Macron sees off Le Pen. Now the real work begins

So much for Marine Le Pen. So much for the far-right surge. Emmanuel Macron was re-elected yesterday as President of France by a larger margin than even his most enthusiastic supporters had dared to predict. By 58.8 per cent to 41.2 per cent, he saw off his far-right challenger, becoming the first French president since Jacques Chirac in 2002 to win a second term. 

It would be easy to downplay his achievement. After all, in 2017 he secured a two-thirds majority over Le Pen in the second round of a contest marked not only by his own rise, but by the virtual destruction of the traditional centre-left and centre-right parties that had dominated France since the foundation of the Fifth Republic. 

This time round, there were fewer fireworks. Both he and the leader of the National Rally – formerly the National Front – were known commodities. Those ready to risk France’s future on a throw of the dice went for Le Pen; the rest – including many from the Left – opted for five more years of crisis management by a president who knows the ropes and, hopefully, has learned from his mistakes. 

Boris Johnson, to whom Macron is bound in cordial enmity, was among the many world and European leaders who proffered their congratulations within minutes of the result being declared. Would they have done the same if Le Pen had won, or would Vladimir Putin, Alexander Lukashenko, Viktor Orban and Jair Bolsonaro have been left to do the honours? 

The fact of the matter is that Macron, still only 44, now has it in his hands to become the most consequential French President since Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand.  

In his brief victory address, delivered last night from the foot of the Eiffel Tower, the former banker showed visible emotion, at one point wiping away a tear. He had been given a scare not only by Le Pen but by her rival on the anti-immigrant front, Éric Zemmour, leader of the openly racist Reconquest Party, whose bid for supreme power was a feature of the early weeks of the campaign. To add to the President’s discomfort, he was harried and harassed at every turn by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, France’s Jeremy Corbyn, whose support in the banlieues matched that of the radical right in the rustbelts of the far North and Deep South. 

In the end, after a slow start to his campaign largely dictated by the need to respond to events in Ukraine, it was Macron’s steadiness under fire that most impressed. If he was arrogant and dismissive towards “Madame Le Pen,” he had reason to be so. He had seen France through the deeply felt but largely incoherent gilets-jaunes uprising – a workers’ revolt that turned on the price of diesel. He had survived mass demonstrations against his modest proposals to reform state pensions and raise the retirement age. He led the most vaccine-averse nation in Europe through the Covid pandemic and, in response to a spate of Islamist-inspired murders, toughened up laws on the separation of Mosque and State. Most recently, though widely ridiculed as Putin’s useful idiot, he did what he could to dissuade the Russian leader from giving in to his inner Hitler. And somehow, in the middle of it all, he presided over a gradual economic recovery marked by the lowest level of unemployment for 15 years. 

What could his principal challengers offer in return? They had led much of the unrest in the streets, opposed vaccine mandates and lockdowns and, while reluctantly condemning Russia’s conduct of the war, made clear that Putin was someone with whom they would do business again as soon as the smoke had cleared. 

But even as he celebrated his achievement, Macron will have known in his heart (which he tapped several times during his victory speech) what a close-run thing it all was. He knows how personally unpopular he is with large sections of the population, who regard him as overbearing and out of touch, and he can be in no doubt that he has to do something, and quickly, to allay the charge that he is the President of the Rich. 

But with his second term bought and paid for, he must now turn his attention to the more pressing matter of the parliamentary elections due to be held in June. In 2017, his back-of-an-envelope En Marche party (“neither right nor left”) won a resounding victory at the polls. With the support of the perennially moderate Movement for Democratic Change, the new head of state was able to impose his will on the National Assembly, picking and choosing his ministers from among friends and allies without regard to party loyalties. 

This time round, once the present Assembly is dissolved, he will almost certainly find having his way more difficult. Even after five years, En Marche has failed to establish an identity and is largely seen as the President’s tribute band. Le Pen and Zemmour, buoyed up by their one-third share of the vote in the first round of the presidentials, are bent on capturing as many seats as possible, enabling them, they hope, to make Macron’s legislative life a misery. Mélenchon, meanwhile, at the head of his France Unbowed movement, even harbours the conceit that he could be prime minister, a development that would oblige the President to enter into a period of cohabitation so bizarre as to be realistically beyond the scope of the existing Constitution. 

But one thing at a time. Macron has beaten the extremes once already and may beat them again, at least to the extent of being able to command support among those deputies – always a majority – who have no wish to see French politics reduced to anarchy. The centre-right Republicans and centre-left Socialists, having ruled the roost for 60 years, are overdue for at least a modest recovery; the Greens and other fringe moderates are biddable; and En Marche itself might yet be given a lick of the cat by a President who, after his latest victory, will have the whip hand for at least the next six months. 

The real problem for Macron may come less from institutional instability than from unrest in the streets. Even before the result of Sunday’s election was announced, fringe elements were letting it be known that they wouldn’t accept the verdict of the electorate. Paris and other big cities could come under siege from a veritable A-Z of malcontents as early as this weekend, resulting in widespread damage to property and the inevitable accusations of police brutality. 

Macron told his supporters last night that he intends to be the President of all the people, including those who don’t trust him and those on the Left who only voted for him to block the Far Right. He wants, he says, to lead a nation that is European and Green and, above all, fair, not one riven by envy or hatred. So much so pious. It could all go horribly wrong. As he knows only too well, and as the last five years have surely taught him, it is one thing to preach unity to France, quite another to create a broad church. 

The French are restive. They want change. Having been shut down by Covid for the last three years, they want excitement. The problem is that the various factions into which they are divided all want different things, and the risk of trying to please everybody is that you end up pleasing nobody. 

On the positive side, Nato and the EU can breathe a sigh of relief. Marine Le Pen, unprepared and unpredictable, has not been handed the keys of the Élysée Palace, which remain firmly in the pocket of Emmanuel Macron. Pandemonium may not have been prevented, but at least it has been postponed.