The last few days in France were relatively quiet: the candidates were doing their final events, and the polls and news coverage stopped for a period lasting from Saturday midnight to 8 pm Sunday, as required by law.  

The French voted on Sunday; by 8 pm the networks were able to report the result.  

From the BFMTV Livestream:

The second round is a rematch of 2017, with Macron against Le Pen, with Macron at about 28.10% of the votes, and Le Pen at 23.30%; the numbers changed slightly throughout the evening, but it remained the case that the percentage spread was wider than it had been in 2017. Was this the Zemmour effect?  He came in fourth, with 7.10%, and almost immediately put out a statement urging his followers to vote for Le Pen.

The abstention rate was being reported as 26.5 %, which was far less than had been supposed.

The first of the losing candidates to speak was Valérie Pécresse, obviously disappointed but not surprised; she had won only 5% of the vote.  She stated bluntly that Marine Le Pen had discredited herself by her long history of support for Putin.  “In good conscience” she stated that she would vote for Macron; her audience applauded.

(Eric Ciotti, speaking on TF1, a member of the hard right of Les Républicains, said that he would not vote for Macron.)

Several more endorsements for Macron came in, from Anne Hidalgo of the Socialist Party, Fabien Roussel of the Communist Party, and Yannick Jadot of the EELV (Ecology Party); all had finished in the low single digits.

BFM had its first three spokesmen of the evening: Christophe Castaner for Macron, formerly Minister of the Interior, now president of the majority La République en Marche group in the National Assembly; Sébastien Chénu for Le Pen, formerly of Les Républicains, recently an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency of the Hauts-de-France region; and Alexis Corbière for Mélenchon, who had come in third.  

It was clear what the talking points would be for the next two weeks:

From Castaner, for Macron: Marine Le Pen’s long support for Vladimir Putin, her desire to destroy the European Union, which would weaken France and all European democracies. 

From Chénu, for Marine Le Pen: a struggle of mondialisme (globalism, Macron) against nationalism; in favor of a necessary recuperation of the country, and a preservation of its culture and language, its tradition of secularism, its equality between men and women, and attention to immigration and security.  (Le Pen, speaking later, borrowed a line from her 2017 campaign: “I will put France in order in five years”–perhaps soothing, perhaps sinister.)  Chénu suggested that all those who did not vote for Emmanuel Macron clearly showed the desire for change, and thus had a “duty” to vote for Marine Le Pen.

Alexis Corbière, deputy from La France Insoumise, had barely started to speak when they cut away for the speech of his candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.  

Mélenchon came in third, with a heartbreaking 21.20%.  He is 70; it will likely be his last campaign.  Just before he came onstage, the camera showed him putting his arm around the shoulders of Mathilde Panot, a deputy and member of his party, who seemed near tears.  Mélenchon himself leaned heavily on the podium, his voice harsh.

But he is known as one of the best speakers in France, and he proved it with a stirring speech that both acknowledged the pain his followers were feeling and at the same time lifted them up.  “I understand your anger,” he said.  “A new battle opens before us now . . . we should be proud of what we have accomplished.”  Then he came to the end, and the moment for an endorsement, if it was to come at all: it is, he said, the “human condition” to be confronted with hard decisions.  And then, smiling: “You know who I will never vote for!”  The crowd began to cheer, as he finished: “Not one vote for Le Pen!  Not one vote for Le Pen!”  

(Philippe Poutou, of the New Anticapitalist Party in the low single digits, took the same route: no endorsement for Macron, but no vote for Marine Le Pen.)

Mélenchon’s speech was a masterful and moving moment.  Alexis Corbière, back in the studio, was asked to comment, and was unable to do so, the finality of the moment coming full force.

Fortunately they had to cut immediately to Éric Zemmour, who achieved a distant fourth, and promised that “I will continue to defend France.”  He wondered how history would treat his defeat: was it the lack of a debate? (Macron’s fault.) Was it the international situation? (The obsession with Ukraine).  Or maybe, he said, it was his own fault; the crowd shouted “no,” and he clearly didn’t believe it either.  He again endorsed Marine Le Pen.

Back at the studio, the first three had been replaced by Stanislas Guerini, a deputy and president of La République en Marche, who hit the talking points of Ukraine, Zelensky, Putin, the progress of a united Europe.

Also there was Jérôme Rivière, who with exquisite timing had left the Le Pen party and joined Zemmour, just before the latter’s plunge in the polls.  

Representing Le Pen was Julien Odoul, very handsome and prepared; but he had barely gotten out the word mépris (scorn, as in Macron’s scorn for the ordinary Frenchmen) before he was interrupted; the network was covering Macron’s car, that was taking him to give his speech.  Odoul continued to speak–cleavage in the country, globalist, McKinsey, buying power–over the image of the panoply of a presidential motorcade in the Paris night.

Finally, at just before 10 pm, Macron approached his podium.  He thanked those who voted for him: “I am honored, obligated, and committed by your confidence.”  He thanked all the candidates from A (Arthaud) to Z (Zemmour), who had defended their ideas and had taken part in democracy.

He thanked Hidalgo, Pécresse, Jadot, and Roussel for their endorsements; he spoke of the need to faire barrage–to block–the extreme right, and thanked Jean-Luc Mélenchon for his “clarity.”

He listed briefly the issues France needed to address and which he had begun to address–energy, the international return of populism and xenophobia; he was against separatism [a nod to fears of Islamic separatism], spoke of the need to preserve laîcité (secularism) and freedom of religion.  

Macron finally called upon the spirit of Enlightenment at this decisive moment, to preserve the great democracies and  Europe.

I finally turned off the livestream. It was uplifting to watch democracy in action. May France be able to keep it.

The Socialist Party candidate, Anne Hidalgo, twice elected as mayor of Paris, seems firmly fixed at about 2% in the polls.  That is where she started, and that is where she will apparently end.  And yet she has been a successful mayor known for shutting off much of Paris–the historic center–to cars, thus cutting down pollution and providing green spaces within the city.  Not everyone likes this, or likes her; several months ago (it seems to have died down) people were photographing random piles of trash and posting them on twitter with the hashtag #saccageParis.

Like this. People are often slobs. Aside from the popular hashtag, which originated apparently with one tweeter (see the Guardian article below), the complaints that Paris is turning into a trash heap are similar to the stories about chaos at the southern border of the United States: useful for campaigning when you have nothing else to talk about.

In fact Hidalgo has been a transformative mayor, she belongs to the Socialist Party, which has deep roots in the countryside, and–reflective of those deep roots–she was one of the first candidates to get her 500 parrainages, or endorsements, to run. She is a firm believer in laïcité, or secularism, of the hard-core variety that banishes religious display; in that, she is similar to both Valérie Pécresse (Les Républicains) and Fabien Roussel (Parti communiste français).

So what is the problem?  And what happened to the once-great Socialist Party, one of the two governing parties of the Fifth Republic?  Some might wish to look for the root cause of decline as far back as the “tournant” of 1983, when the first Socialist president, François Mitterand, after only two years in office, was forced by the weakening of the franc to switch from a Keynesian policy of social spending to a policy of austerity, or rigueur.  This policy change was a part of the deregulatory and “trickle down” economics that is familiar from the 1980s, the times of Reagan and Thatcher, followed by the watered-down Third Way of Tony Blair and the DLC (Democratic Leadership Conference) policies of Bill Clinton.  In the face of neoliberal orthodoxy, the Left in general has become altogether too cautious about discussing genuine economic justice in society, and has suffered as a result.  

Short-term difficulties for Hidalgo include the recent string of bad candidates.  Segolène Royal, in 2007, proved to be a lightweight; François Hollande, who won in 2012, was an unsuccessful president.  The 2017 Socialist candidate, Benoît Hamon, went his own quirky and unproductive way.  Hamon won the Socialist Party nomination in late January, 2017; he spent weeks in negotiations with Yannick Jadot, the Green Party (EELV) candidate, which ended, ultimately, in Jadot’s decision to drop out in favor of Hamon and the issuing of a joint program.  Hamon then spent much of the rest of his campaign promoting his own (not the party’s) version of Universal Basic Income.  This was something of a distraction, because people did not necessarily understand it; and then he issued a revised plan.  In neither of these two efforts, according to party chairman Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, did he bother to unify the stalwarts of the party around him.  Hamon won 6% of the vote in the first round, and left the party after the National Assembly elections in June, asserting that the Socialist Party “had perhaps had its day.”   The Socialists dropped from 280 seats (2012) down to 30 (2017).

Hidalgo has not made those sorts of mistakes.  She has announced that her next priority will be the National Assembly elections, if (when) she loses the presidency.  And she has been promoting a socialist and secularist program that is traditional, broadly acceptable, and popular in terms of the issues.  It has been suggested that she might try to reach out to the ecological wing of the left, since she has a genuine environmental record in Paris.  But there she is confronted with the recent debacle of 2017 and the determination of EELV to run a separate candidate–who is, again, Yannick Jadot.  He has held steady at 5% in the polls.

Her most important issues are strengthening the public schools and restoring economic fairness. In a discussion published in La Voix du Nord, she noted the recent attacks on public schools and teachers: “A teacher can’t find himself in a position of having to go soft on questions of secularism or freedom of expression because that might not please some parents.” (I’m not mentioning Florida or Texas here.). Noting that both the minimum wage-earners and old age pensioners have seen their living standards reduced in recent years, she called for catch-up raises for both, combined with an indexing to inflation. To the inevitable question of how she would pay for that, she has expressed a wish to restore the ISF–a wealth surtax abolished by Macron early in his administration–and, additionally, to tax multinational firms, as Joe Biden has also discussed.

She has also been vocal in her support for Ukraine, linking its struggle with Republican values. She devoted a campaign rally in Bordeaux, just after the Russian attack, to the support of the people of Ukraine:

“We, the European Left, republican and social, we are always on the side of the targets of aggression, of the oppressed, of the right of a people to decide its own destiny.”  She has supported “the political and diplomatic isolation” of Putin, even if it meant hardships at home–a difficult decision, she said, “that will have consequences on our lives, but prosperity means nothing without liberty and peace.”  She called for a strengthened European defense as well as the suspension of the Russian propaganda network RT (Russia Today), which was silenced in France on March 2, 2022.  She has affirmed her support for the actions of the French government and the European Union.  Finally, she has attacked “the extreme right, that of Le Pen and of Zemmour, which has slavishly relayed Putin’s propaganda for years.” And she has also had words for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of the far left, or the “so-called Left”; “The left is never on the side of dictators, in Venezuela, in Syria, or in Ukraine.”  In an April 2 interview for the Journal du Dimanche she was asked whether Mélenchon, third in the polls after Macron (in first) and Marine Le Pen, might not be a more “useful” vote for those who want to see a candidate on the Left in the final round, rather than a replay of Macron and Le Pen:

“I say to the voters: if you want to change the future of our children, you need to vote for the left of transformation, and not for the left of vociferation, incapable of blocking the extreme right in 2017 and guilty of indulgence towards Vladimir Putin.”

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Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, Chronique d’une débâcle, 2012-2017. Paris: l’Archipel, 2017.

Anne-Charlotte Dusseaulx and Arthur Nazaret, “Anne Hidalgo au JDD:’Je propose d’une loi d’urgence pour l’avenir des jeunes de notre pays,” Le Journal du Dimanche, April 2, 2022.https://www.lejdd.fr/Politique/anne-hidalgo-au-jdd-je-propose-une-loi-durgence-pour-lavenir-des-jeunes-de-notre-pays-4103373?Echobox=1648934157#utm_medium=Social&xtor=CS1-4&utm_source=Twitter

Laurent Decotte and Julien Lécuyer, “École, salaires, retraites, décentralisation . . . . Anne Hidalgo face aux lecteurs de La Voix du Nord, La Voix du Nord, March 31, 2022.https://www.lavoixdunord.fr/1160577/article/2022-03-31/presidentielle-2022-anne-hidalgo-face-aux-lecteurs-de-la-voix-du-nord?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email-communication-fid&utm_campaign=VDN_20220331_fid_fal_hidalgo&utm_content=2022&M_BT=4668072208292

“Guerre en Ukraine: Anne Hidalgo rejoint les maires européens à Varsovie Vendredi,” BFMTV, March 3, 2022.https://www.bfmtv.com/politique/guerre-en-ukraine-anne-hidalgo-rejoindra-les-maires-europeens-a-varsovie-vendredi_AN-202203030515.html

“À Bordeaux, Anne Hidalgo consacre son meeting au conflit en Ukraine,” Ouest-France, February 26, 2022.https://www.ouest-france.fr/elections/presidentielle/a-bordeaux-anne-hidalgo-consacre-son-meeting-au-conflit-en-ukraine-6ca829da-9734-11ec-b7c4-1bc37bf7ac71

Emmanuel Macron has stated that he will not debate before the first round of elections, which will take place on April 10.  If he were to do so, he would be facing eleven other candidates who would devote much of their time to attacking him; and he would have only his own two or three minutes to respond to all of them. Mass debates, as we learned in the 2016 Republican and 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, can be enlightening, but the presence of an incumbent probably makes a great deal of difference.  

Some of the candidates have been attempting to challenge each other, and this past week (on March 10) Valérie Pécresse, of Les Républicains, took on Éric Zemmour, of Réconquête!  

Pécresse was reelected in the summer of 2021 to a second term as president of the Ile-de-France region (Paris and the surrounding area).  She has served as a deputy in the National Assembly as well as holding several cabinet positions  in the Sarkozy administration, including the posts of Minister of the Budget (in the difficult post-2008 years) and Minister of Higher Education and Research.  

Éric Zemmour is a television personality.

Both candidates needed to do some damage control.  One candidate was successful, but it might not matter.

For Éric Zemmour, of course, the problem was his unabashed support of Putin.  In an earlier interview on CNews/E1, Zemmour stated that Ukrainians had persecuted ethnic Russians in the Donbass region.  He said that the expansion of NATO to the east violated a promise that George H.W. Bush had made to Russia (see the RadioFreeEurope article, below, for a discussion of the issue and its afterlife).  This expansion of Nato, he continued, had been “legitimately seen as an aggression by Russia.”  Imagine, he wondered, how the Americans would feel if Russia put missiles in Cuba (we don’t have to imagine, actually) or Mexico?  NATO, he stated here, was an obsolete organization that had no reason to exist.  Zemmour asserted, finally, that there would be no war: US propaganda was stirring up the issue in order to turn public opinion against Russia.  

Zemmour’s interview took place on February 20, 2022.

Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

Valérie Pécresse, the candidate of Les Républicains, was widely critiqued for her campaign launch on February 13, 2022, at the Zenith amphitheater outside Paris.   (See Campaign Chronicles: Zenith).  As it has been noted, she is much better as a debater than as a speechmaker, and it was generally agreed that she had flattened Zemmour in this March 10 event.

The first question in the debate was why each thought the other would not make a good president.  Pécresse, who went first, opened with Ukraine.  In France, she said, there is the spirit of De Gaulle, and the spirit of Munich, which had allowed Hitler to attack Czechoslovakia.  (Throughout her statement, Zemmour was nodding and what might be described as “smirking”; one of the commentators afterwards mentioned that sarcastic, arrogant look.)  Those of Munich, she continued, were also fascinated by the force of Hitler, as Zemmour had been by the force of Putin.  Zemmour had said that Putin is a democrat, that he is the aggressed against, instead of the aggressor, that we need a French Putin.  She noted that he had said that he would not accept Ukrainian refugees.  

Zemmour began his response by saying that she “seemed not to understand” that De Gaulle went to see Stalin in 1944 (in December, post-D-Day, to discuss the post-war settlement).  He continued, at some length, to instruct her on the history of the late 20th century.  This was not a good tactic.

The refugees, he concluded, actually prefer to go to Poland.

When Zemmour finally got around to the question of why Pécresse would not make a good president, it was because she had changed her mind on various issues over the years.  His first example was the same-sex marriage law passed in 2013, or mariage pour tous, which she had opposed but now supported.   He had a few other examples, but concluded: “That is the difference between us–you evolve with society, in reality you’re only a technocrat, a manager . . . politics is about having convictions.”  In other words, in a phrase made popular by US Republicans earlier in this century, she is a “flip-flopper.”

Zemmour’s understanding of women’s place has certainly not evolved; he wrote The First Sex in 2006, arguing that the decline of the West had occurred because of the “feminization,” the loss of “virility,” of society. And a selection of comments over the years, assembled below, suggests that he doesn’t see women as suitable for politics, or perhaps much else.

And his fixed convictions apparently don’t extend to his marriage vows, or to his wife of nearly 40 years. The celebrity-gossip magazines Gala and Closer were all over this story last fall, and Paris-Match published a cover photo of the 63-year old Zemmour at the beach with the 28-year-old campaign “director” (she has now been elevated to the “soul” of the campaign), to the point that Zemmour was finally forced to admit (to Elle) that the woman, whom he had met when she was 13, was his “companion.”  She is now quite visible at campaign events.

The editor of Paris-Match was fired.

In the end, and in spite of the Pécresse campaign efforts and the pompous emptiness of Zemmour, the needle has not moved very much.  In a poll of yesterday (March 14, 2022), only a few days after the showdown, Pécresse was still fifth; Zemmour had moved to third place, just behind Le Pen. Here, the latest Ifop poll.

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Header image by Shutterstock.com.

Gossip–even the London Times!

Charles Bremner, “Young aide Sarah Knafo ‘has would-be French president Eric Zemmour in her grip,’” The Times, October 29, 2021.https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/young-aide-has-would-be-french-president-in-her-grip-qr3j72dgg

Victorian Trébeau, “Éric Zemmour: Sarah Knafo le suivra-t-elle à l’Élysée? Sa réponse cash,” Gala, February 16, 2022.https://www.gala.fr/l_actu/news_de_stars/eric-zemmour-sarah-knafo-le-suivra-t-il-a-lelysee-sa-reponse-cash_487351

Xavier Terrade, “Sarah Knafo omniprésente pour Éric Zemmour: ce surnom donné par ses équipes,” Gala, March 10, 2022. https://www.gala.fr/l_actu/news_de_stars/sarah-knafo-omnipresente-pour-eric-zemmour-ce-surnom-donne-par-ses-equipes_488985

Mike Eckel, “Did the West Promise Moscow that NATO Would Not Expand?  Well, It’s Complicated,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, May 19, 2021.  https://www.rferl.org/a/nato-expansion-russia-mislead/31263602.html

For Radio Free Europe, see the Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Radio-Free-Europe