The French President Emmanuel Macron has, it is revealed, forbidden all talk at the Elysée of the forthcoming presidential election and has refused to discuss even whether he will be a candidate. His entire attention is focused on France and the French, he claims.
Of course this is entirely the opposite of the truth as his entire attention is focused on being re-elected. Nevertheless, he was likely to have been opening a bottle of something sparkling in which to dip his croissant this morning with the announcement that Michel Barnier, yet another no-hoper, has thrown his beret into the ring to oppose him. Divide and conquer seems to be Macron’s strategy. Although Macron’s party, La République en Marche, is hardly a party at all, having failed miserably in European regional and municipal elections, and millions of French voters despise him, and hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets to oppose his vaccination passports, he is banking on an ancient calculus. That there’s no evident alternative. Except there might be. Although it’s not Barnier.
Barnier, a superannuated politician of 70, last a minister 26 years ago, was exiled to Brussels 22 years ago where he has accumulated a fortune in untaxed emoluments and most recently ran the Brexit negotiating team for the EU, making himself notorious in Britain where he is currently taken more seriously as a prospective presidential candidate than in France itself. ‘He isn’t a serious candidate,’ says a mayor I know with sensitive political antennae. ‘He’s not running for president. He’s running to try to make himself relevant, and perhaps to reinsert himself as a minister of something in the future.’ Good luck with that.
It’s not truly clear that the Republicans represent a serious national party outside their regional fiefdoms
A fanatically pro-EU Savoyard in a country that’s deeply Eurosceptic, Bernier will join an overweight list of candidates in a future Republican primary election in which the contours remain obscure. He would be an eminence grise but lacks even much eminence. His sole unique proposition is to ban immigration, and while this might resonate among many voters, few will believe he’s capable of delivering, with a new wave of Afghans heading west, and especially as he has specifically excluded immigration from the EU itself.
In any case, it’s not truly clear that the Republicans represent a serious national party outside their regional fiefdoms. The field is an overcrowded steeplechase of has beens, wet centists (a territory already colonised by Macron) and will never bes. Other candidates include Valérie Pécresse, former Republican president of the Ile-de-France (greater Paris), Philippe Juvin, mayor of La Garenne-Colombes (Hauts-de-Seine) a physician and head of the emergency services at the hospital Georges Pompidou in Paris, and Eric Ciotti, a Republican deputy from the Alpes-Maritimes, who also declared his candidacy this week. Others could include Édouard Philippe, sacked as Macron’s prime minister for being too popular, who might make an impact although he’s not even a declared candidate. None of them are especially conservative, it should be noted.
And these are only the candidates of the more or less mainstream Republicans. There’s an entirely separate and potentially much more interesting bun fight lining up on the nationalist, more hardline right, between the perennial loser Marine Le Pen of the Rassemblement National, née National Front, defeated in the past two campaigns and whose tack to the cente has alienated many of her traditional voters, and Eric Zemmour, a brilliant polemicist, author and broadcaster, often described as the Tucker Carlson of CNews, the French equivalent of Fox. He’s hated by the biens pensants, has been cancelled by Instagram and abandoned by his woke publisher, Albin Michel. His book, The Suicide of France, decrying the abandonment of French principles to Islamism, was a huge best seller. His forthcoming tome, to be published by a new publisher, will be his manifesto, and will certainly sell like freshly baked baguettes.
The card of Republican runners and riders is long and uninspiring. For the moment, the président of the region Auvergne-Rhône Alpes, Laurent Wauquiez, has said he won’t be a candidate, to avoid sowing further division on the right. The president of the région Hauts-de-France, who was a Republican but has left the party, Xavier Bertrand, is refusing to participate in a primary but apparently wishes to present himself directly to voters in the first voting round. It’s hard to be definitive but I count at least two dozen diverse candidates currently hoping to present themselves in the first round, including animal rights activists and monarchists.
The left and the Greens present an equally unedifying spectacle with Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, a no-hoper, who is widely credited with trashing the capital (resonance of the mayor of London), being challenged from the left by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a Jeremy Corbyn-like figure, whose single-digit polling guarantees he will remain in the political wilderness. ‘The problem is that the left is proposing nothing we can build union around for the presidential election,’ former Socialist president François Hollande has said. ‘It can’t seem to agree on anything.’ Hopes for a socialist-Green ticket seem fanciful especially as the Greens, who have little support outside some big cities, have alienated voters in la France Profonde with increasingly eccentric policies including banning Christmas trees.
With six months to go the polls are almost useless, if not nakedly instrumentalised, and seem to measure name recognition above all. Le Pen and Macron seem to be the favourites, but with underwhelming support hovering around 25 per cent each. Le Pen is assuredly Macron’s preferred opponent. It’s fair to say voters have not a great deal of enthusiasm for any of the declared candidates. Zemmour, presently undeclared and ignored by most pollers, is an exception. Valeurs Actuelles, a right-wing weekly, has put him above 13 per cent. My own focus group at the Café de la Paix is fairly united in its overwhelming lack of interest in any of this, although Zemmour is most frequently mentioned. My neighbours, in a bellwether commune that has traditionally supported the winner in presidential contests, seems united in a weary expectation that Macron, supported by a heavily subsidised, group-thinking media, will probably be re-elected despite everything.
Abstention, currently the first party of France, seems likely to be the real winner in the first round and decisive in the second. A poll this morning revealed 31 per cent of voters are unlikely to participate. That could produce unanticipated consequences. Zemmour could upset the geometry. French presidential elections can often throw out unpredictable outcomes. Not least, the victory of Macron himself.
The conventional wisdom amongst the chattering classes is that there are still no clear leaders and that they will not merely fight each other to a standstill in the first round on the presidential election in 226 days, but will leave the French once again facing a choice between the unloved Macron and the clueless Le Pen. On this logic, Macron is most likely to win, although perhaps by a narrower margin than last time, on a surge of indifference boosted by a continued bout of abstention. Unless he’s united France against him, a mission in which he sometimes appears to be succeeding.
Barring a miracle, Barnier, currently optimistically on 11 per cent in the latest polls, which are unwise to put much confidence in, is behind Bertrand and level pegging with Yannick Jadot of the Greens, thus far from securing a place in a second round of voting and hence no more likely to be elected president than me. If there’s a wild card in this race, it’s likely to be Zemmour. There’s a genuine groundswell of support for him in the provinces and even in the wealthy 16th arrondissement of Paris. The odds remain long but this clever journalist could even beat the hapless Len Pen into the second round and with a fair wind, might even give Macron a run for his money.
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