This year’s French presidential election will be a rematch of the last. According to exit polls, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen have won the first voting round and will advance to the second in two weeks.
Ipsos and Sopra Steria give the incumbent 28 percent support and the far-right Le Pen 23 percent. The far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon would place third with 22 percent. The other candidates are in single digits.
Macron defeated Le Pen with 66 to her 34 percent in the 2017 election. Polls suggest this year’s runoff will be tighter.
Here are my takeaways from the first voting round. (more…)
Twelve candidates have qualified to compete in the French presidential election. Only six are polling at more than few percentage points. I will summarize their policies here, plus those of Anne Hidalgo. The mayor of Paris has just 2 percent support in recent surveys, but her Socialist Party could still be a force in the legislative elections in June.
The comparison reveals strange bedfellows. The centrist Emmanuel Macron and center-right Valérie Pécresse see eye to eye on asylum and pension reform. Macron’s climate policies are closer to the Green party’s candidate, Yannick Jadot. Jadot and the far-right Marine Le Pen emphasize animal welfare. Le Pen and the far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon agree on renationalizing motorways. Mélenchon and the far-right Éric Zemmour believe NATO is obsolete.
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From a European point of view, the French have avoided the nightmare outcome of a presidential runoff between Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen. But Europe’s political elite should not celebrate too soon.
It is more than probable that Emmanuel Macron will beat Le Pen in the second voting round, yet this might be the best possible outcome for the leader of the National Front.
As Donald Trump is discovering in America, it is often more fun to be the populist outsider than to be in power. A President Le Pen would have limited scope for causing foreign-policy chaos, but, with a massive majority against her in the National Assembly, she would have little prospect of delivering on her electoral promises. Her administration would almost certainly end in failure and the Front National would once again be relegated to the fringes of French politics. (more…)
Polls suggest five candidates could qualify for the decisive second voting round of the French presidential election.
They range from the far left to the far right, but a look at their policies suggests that these categories may have outlived their usefulness.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen are supposed to be on opposite ends of the political spectrum, yet they make common cause against the European Union and NATO.
The center-right candidate, François Fillon, shares their friendly attitudes toward Russia. But Fillon sides with the left-wing Benoît Hamon and the center-left Emmanuel Macron in arguing for a more political eurozone.
Le Pen’s economic policies have more in common with the left than the mainstream right. Fillon and Macron, on the other hand, share proposals for labor reform — but they have different social views. The Republican is a Catholic and social conservative who agrees with Le Pen that the French must protect their identity. The independent Macron is socially liberal and pro-immigration.
All candidates want cleaner energy, but where Fillon, Macron and Le Pen see nuclear as part of the solution, Hamon and Mélenchon want to phase it out alongside fossil fuels.
Here is an overview of the signature policies of all five candidates. (more…)
Neither of the two frontrunners in the French presidential election is likely to win a majority in the National Assembly, which would make it hard for them to govern.
The centrist Emmanuel Macron and the far-right Marine Le Pen are neck and neck in the polls for the first voting round this month. Macron is expected to prevail in the second round.
A former economy minister under François Hollande, Macron left the Socialist Party last year to start his own movement.
Le Pen leads the anti-EU and anti-immigrant National Front, which currently has just two out 577 seats in the French parliament. (more…)
Benoît Hamon and Emmanuel Macron don’t have a lot in common. The former wants to raise taxes in France in order to finance a universal basic income. The latter wants to cut taxes and reduce public spending.
Yet the two presidential candidates made common cause on Monday, when they faced three Putin apologists in the first televised debate of the 2017 campaign. (more…)
After Britain voted to exit the European Union and America elected Donald Trump, the French ambassador to Washington DC, Gerard Araud, tweeted in despair: “A world is collapsing before our eyes.”
Now his home country has a chance to breathe new life into the liberal world order the English-speaking powers have turned their backs on.
After decades of statism, and five years of ineffectual Socialist Party rule, there is finally a critical mass for reform in France.
Brexit has also revived French enthusiasm for the European project. French support for the EU has shot up 10 points to 67 percent, according to an Ifop poll.
And Trump’s crude nationalism is showing the French the ugly reality of hysterical patriotism and anti-Muslim bigotry, both of which have been creeping up on them in recent years.
These three threads come together in the presidential candidacy of Emmanuel Macron. (more…)
Politico reports that a long-simmering dispute between the two most prominent women of the French far right is getting out of hand.
There is even a risk of a split in the Front national, the website argues: between the faction of leader Marine Le Pen and the socially conservative wing that has rallied around her 26 year-old niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen.
The fact that it’s a family feud, in which the Le Pen patriarch and Vichy apologist Jean-Marie inevitably resurfaces, makes this a headline-grabbing story.
But there are deeper, geographical and political divides at play that have less to do with personality. (more…)
Donald Trump’s unexpected presidential election in the United States has delighted his ideological counterparts in Europe. Brexiteers in the United Kingdom think he will give them a better deal than Hillary Clinton. Populists in France and the Netherlands have responded to Trump’s victory with glee. So have ultraconservatives in Central Europe.
They should think again. Trump may be a kindred spirit. His triumph is a setback for the liberal consensus that nationalists in Europe and North America are trying to tear down. But he is no friend of European nations. (more…)
One of the things that was taken out of the 2007 French presidential election was the collapse of the far right (the Front national or FN), the same far right which five years earlier had shocked the world and France by placing second in the presidential race with 16.9 percent of the vote. Its poor 10.4 percent showing in 2007 was followed by a drubbing in subsequent legislative elections and an equally weak showing in the 2009 European elections.
It has rightfully been said that Nicolas Sarkozy took a lot of the far-right vote in 2007 with his tough law and order platform and populist rhetoric. It helped him with working-class voters, many of whom had supported the FN in 2002 despite their left-wing roots.
Following the party’s collapse, which put it on the verge of bankruptcy and forced it to sell off its headquarters in an affluent Parisian suburb, the far right was buried. Sarkozy and the traditional right had permanently integrated most of the FN’s electorate, and it would collapse following the inevitable retirement of its historical lider maximo, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
It turns out that the far right was buried far too early and the party that passed for dead or at least moribund four years ago is roaring back with a vengeance. (more…)
