Piece on the state of the French election in the FT
The president would prefer a run-off with Eric Zemmour, but risks losing votes to Valérie Pécresse
www.ft.com
Its very much from an FT liberal perspective but the general point that that this is an election between different parts of the right is accurate (at least at this point
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The disarray of the French left underscores how the campaign for the presidency ahead of April’s election will be fought and won on the right.
Barely five years since François Hollande bowed out as France’s socialist head of state, the party’s candidate Anne Hidalgo has sunk to as low as 3 per cent in one recent opinion poll. Hidalgo’s last-ditch appeal for the multiple left-of-centre contenders to submit to a primary contest has so far been rejected by most of them.
Now Christiane Taubira, a veteran politician from the French Caribbean, is considering a bid to save the honour of the left. Taubira, a former justice minister, is a respected figure. But whether she can unify the leftwing vote, including the greens, is doubtful.
First-round support for all of the left-of-centre candidates amounts to only 24 per cent. The left lacks compelling leaders and fresh ideas. France’s political centre of gravity has shifted to the right in recent years, with crime, immigration and national identity rising up the agenda, even if living standards and Covid-19 have more recently returned to the fore.
The election is shaping up as a battle among four candidates for right of centre voters. The novelty was the stunning rise of Eric Zemmour, the far-right polemicist, whose polling breakthrough has come largely at the expense of Marine Le Pen, fighting her third presidential campaign. Then came the surprise victory of Valérie Pécresse, in the primary for the centre right Republicans. She has since vaulted the two far-right candidates into second place in opinion polls behind Emmanuel Macron. In his book La Droite en France, published in 1954 and updated in 1982, the historian René Rémond drew up a typology based on the right’s post-revolutionary antecedents which, if inexact in its categorisations, remains remarkably pertinent today. It is divided into three currents, Rémond wrote: legitimists (or counter-revolutionaries), Orleanists and Bonapartists. Zemmour and Le Pen are legitimists or anti-liberal reactionaries. Gaullists, with their faith in the charismatic leader, are Bonapartists. Macron is an Orleanist liberal, as is the more conservative Pécresse.
Postwar French politics has been shaped as much, if not more, by the divisions among these currents as by the ideological competition between left and right. Periodically, rightwing ideologues dream of uniting all three currents. Nicolas Sarkozy came closest in recent times, taking far-right and liberal votes to win in 2007. His presidency was incoherent and erratic.
Zemmour, an essayist and historian, aspires to bring together legitimists and Bonapartists. For him that means paying homage to Charles de Gaulle while playing down the crimes of his second world war adversary Philippe Pétain and his collaborationist regime. He also thrives on the fuss his revisionism creates.
Macron, who also celebrates de Gaulle, has every interest in keeping this rift alive. He made a point of visiting Vichy, seat of Pétain’s wartime government, earlier this month where he warned against the “manipulation” of history. Macron’s original political pitch was that he went beyond left and right, but he has governed as a liberal conservative. While his core vote includes social democrats and centrists, the bulk of his supporters are centre-right. Fifty per cent of them would back Pécresse as a second choice in the first round of an election, according to an Ipsos Sopra-Steria poll. Pécresse needs to win them over while keeping the rightwing of her party from deserting to Zemmour.
She has taken a hard line on immigration, wants to slash the size of France’s public administration and accuses Macron of wrecking the public finances. Her pitch is very similar to that made by the conservative François Fillon five years ago before his campaign collapsed in scandal. Macron’s allies are already accusing her of being stuck in the past, too Parisian and a hostage to her party’s hard right sympathisers. But opinion polls suggest she could beat the incumbent in the second round. Macron is under pressure to promise a reformist second term. Since his party may well lose its parliamentary majority in elections in June, he would probably have to share power with the Republicans in any case.
Macron would prefer a rematch against Le Pen or, even better, an easy run-off with Zemmour. He could once again present himself as a rampart against the far-right. But the French seem to have little appetite for a Manichean choice. Pécresse may yet falter. She is only narrowly ahead of her far-right rivals. But the first female conservative presidential candidate presents Macron with a fresh challenge. It would strengthen Macron’s legitimacy should he win. It is good for French democracy.
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