Macron in pole position as he eyes a second term
If the polls are to be believed (always an open question these days), Emmanuel Macron is set to “walk it” in this year’s presidential elections, set for April 10 and 24.
The latest Politico poll of polls suggests that Macron will score 25 per cent of the vote in the first round, against 17 per cent for the far-right’s Marine Le Pen and just 15 per cent for the Conservative Great White Hope, Valerie Pécresse.
In the run-off, Macron would apparently come away with 55 or 56 per cent of the vote against either Le Pen or Pécresse.
Such an outcome, though less stunning than his victory in 2017, when he secured 66 per cent of the vote in round two against 34 per cent for Le Pen, would be decisive, giving the still patrician head of La République en Marche (“neither right nor left”) five more years in the Élysée in which to finally push through his ambitious programme of reform.
Two months ago, when Pécresse – an experienced administrator with a formidable CV – unexpectedly won her party’s nomination, it was widely felt that Macron had a fight on his hands. But since then he has steadily drawn ahead, helped by his rival’s shameless borrowings from the far-right playbook and her failure to rise to the occasion at the Trump-style rallies organised for her at venues up and down the country.
Whether Macron’s anticipated success in the presidentials would be repeated in elections to the National Assembly, scheduled for June 12 and 19, is seriously to be doubted. Voters in this case have the power to distribute their favours across a wide spectrum, including not only Pécresse’s centre-right Républicains and Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, but the anti-Muslim Reconquête party of Éric Zemmour, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s quasi-Marxist France Insoumise and The Greens, led in France by the ever-hopeful Yannick Jadot.
An Assembly in which each of these factions was properly represented would present problems for Macron. If he couldn’t get his reforms through an assembly in which En Marche held 268 of the 577 seats, what hope would he have if – as seems likely – his legislative tribute band falls below the 200 mark?
But that is the joy of democracy, French-style. In the UK, 44 per cent of the popular vote resulted in an 80-seat majority for Boris Johnson. The Prime Minister may have squandered his authority over the last 18 months, but that has everything to do with his personal failings. The parliamentary arithmetic gave him carte blanche and allows the Tories to do more or less as they please.
In France, the power and prestige of the presidency count for less these days than under De Gaulle, Pompidou, Mitterrand, or even Jacques Chirac. For all his pizzazz, Nicolas Sarkozy turned out to be a national embarrassment, while François Hollande will be forever remembered being chauffeured on a motorbike in the dead of night between the Élysée and his mistress’s apartment in the trendy Rue du Cirque.
But while the French are less likely these days to doff their caps in the vicinity of the man always referred to in the media as Le Président de la République, they do still accord some measure of respect to the office and expect the holder to use their authority to get things done.
When Macron flew to Moscow last week in a bid to persuade Vladimir Putin to hold off on invading Ukraine, few expected him to come back promising Peace in Our Time. They knew he was on a hiding to nothing. But there was still a palpable sense that, as their President, he had done the right thing and carried it off with an impressive measure of dignity.
No such leeway is available on the domestic front, where everybody, both in the Assembly and on the streets, expects their pound of flesh.
Assuming that he is granted a second term, Macron will be electorally weaker and more vulnerable to attack from the ad-hoc, but powerful, extra-parliamentary fringe. Against that, with only his legacy to secure and having seen off the worst of the Covid pandemic, he can concentrate on forcing through some long-delayed reforms.
Expect him to exert maximum pressure on deputies to accept a package of changes that would raise the age at which the state pension is due and extends working hours for most in the public and private sectors. And don’t be surprised when he pulls every available string in Europe to secure advantage for French banks over the City of London. He has already promised to upgrade the nation’s existing nuclear power stations and to build four more of the latest type, giving France a unique energy capability while still pursuing its net-zero goals.
To overcome the fact that he doesn’t have the numbers in the Assembly, he will most likely draw his top team not just from En Marche, but from other centrist parties, most obviously Les Républicains. It is reported that he is considering Christine Lagarde, currently head of the European Central Bank, to be his prime minister. Lagarde – a senior figure under both Sarkozy and Chirac – would certainly confer prestige on the office and could probably count on the votes of her centre-right party colleagues at least on key issues of economic reform.
Yes, but what of the further right, represented by Le Pen and Zemmour? Between them, the two extreme candidates are slated to win some 32 per cent of the popular vote – seven per cent more than Macron. Yet only if one of them stands down in favour of the other in the course of the next few weeks, can they even hope to achieve a result on April 10.
The problem is that they loathe each other, just as the various candidates of the Left loathe each other. Procedurally, there is chance that one of them will have to pull out. Neither to date has the 500 endorsements from elected officials required for them to get their names on the ballot. But failing that, and assuming Le Pen and Zemmour continue to lock horns, the likelihood is that close to a third of the electorate will be forced to opt instead for their second or third choice in round two of the contest.
France may have lurched sharply to the right since the turn of the millennium. But the system thus far has contrived to ensure that votes for the centre continue to carry most weight. It may even be that many who vote for extreme candidates do so in the knowledge that they can’t win, hoping only that their demands have been heard and won’t be ignored by the victor.
There is always a chance, of course, that the polls are wrong and that Macron is in fact fighting a losing ticket. It could be that Pécresse’s lack-lustre campaign will catch fire in the weeks ahead and that in the run-off either she or the veteran Le Pen will win through. Stranger things have happened. Just don’t depend on it.