For at least the last three French elections, voters in the town of Louviers, about 60 miles northwest of Paris, have cast their ballots for the candidate who ultimately won the presidency. So who are they going to vote for Sunday, in the country’s closest race in memory?
“I haven’t decided. It’s gnawing at me,” said Charlène Hedoux, 30, a cleaning woman who was sitting at a bus stop this past week in central Louviers, which has a soaring Gothic church and bustling cafes. “I have children. I didn’t before. When one sees how these last few days have been going, it’s not very reassuring.”
And that was before the terrorist attack on Thursday that left a police officer dead in central Paris and added yet another combustible element to an already volatile race.
The election on Sunday is one of the most consequential in recent times — not just for France, but for Europe — and one of the most unpredictable, too.
Even at this late stage, a remarkable 28 per cent or so of voters remained undecided. The four leading candidates span the extremes of the political spectrum and are locked in a virtual dead heat.
The potential outcomes are just as broad. Depending on who wins, France could seek to leave the European Union and recast security alliances with a tilt towards Russia. Some would have France take harsher stands, immigration and domestic security.
Alternately, France may elect a president who wants to shrink the ranks of civil servants, eliminate some job protections and reduce France’s generous welfare state, making the country more competitive in the global economy but risking a popular backlash. Yet another possibility: a winner who aspires to sharply increase taxes on the rich and nationalise banks.
The two candidates who receive the most votes on Sunday will compete in a runoff on May 7.
“There’s never been a campaign where the uncertainty was so uncertain,” said Edouard Lecerf, global director for political and opinion research for Kantar Public, a public opinion research firm. “The mistrust of politicians is stronger than it has ever been.”
That mistrust appears to have caused many voters to veer away from traditional politicians in search of someone they feel is more principled, prompting even candidates who are insiders to claim they are “outsiders.”
A majority of French voters have traditionally supported parties with established ideologies, either mainstream left or right. But traditional left-right allegiances are breaking down all over — in Europe, as they appear to have in the United States — as polarisation grows.
Globalisation is a stark dividing line, with candidates on both the extreme left and right crusading against it, and more centrist candidates embracing it.
Voters are looking to get away from politics as usual. That appears to have helped one of the leading candidates, Emmanuel Macron, a former economy minister who has formed a new party with a platform that combines pro-business, pro-EU and pro-social welfare elements — a novelty in contemporary France.
With allegiances to existing parties diminishing, some French voters find themselves torn between candidates who are diametrically opposed.
A good example was Pierre Haux, a teacher at a technical school, who went to a rally last week in Lille of the mainstream conservative candidate, François Fillon, who is under the cloud of a nepotism scandal that has led to claims of embezzlement.
Haux said he was also weighing voting for the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, but worried that he was “a one-man show.”
The fluidity of the race has allowed each of the leading candidates to claim to be on the verge of victory. At least three of the top four candidates have been in the lead at some point, making it almost impossible to say who the front-runner is.
“I will be in the runoff,” Fillon told supporters confidently on Thursday, though the current polls make it look as if that would be a reach.
What has been most striking is how voters’ concerns keep shifting, from day to day and even hour to hour, almost as if they had been infected with the impatience of adolescents. That phenomenon is just one of several that pollsters said had made the race so unpredictable.
In France, as elsewhere, the election may be decided in the provinces, in smaller and midsize towns and rural communities. Rural areas have proved especially unpredictable in recent votes, like Britain’s so-called Brexit vote to leave the European Union and former president Donald Trump’s election in the United States. – New York Times
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