Reflections on another French revolution

The idea of French politics as a time-bomb, wired to a ticking clock, has been under development for some years. The theory is that the Fifth Republic has run its course and will shortly explode, giving rise to God know’s what.  

Rage about the rich, the poor, the price of diesel, crime, the police, healthcare, the weekly food bill, Europe, sexism, Islamism, “bloody immigrants” – take your pick – ­ has, we are assured, grown to the extent that something has to give, if not today then no later than the day after tomorrow.   

In a related image, politics can be viewed as the boiler room of a run-down block of flats in which gas has been leaking for days and the unsuspecting janitor, after extracting a packet of untipped cigarettes from the pocket of his crumpled overalls, is about to strike a match.   

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally (formerly the National Front) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who heads the old-school, quasi-marxist France Unbowed movement, might be thought of as the ones who either wound the clock or called for the boiler to be fixed, while Emmanuel Macron, as President, is cast as the absentee landlord who collects the rent but rarely bothers to make the necessary repairs.  

So how real is the threat? Is France about to blow itself apart?  

In yesterday’s opening round of the presidential elections, the winner, by a small but respectable margin, was Macron, who secured a tad under 28 per cent of the popular vote. Given that there were 12 candidates, this was a creditable result. In round two, on April 24, he can expect his base to be reinforced by votes from the centre-left and centre-right, giving him, in all probability, a majority over his remaining rival, the redoubtable Mme Le Pen.  

In that event, Macron will carry on much as before, but with a heightened awareness of what is possible and what is not. Macronisme will die with its founder in 2027, leaving a gap in the centre that demands to be filled. For the man himself, it will be upwards and onwards.  

But – and it is a big “but” – the bomb could go off or the boiler could explode. Nothing is certain. Le Pen, in her new guise as the workers’ friend, won 23.4 per cent of yesterday’s vote and can look forward to absorbing the seven per cent achieved by her further-right rival, Éric Zemmour. Moreover, an estimated one third of Mélenchon’s Ultras, a bit like the Communists who ended up supporting Hitler, are now expected to come over to Le Pen’s side, convinced that, if nothing else, she stands for the people, not the governing class.  

The France Unbowed leader, whose 22 per cent share of Sunday’s vote, was a last hurrah, immediately placed an edict on such errant behaviour. Not a single left-wing vote should go to Le Pen, he said, glaring at his audience. But the polls tell a different story.  

The fact is, Le Pen’s combined vote on April 24 could exceed 38 per cent, to which should be added an unknown level of support from the 25 per cent who abstained yesterday but will turn out for the decider.  

She probably won’t do it. But she might. If so, be afraid, be very afraid – especially if you are Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of NATO, or Ursula von de Leyen, President of the European Commission, or anybody in France with a net worth of more than a million euros. 

But while you are at it, spare a thought for Les Républicains – the Gaullists, for goodness’s sake – who in their various iterations have governed France for 50 of the last 64 years, ever since the founding of the Fifth Republic, and the once-mighty Socialists, the party of Francois Mitterrand and, most recently, his mini-moi, François Hollande.  

The Republicans, representing the conservative centre-right, put up a perfectly plausible candidate this time round. Valérie Pécresse, the multi-lingual administrative head of the Paris capital region, is a highly-qualified lawyer and former minister, who was expected to repair the damage caused to the party’s image in 2017 when its contender for the presidency, François Fillon, was arrested (and subsequently convicted) on charges of embezzlement and fraud. Pécresse won just 4.8 per cent of the vote on Sunday. She is finished and, quite possibly, her party with her.  

Even worse was the performance of the Socialists, whose candidate Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris (one dubbed the second-most powerful job in France), barely troubled the scorers, scraping home with a miserly 1.7 per cent of the vote. The Left is not dead in France. But, France Unbowed aside, it has so splintered as to become unviable.  

Two of the legs of France’s three-legged stool have come loose and no one can say for sure if it can be fixed. Pécresse and Hidalgo will scuttle back to their day jobs, but who in future could take them seriously? Both lost their deposits, meaning that their parties, unlike the racist Zemmour, must now foot the bills for their failure, which will run into many millions of euros.  

The one question remaining is the obvious one: is there in fact a bomb beneath the Fifth Republic? Is the boiler about to burst? We will know on April 24.  

During and after elections, it is common to speak of voters as if they were in some sense  a single entity, or herd, trying the send a “message” to those in charge. If this is true, the message is that the nation has no idea what it wants, except that it doesn’t want what it’s got.  

Close to a third of the electorate appears to favour some form of top-down Workers Republic, in which The Leader clears out the augean stables created by mass-immigration and the rise of Islam and directs most government money towards public services, fat pensions and early retirement. Surprisingly, you might think, many who have flocked to Le Pen are young – Club Med voters who because of Covid haven’t seen the sea for two years and are keen to get out and get on on with their lives.  

Another third, or a little less, is steeped in false memories of Russia in 1917, the Paris Commune in 1871 and the blighted hopes raised by the evenements of 1968. They reject social democracy and want a full-throated Peoples Republic (which is why many of them will peel off in the second round and vote for Le Pen).  

The final third are what Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher would have called the Silent Majority – the wealthy, the prosperous middle class and those in jobs for life who may grumble about their lot but are not ready to give it up for those they regard as lazy sods or troublemakers too clever for their own good.  

The current generation of in-betweeners find themselves having to defend Emmanuel Macron, whom many of them dislike and distrust but looks to be the last man standing in the face of anarchy. At least half of those who stayed at home yesterday fall into this category. On Sunday, they stood back, keen to see how the country might get along without them. Now they must make up their minds.  

Marine Le Pen will be hoping that as many as possible of the abstainers will be taken in by her new image as the woman France can trust to take them back to the 1950s – the first decade of the trentes glorieuses, when France governed Algeria with an iron fist and most Muslims lived in the colonies, not the banlieues. Her programme and Mélenchon’s overlap to a significant degree. Both are sovereigntists, opposed to the ongoing European Project; both would like to take France out of Nato (though perhaps not just yet); both have a history of sucking up to Putin; and both would throw money at the workers while soaking the rich. Only on race and immigration is there much that separates them. Zemmour sits on Le Pen’s right shoulder; Mélenchon on her left.

Macron, by contrast, will seek to convince voters that he has stepped down from his marble pedestal as the Jupiter President, and is the only man who can steer France to a better place, leading Europe, building up the country’s financial and industrial infrastructure and gradually rebalancing the economy between rich and poor. Up until now, his campaign was constrained by two things: his conceit that a second term was his by right and his belief that he could persuade Putin to either not invade Ukraine in the first place or to get out as quickly as possible, in which case he, not Boris Johnson, would be acclaimed as World King. Neither of these assumptions was, of course, borne out by events.  

Battle is therefore joined. To the victor, the spoils. But what we are likely to hear most ominously in the days head is the deep rumbling beneath the surface of French society. It should make for the most exciting, and troubling, election in the nation’s post-war history.