and small business owners) is so reduced by offsets that it totally fails to register. 

The celebs and bobos of Paris might as well live on Mars for all the heed Bretons pay them. The mega-rich are similarly disregarded. Though they appear every week on the cover of Paris Match and are the stuff of a dozen successful television dramas, the rich are not seen as real off-screen, because “real” means not forgetting your carte de fidelité in the supermarket and knowing the back way home after a trip to the pub. 

And yet Macron is resented in a way that Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy — a pair of artful rogues — and François Hollande — as ineffectual as Mitterrand was a master — were not. 

It may be that the Élysée’s current occupant is despised not because he made millions as a banker before entering politics, but rather for his snooty attitudes and near-zero lack of empathy.

Chirac and Sarkozy were both convicted of fraud. Both loved nothing more than hanging out with the rich and famous. Hollande achieved so little in his five years as President that he was too embarrassed to stand for a second term. 

Yet it is Macron, a thinker and a strategist, who is given stick every week right across the political spectrum. But who knows? The wheel is turning. 

He got Covid right (eventually) and he has ordered EDF, the state-controlled energy giant, to keep price rises this year down to a maximum of 4 per cent. Perhaps it is because of Macron’s arrogance and not in spite of it that so many Bretons will vote for him again on 10 April.