Countdown
The first round of the French elections will take place tomorrow, on Sunday, April 10. The results should be known by or a little after 8 pm French time, or about 2 pm in the eastern time zone of the US. By the end of the first round, all but two of the candidates will be out of the race. The two remaining will be Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. Neither will win a 50% majority, and they may only be two or three points away from each other in the results; indeed, Marine Le Pen could conceivably take a slight lead over Macron, though that is probably unlikely. Various second-round polls have shown that a Macron-Le Pen match-up would be only a few percentage points apart (not the 66%-33% of the 2017 race). And a great deal of the final vote depends on abstention, which has been reaching record highs in recent years.
Marine Le Pen is a populist. She admires Trump and Nigel Farage (Brexit), and in 2017 projected a victory for herself as the third triumph in that year. She called for a “Frexit” in 2017, or a French exit from the European Union.
Though Le Pen has not used the term “Frexit” in her campaign, she has spoken around it, calling (in the stilted language of the party program) for “the creation of a European Alliance of Nations which has as a mission to substitute itself progressively for the European Union. This Europe of free and sovereign nations, embracing its heritage of the [past] millennium, will be that of cooperation; and will put an end to the project of those who want to make of the EU an ideological federalist super-State (Programme, p. 19). One of the first to join would be Victor Orbán, whom she recently congratulated for his victory.
She will accomplish this and other measures through the RIC, or Référendum d’Initiative Citoyenne (29). This measure, which became the chief goal of the Gilets Jaunes, is essentially a plebiscite, which could easily be manipulated by Facebook and others, including the Russia propaganda channel RT (Russia Today), currently silenced in France. RT would almost surely be restored, in the name of free speech.
As for NATO, Marine Le Pen has called for a disengagement of French forces from the integrated NATO command. She has a long-standing admiration for Putin, and visited him in Moscow during her campaign in 2017. A Putin-affiliated bank lent her the money for her earlier campaign. What Putin failed to accomplish with Trump–the destruction of NATO–could be accomplished with Le Pen.
Le Pen looked weak in the summer of last year, after the trouncing of the Rassemblement National in the regional elections; none of the RN slates came in first. But the slates did come in second or third or fourth in many regions, retaining their strength in the countryside, which Macron’s very new party does not have.
Last summer’s focus on Le Pen as the “loser” in the Regionals, the narrative that young people and others were getting tired of her, may have been instrumental in Eric Zemmour’s decision to enter the presidential race (his perception combined, to be sure, with arrogance and egotism). Zemmour is fading fast, taking down with him some of those prominent RNs who joined the sinking ship of his party, Reconquête! Le Pen’s fierce struggle with Zemmour for the soul of the extreme right seems, in contrast, to have strengthened her.
Le Pen’s polished campaign machinery has done much of the rest. They cleverly took advantage of Macron’s slogan, “Avec vous” (With you) with this clever play on words, “Sans lui” (Without him), “Avec elle” (with her).
Marine Le Pen transformed the image of the old National Front, from its name to her stated determination that the RN should become a governing party. What remains of the old Front is what was always there: nativism and antisemistism, joined by a virulent anti-Islam strain, enhanced by the overt statement that the European French will be dominated by Black and Brown Muslims of immigrant stock by 2050, unless immigration is stopped.
It is likely that Macron will pull off a victory, though it may be a narrow one. If Le Pen were to win, the next rampart would be the National Assembly elections; it is dominated by Macron’s party now. The Socialist Party would likely not be a bulwark, but Les Républicains might; though they, too, have an extremist wing that would be willing to support a number of Le Pen’s initiatives.
The term of National Assembly deputies is five years, along with the president; there are no mid-term course corrections. The European Parliament elections, last held in 2019, are held every five years (thus in 2024) but they will not change what is going on in France itself, and may do more harm than good to the EU. The RN has always run most strongly in these MEP elections, for which the seats are assigned proportionally, rather than in two rounds. This electoral method revealed, in the last election, about 25% of the voters who backed Le Pen; and one of her proposed constitutional changes is to substitute proportional representation for the National Assembly.
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The Rassemblement national program (party platform):
https://mlafrance.fr/pdfs/manifeste-m-la-france-programme-presidentiel.pdf
See also:
Noemie Bisserbe and Matthew Dalton, “In France, Inflation Tightens Race Between Macron and Far-Right Le Pen,” The Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2022. https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-france-inflation-worries-fuel-tight-presidential-race-11649419200
Roger Cohen, “With Macron and Le Pen Leading Election Field, a Fractured France Decides,” The New York Times, April 9, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/09/world/europe/french-presidential-election-marcon-le-pen.html
Jonathan Freedland, “Putin still has friends in the west–and they’re gaining ground,” The Guardian, April 8, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/08/vladimir-putin-viktor-orban-eu-marine-le-pen
(In English) Gilles Paris, “The election of Marine Le Pen is now a possibility,” Le Monde, April 6, 2022. https://www.lemonde.fr/le-monde-in-english/article/2022/04/06/the-election-of-marine-le-pen-is-now-a-possiblity_6120841_5026681.html
