Bertrand moves ahead as centre-right challenger to Macron
It’s not easy being piggy in the middle in France these days. The centre-right Republican Party still hasn’t made up its mind who should lead it into next year’s presidential elections, the first round of which takes place on 10 April. But at least the short-list has more or less been established, with front-runner Xavier Bertrand continuing to fight off challenges from Valérie Pécresse and – wait for it – Britain’s Brexit nemesis Michel Barnier.
Whichever of them wins the nomination will be competing for the pan-conservative vote not only against Marine Le Pen, the increasingly grizzled leader of the far-right National Rally, but, quite possibly, the newly-emerged, righter-than-right Éric Zemmour.
On the other side of the ballot slip will be the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, often down but never out, and the presumptive candidate for the Socialist Party, Anne Hidalgo, while most prominent among the also-rans will be whoever emerges as flag-bearer for the Greens and the Marxist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, president-for-life of La France Insoumise, or France Unbowed.
France is almost equally poised between Left and Right – though voters often fail to distinguish between them, especially on the extremes. It was the genius of Macron, back in 2017, to declare that he leaned both ways, securing as a result a decisive second-round victory over Le Pen and a massive majority for his followers in the National Assembly.
This time round, the President cannot hope for a repeat performance. By now, the electorate knows all too well who he is and the sort of leadership he provides. They continue to be impressed by his cleverness and – at least on the world front – by his bearing. But they have every reason to expect that five more years of La République en Marche (the party he devised on the back of an envelope in 2016) will be defined as much by street protests and failure to deliver the goods as by actual legislative progress and the feeling that France is moving forward, not back.
That is not to say that he won’t win. If nothing else, Macron is tough and there is no doubting the depth of his ambition. The Left has yet to recover from the drubbing he dealt it last time out, and Le Pen’s struggle with the outspoken TV pundit Zemmour, like a conflict out of the Marvel Universe, could prove the final nail in her electoral coffin.
Can Hidalgo, the Spanish-born mayor of Paris, spearhead a Socialist revival, having seen off the cardigan-wearing Mélenchon? Such an outcome cannot be entirely ruled out. Stranger things have happened. Will Le Pen strike down Zemmour, experiencing a “quickening” as she adds his strength to her own? Who can say? Electorates everywhere these days are fickle and difficult to read.
But as France heads into a difficult winter, with Covid and the economy still stubbornly top of the agenda, the biggest of the known unknowns is who will be left to take on Macron in round two of the presidentials, set to take place on 24 April.
The far-right tussle is as entertaining as it is interesting. Zemmour is a polemicist and professional provocateur – an intellectual version of Donald Trump – best known in recent years for his punditry on Cnews, the French equivalent of Fox News. Le Pen is a street-fighter whose problem is that, in cleaning up her act, she has robbed herself of a large part of her appeal. It is hard to imagine either of them actually exercising power. But then again, no one expected Trump to become President of the United States.
In the past, the final choice would have been between the centre-right and the centre-left, with the former, in a line that began with De Gaulle and went on to include Giscard d’Estaing, Jacques Chirac and, most recently, Nicolas Sarkozy, most often claiming the win. But Les Républicains have proved a busted flush ever since their last nominee for the Élysée, François Fillon, and his Welsh-born wife, Penelope, were convicted mid-campaign of embezzling state funds.
Not helped by the fact that Sarkozy, too, is mired in charges of corruption, the party has turned to a new generation of proven leaders. Xavier Bertrand, president of the northern region known as Hauts-de-France, which includes Calais, is a no-nonsense politician with a reputation for getting things done. His problem is that his chief rival, Valérie Pécresse, has pretty much the same reputation and heads France’s biggest and most important region, the Île-de-France, centred on Paris, with its population of more than 12 million.
Bringing up the centrist rear is Michel Barnier, who, having shepherded the EU though Brexit, has since gone on to champion French sovereignty over that of Brussels, even to the extent of challenging the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. Is he serious? Does he, for whom the Treaty of Rome has always been treated as if it were a sacred text, truly believe that France needs to be wary of Ever Closer Union or is he just trying out late-career populism in a bid to introduce a note of levity into his Wikipedia entry? We will know soon enough. For now, all that can be said is that he enjoys – or is said to enjoy – the support of his fellow Savoyard, Laurent Wauquiez, who until 2019 served as party leader.
For the moment, the smart money is on Bertrand – a “provincial oaf” (plouc de province) according to better-born party critics – who was raised to work for a living and has no time for the Énarques (graduates of the École Nationale d’Administration) who have dominated French politics for the last half century. Bertrand appeals to workers as well as the aspirational middle class. If he was a three-piece suit man, his waistcoat would be a gilet-jaune. Whether or not his policies (as distinct from his manner) would be markedly different from those of Macron is harder to judge, but he believes that, lacking hauteur, he would be better able to work with the unions on such key issues as pension reform and the age at which state employees can expect to retire.
Bertrand is notable for having taken the immigration question seriously, most obviously in the Calais area. He says it is important for France and the UK to tackle illegal immigration together and that, post-Brexit, he would aim to work sympathetically with Britain in a bid to restore order and burnish what remains of the Entente Cordiale.
Pécresse – an unashamed Énarque – is a household name in the Île-de-France, but little known outside. No longer, technically, a Republican, she handed in her party card in a bid to be more inclusive, arguing that the presidential nominee should be chosen in an open, American-style primary. That idea went down like a lead balloon, and if Pécresse is to advance she may now choose to place stress on the fact that in addition to heading the Paris region during the turmoil of the last six years, she would be the first women to stand for the centre-right in a presidential election and could take on Le Pen and Hidalgo on a gender-equal basis.
Le Journal du Dimanche, France’s leading (and almost only) Sunday paper, published a poll at the weekend suggesting that Bertrand would fare significantly better against Macron, Hidalgo or the Greens than any other centre-right hopeful. He would also, with his provincial oaf standing, be well-placed to take on Le Pen (or Zemmour) in a populist reality contest. So, eschewing all good sense, my money is on Barnier, or Mélenchon, or Philippe Juvin, a doctor from Orléans who scored 0 per cent in the JDD poll. You heard it here first.