Is Emmanuel Macron about to blow it?
French voters try to avoid a rematch between Macron and Le Pen.
Published: 05:04 PM,Apr 06,2022 | EDITED : 08:04 PM,Apr 06,2022
Posters have gone up across France for Sunday’s presidential election, a 12-way contest that pits the centrist incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, against a range of challengers of varying degrees of seriousness.
Some hardly get recognised in the street; others are fixtures of protest marches and television specials; only one, the anti-immigrant candidate Marine Le Pen, appears capable of running a close race against the president in the runoff on April 24.
This two-round system, a so-called “jungle” primary followed by a head-to-head matchup, has been a feature of French politics since the 1960s.
Historically, this has given voters the freedom to vote with their hearts in the first round, because the second round has usually boiled down to a battle between the two establishments parties, Socialists versus Republicans. The far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, upset that dynamic in 2002; the fresh-faced former finance minister Macron, who started his own party (La République En Marche!) in 2016, has ended it.
Instead, in a crowded field where Macron seems to have locked down a spot in the runoff, but second place might still be up for grabs, voters, pundits and politicians have been riveted by the polls and are strategising about the “vote utile”—the useful vote. Things have come to the point where some of the president’s own supporters might vote against him in the first round, in the hopes of delivering a more favourable matchup in the second. “It’s so beautiful when a democracy resembles Koh-Lanta,” the comedian Alex Vizorek said this week, referring to the French version of Survivor.
“The vote utile — that’s me,” Valérie Pécresse, the president of the Parisian region running as the mainstream right-wing candidate, offered last week. Pécresse has struggled to distinguish her platform from the president’s. Instead, she has accused him of copying her ideas, such as investing in nuclear power, raising the retirement age from 62 to 65, and reforming the welfare system.
The less doctrinaire members of her party have flocked to the president’s coalition; even the last Republican president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is suspected of supporting Macron.
Meanwhile right-wingers more fixated on immigration, public safety and culture war issues have thrown their support behind the far-right candidates — Marine Le Pen and to her right, the grotesque polemicist Eric Zemmour.
Pécresse’s pitch, basically, is that what has failed to set her apart in the primary will become an asset in the runoff—that she’s more likely to triumph over the president than her toxic right-wing rivals. It was a position that made more sense a month ago, when she was hovering around second place in the polls.
Since then she has switched places with Le Pen, who is now
favoured to advance to the second round — and is creeping closer and closer to Macron in head-to-head polling.
For a quarter-century, the French political establishment has considered the prospect of a President Le Pen unthinkable. Le Pen père was tainted by, among other things, his support for the Vichy regime and the record of the French military in its colonial wars.
But his daughter Marine, now in her third presidential contest, has led a 20-year campaign to “de-demonise” the National Rally party her father founded in 1972, jettisoning some of its extreme positions (like exiting the European Union) and extreme members (like her dad). It’s working.
She still wants to systematically expel France’s undocumented immigrants, end the right to birthright citizenship and give French nationals priority in hiring, housing and benefits, but she has run most of this campaign as an economic populist. Her party performs best in the de-industrialised regions of Northern France that were once left-wing strongholds.
She’s gotten help from the centre, where Macron’s conservative cabinet members have parroted her voters’ anxiety about the influence of Islam, helping to legitimise her views and from the right, where the ex-journalist Eric Zemmour’s extraordinarily nasty campaign — he’d like to require children born in France to have French names — has served to make her own look moderate.
On the left, meanwhile, the prospect of a second Macron–Le Pen runoff is filling voters with dread. The question of the vote utile is front of mind this week, because the left has four candidates dividing up the first-round vote, and only one of them — Jean-Luc Mélenchon — appears capable of making it to the runoff. And so progressive voters are trying to make up their minds: Is a vote for Mélenchon the only way to keep Le Pen from the runoff?
“The vote utile on the left is for Mélenchon,” the former socialist candidate Ségolène Royal said in February.
Mélenchon, who is polling a few points behind Le Pen in third place, is a loose analog to Bernie Sanders — a veteran politician who has been in and out of the Socialist Party.
At the moment, he’s out: He founded his own party, La France Insoumise, often translated as “unbowed,” and came within a hair of making the runoff in 2017. He was greeted with selfies and cheers when he marched with striking teachers in January and he has called on the French to summon their better nature in welcoming the country’s immigrants.
Mélenchon says he’s the unity candidate on the left: “If you really intend to build a dam in the second round [to stop Le Pen],” he said last week, “I have a more interesting proposition for you: Build the dam in the first round by voting for us!”
Still, not all the gauche likes him or trusts him, especially when it comes to stopping the extreme right. After Mélenchon lost the first round in 2017, he declined to rally behind Macron in the runoff and is similarly non-committal about the “Republican front” to stop Le Pen this time around.
Not all French leftists agree with his platform, either, which includes price controls, a new constitution, and an exit from Nato. “At some point you need a président utile, not simply a vote utile,” countered the Socialist ex-president François Hollande last month.
“A vote utile for whom?” an older Socialist voter told me on Sunday. “For Putin?” I found her outside the rally for Anne Hidalgo, who occupies the mirror position of Pécresse on the left:
The standard-bearer of the French political establishment, heading for near-certain defeat. Hidalgo is the mayor of Paris, best-known abroad for her quest to rid the city of cars. Like Pécresse, she is trying to carve out space between Macron and the fringe. Fortunately for her, there’s more space for that on the left, after Macron lurched right during his term.
Unfortunately for her, there are also more candidates on this side of things — Hidalgo is contending not just with Mélenchon but with a green party candidate, Yannick Jadot; a communist, Fabien Roussel; and a couple of smaller fish as well.
It’s never a good sign when you feel obliged to address your audience’s suspicion that voting for you might be a waste of time, but that’s how bad the polls have been for the mayor. “Macron’s a right-winger; Mélenchon is a dead end,” she told a theatre full of supporters, dismantling each of their records. “Vote with your heart.” - New York Times
Henry Grabar
The author is a staff writer at Slate Magazine
Some hardly get recognised in the street; others are fixtures of protest marches and television specials; only one, the anti-immigrant candidate Marine Le Pen, appears capable of running a close race against the president in the runoff on April 24.
This two-round system, a so-called “jungle” primary followed by a head-to-head matchup, has been a feature of French politics since the 1960s.
Historically, this has given voters the freedom to vote with their hearts in the first round, because the second round has usually boiled down to a battle between the two establishments parties, Socialists versus Republicans. The far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, upset that dynamic in 2002; the fresh-faced former finance minister Macron, who started his own party (La République En Marche!) in 2016, has ended it.
Instead, in a crowded field where Macron seems to have locked down a spot in the runoff, but second place might still be up for grabs, voters, pundits and politicians have been riveted by the polls and are strategising about the “vote utile”—the useful vote. Things have come to the point where some of the president’s own supporters might vote against him in the first round, in the hopes of delivering a more favourable matchup in the second. “It’s so beautiful when a democracy resembles Koh-Lanta,” the comedian Alex Vizorek said this week, referring to the French version of Survivor.
“The vote utile — that’s me,” Valérie Pécresse, the president of the Parisian region running as the mainstream right-wing candidate, offered last week. Pécresse has struggled to distinguish her platform from the president’s. Instead, she has accused him of copying her ideas, such as investing in nuclear power, raising the retirement age from 62 to 65, and reforming the welfare system.
The less doctrinaire members of her party have flocked to the president’s coalition; even the last Republican president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is suspected of supporting Macron.
Meanwhile right-wingers more fixated on immigration, public safety and culture war issues have thrown their support behind the far-right candidates — Marine Le Pen and to her right, the grotesque polemicist Eric Zemmour.
Pécresse’s pitch, basically, is that what has failed to set her apart in the primary will become an asset in the runoff—that she’s more likely to triumph over the president than her toxic right-wing rivals. It was a position that made more sense a month ago, when she was hovering around second place in the polls.
Since then she has switched places with Le Pen, who is now
favoured to advance to the second round — and is creeping closer and closer to Macron in head-to-head polling.
For a quarter-century, the French political establishment has considered the prospect of a President Le Pen unthinkable. Le Pen père was tainted by, among other things, his support for the Vichy regime and the record of the French military in its colonial wars.
But his daughter Marine, now in her third presidential contest, has led a 20-year campaign to “de-demonise” the National Rally party her father founded in 1972, jettisoning some of its extreme positions (like exiting the European Union) and extreme members (like her dad). It’s working.
She still wants to systematically expel France’s undocumented immigrants, end the right to birthright citizenship and give French nationals priority in hiring, housing and benefits, but she has run most of this campaign as an economic populist. Her party performs best in the de-industrialised regions of Northern France that were once left-wing strongholds.
She’s gotten help from the centre, where Macron’s conservative cabinet members have parroted her voters’ anxiety about the influence of Islam, helping to legitimise her views and from the right, where the ex-journalist Eric Zemmour’s extraordinarily nasty campaign — he’d like to require children born in France to have French names — has served to make her own look moderate.
On the left, meanwhile, the prospect of a second Macron–Le Pen runoff is filling voters with dread. The question of the vote utile is front of mind this week, because the left has four candidates dividing up the first-round vote, and only one of them — Jean-Luc Mélenchon — appears capable of making it to the runoff. And so progressive voters are trying to make up their minds: Is a vote for Mélenchon the only way to keep Le Pen from the runoff?
“The vote utile on the left is for Mélenchon,” the former socialist candidate Ségolène Royal said in February.
Mélenchon, who is polling a few points behind Le Pen in third place, is a loose analog to Bernie Sanders — a veteran politician who has been in and out of the Socialist Party.
At the moment, he’s out: He founded his own party, La France Insoumise, often translated as “unbowed,” and came within a hair of making the runoff in 2017. He was greeted with selfies and cheers when he marched with striking teachers in January and he has called on the French to summon their better nature in welcoming the country’s immigrants.
Mélenchon says he’s the unity candidate on the left: “If you really intend to build a dam in the second round [to stop Le Pen],” he said last week, “I have a more interesting proposition for you: Build the dam in the first round by voting for us!”
Still, not all the gauche likes him or trusts him, especially when it comes to stopping the extreme right. After Mélenchon lost the first round in 2017, he declined to rally behind Macron in the runoff and is similarly non-committal about the “Republican front” to stop Le Pen this time around.
Not all French leftists agree with his platform, either, which includes price controls, a new constitution, and an exit from Nato. “At some point you need a président utile, not simply a vote utile,” countered the Socialist ex-president François Hollande last month.
“A vote utile for whom?” an older Socialist voter told me on Sunday. “For Putin?” I found her outside the rally for Anne Hidalgo, who occupies the mirror position of Pécresse on the left:
The standard-bearer of the French political establishment, heading for near-certain defeat. Hidalgo is the mayor of Paris, best-known abroad for her quest to rid the city of cars. Like Pécresse, she is trying to carve out space between Macron and the fringe. Fortunately for her, there’s more space for that on the left, after Macron lurched right during his term.
Unfortunately for her, there are also more candidates on this side of things — Hidalgo is contending not just with Mélenchon but with a green party candidate, Yannick Jadot; a communist, Fabien Roussel; and a couple of smaller fish as well.
It’s never a good sign when you feel obliged to address your audience’s suspicion that voting for you might be a waste of time, but that’s how bad the polls have been for the mayor. “Macron’s a right-winger; Mélenchon is a dead end,” she told a theatre full of supporters, dismantling each of their records. “Vote with your heart.” - New York Times
Henry Grabar
The author is a staff writer at Slate Magazine