Le Pen’s star continues to rise as Mercury remains stuck in retrograde for the Jupiter President
Leadership is as much about seizing the moment as it is about anything else, policy included. Six years ago, Emmanuel Macron was the new kid on the block in France. After twelve years of Jacques Chirac, during whose presidency not much happened that sticks in the memory other than the decision not to join George W Bush and Tony Blair in the invasion of Iraq, voters were ready for a jolt. And that is what they got in Macron.
By contrast, the new President’s erstwhile opponent, Marine Le Pen, looked to be a beaten docket. She had given her all to the cause of the far-right, denouncing immigration and warning of the dangers of militant Islam. But her cries fell on too many deaf ears, and Macron, promising to take France in an exciting new direction, ”neither left nor right,” won the Élysée by a landslide.
Five years later, the pair clashed again, only this time the gilt had come off Macron’s appeal while Le Pen, in spite of, perhaps because of, her populist rhetoric was starting to look, you’d have to say, plausible. It wasn’t enough. The former banker, exuding hauteur when what was needed was empathy, still won in the end, but by a sharply reduced margin and with his reputation for effortless superiority definitively shredded.
Since then, he has lost pretty well all of his remaining luster. He didn’t have it easy. No one could pretend otherwise. All of what he accomplished in his second term, from keeping the country going throughout the pandemic, attempting to talk sense to Vladimir Putin on the war in Ukraine, holding down energy prices and, crucially, keeping his word to the electorate on the absolute need for an increase in the age of retirement, was dictated either by events or, in the case of pension reform, financial necessity.
History may well judge Macron more kindly than the people of France, who discovered they didn’t have far to look in their search for a scapegoat in hard times. The fact is that while government debt continues to rise (as it has every year since 1995), the economy, all things considered, is in good shape, unemployment is down and inflation, though high at 6.1 per cent, is lower than the average for the Eurozone and nearly three percentage points below that of the UK.
Macron would argue that he has been trying to fix the roof during a period of non-stop rainfall, though, as luck would have it, the nationwide drought expected to overtake France for the second year running, with temperatures hitting 40 degrees in much of the country come July, will surely be another failure laid at his door.
So who, apart from the incurably egotistic Macron, would be President at times such as these? The answer is … Marine Le Pen, who, remarkably, has gone from street-fighter to Mother of the Nation in stages since the advent of Covid-19. The former leader of the National Front, now the National Rally, has given up her soap box, settling instead for a high-profile role in the National Assembly in which, while dismissing Macron as yesterday’s man, she equally denigrates the Far Left, led by Jean Luc Mélenchon, France’s Jeremy Corbyn, as both incompetent and bent only on chaos.
In Le Pen’s case, history will show that she started out, under the influence of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, as a racist and anti-semite. In recent years, however, she has changed her tune, so that while committed to shutting off future immigration and rejecting multiculturalism as a viable approach to social cohesion, she will, she says, open her arms to all those, of whatever race and creed, who subscribe to her bottom line of what it means to be French.
More immediately, does she stand four-square behind the millions of voters who refuse to accept that they should retire at 64, not 62? Yes, she emphatically does. But she is not ready to smash the windows of banks and luxury goods stores to make her point. She has sensed that the middle-classes, whom she needs to secure a winning margin next tie round, are uneasy about the unruly and violent nature of recent protests. So she has to be nuanced in the destructive path she is plotting. Yes, she will reverse pension reform, but she will do so by the book, restoring power to the people through the proper exercise of democracy. It may turn out to be smoke and mirrors, but for the moment it looks to be working.
According to the most recent polls, Le Pen would win a presidential race against Macron held this summer by a margin of 55 per cent to 45 per cent. Just as important, she looks to have attracted 27 per cent of those who last year voted for Mélenchon. If she continues like this, she would be the front-runner in the actual contest in 2027, leaving Macron’s legacy in tatters while opening up the likelihood of the most consequential presidency since De Gaulle took charge for the second time in 1958.
There is, as things stand, little point in asking Le Pen what the nuts and bolts of her policies are in advance of the election campaign. A crackdown on immigration would be her most obvious marker, but what form this would take is difficult to say. What would a crackdown look like? A similar lacuna exists over how she would bring about the integration of existing immigrants, especially Muslims. We know what she would like to achieve, very little about how she would go about it.
On the economics front, she is pro-working people and anti-élitist. But she is also hard-nosed enough to know that wages and pensions have to be paid for and that bleeding the rich only works until the point where they run out of cash or flee the country. So she would most likely be a pragmatist, increasing the minimum wage and raising taxes on big corporations and the super-rich, while, in her first hundred days, cutting the age of retirement to as low, it is said, as 60 – the age at which it was fixed until raised by two years during the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy.
A lot will happen, of course, between now and 2027. Le Pen’s star could fall again; the Left could stage its long-awaited resurrection; the centre-right Republicans could find a candidate for the presidency who galvanises the campaign. All that be said for now is that Macron bonds are approaching junk status while those of Le Pen are attracting coupons not seen on the far-right for decades.
As for the President himself, he still has the best part of four years to run and will try to make the best of them. He is talking animatedly about a new industrial strategy for France, to include Pari taking over from London in the Eurozone. He also hopes to play a key role not only in ending the conflict in Ukraine, but in the future defence of Europe under French (i.e. his) leadership. If all goes to plan, the second half of his second term will be a time of statesmanlike achievement, culminating (who knows?) in an invitation to head the European Commission or the European Council. All that one can usefully say in regard to any such ambition – especially if he is succeeded in the Élysée by a vengeful Marine Le Pen – is, Good luck with that!
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