Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

The Macron Paradox

The French President is unloved but unbeatable

(Getty)

With just 24 days to go before the first round of French presidential voting, the political landscape has become borderline surreal, a dream state of self-induced hallucinations. The war in Ukraine has utterly overshadowed the vote. Any resemblance to an actual democratic contest might now be regarded as coincidental.

If the current polls are right, Macron will enter the second round with Marine Le Pen in a straight replay of 2017, with the same inevitable result. I have my doubts about these polls. But it might not matter much who faces Macron: unloved yet unbeatable.

Macron isn’t even campaigning. He’s at 30 per cent in polls for the first round, campaigning through a torrential downpour of electoral bribes. That after this binge there will be a bill is unmentioned by the media, which has been feasting on subsidies itself, much of it in the form of government advertising. France Inter, the state broadcaster, is known here as Radio Macron.

The fractured opposition is almost helpless, starved of campaigning oxygen

As Macron poses as a war leader in his commando sweater like some kind of Parisian Volodymyr Zelensky, the other candidates struggle to make an impression. Marine Le Pen on an optimistic 20 per cent remains a deeply unimpressive figure. Her words are wooden, her program for France inchoate and incoherent, her tack to the centre expedient, yet second only to Macron in the polls.

Zemmour and Pécresse are supposedly neck and neck at around 11 per cent each. The polls would have to be spectacularly wrong for Zemmour to make it, but it’s not inconceivable that they are.

Pécresse, of the Républicains, continues to fail to cut through. Some of my more hallucinated colleagues are even touting socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon coming up the left lane, uniting the various leftist factions who hate each other and him.

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