Macron at the Head of the Pack
The first round of the French Presidential elections will be held on April 10, 2022; the second round will be held on April 24. During those two weeks, the two finalists will (most likely) debate. President Emmanuel Macron has stated that he does not wish to debate in the first round, which will include all the candidates who have qualified to run by getting 500 parrainages, or endorsements from 500 elected officials, including members of the National Assembly and Senate, Mayors, regional and departmental councils, and the councilors of Paris and Lyon, among others.
Jordan Bardella, the current head of the National Rally party as Marine Le Pen runs for president, has predictably called for Macron to “get down into the arena,” but Macron is too smart for that, since he would be a punching bag for all comers. Les Echos provides a “daily barometer” of the polls, which has shown Macron to be consistently ahead of the pack. His January 24 showing, at 25% of the choice of those who intend to vote in the first round, is not as alarming as it sounds, in a field of 12 or so candidates (the deadline for the signatures is not until March 4).
Surprisingly, however, the second candidate at 18% is Valérie Pécresse of Les Républicains, who will have the backing of a strong national party network, which Macron does not have. She was chosen in December by her party’s convention–and, while 18% is as high as she has ever been, she has been rather steadily rising.
The other surprise is Marine Le Pen, currently at 16%. It was long assumed that the second round would be a replay of Macron and Le Pen, as in 2017, but that may not be the case. Le Pen was hurt by her confident predictions that the National Rally could take several of the regions of France during the June 2021 elections. She campaigned hard for her candidates, and did not win a single region; the “blue wave” she had predicted did not materialize. And in the meantime, she has been known to falter; her 2017 debate performance against Macron was widely considered a disaster.
No doubt some of her weakness stems from the (yet another) surprise candidacy of Eric Zemmour, at 13%, which is more or less where he started at the beginning of the year. He has dipped below 13%, but has never (at least not yet) gone above it. He is a right-wing public intellectual and television personality, a writer of public intellectual-type books, who has been called the French Tucker Carlson or the French Donald Trump. He named his political movement (not yet a party) Reconquête, or “Reconquest.” He is referring to “taking back” France from Muslim immigrants, and he uses the term “The Great Replacement” frequently in his speeches. The reference is to Renaud Camus’s theory that Muslim immigrants, with their relentless infiltration and high birth rates, are racially and religiously “replacing” Europeans, in France and throughout Europe.
The strongest candidate on the Left is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of La France Insoumise (a party he founded), who has stayed more or less at 9%. Mélenchon is frequently referred to as “the Left of the Left,” but his orientation is fundamentally different from that of the socialist Left. Rather than the “Blairism” or DLC centrism of the turn of the century, he looks back to the revolutionary movements of the third world, admires Che Guevara and Thomas Sankara, and hates the United States, NATO, and the European Union.
The EELV “Green” party candidate, Yannick Jadot, was elected in the only party primary that was held this cycle. The excitement around the primary and the debates that preceded it gave him a bump up to 8%, but he is now holding steady at 5%.
Finally, at 3%, Anne Hidalgo is carrying the tattered banner of the once great Socialist Party, the party pulled together by François Mitterand. She was elected last year to a second term as mayor of Paris; since her selection by the Socialist Party, she has been unable to gain traction. She recently called for a “primary of the Left,” so that the second round would not be a replay of the right and far right. Mélenchon has refused to participate, and in fact the only taker was someone who had not been planning to run at all (or maybe she was, and needed the excuse). Christiane Taubira, author (of real books) and long-time deputy from French Guiana, who served as President François Hollande’s Minister of Justice, announced her candidacy for the Left primary; and she is sitting at 5%, ironically above Hidalgo herself.
More concerning is the overall strong percentage of those on the far right; Le Pen and Zemmour together are at 29% of the vote. Add to that the conservative candidate Pécresse (currently president of the Ile-de-France region) with 18%, and it is clear that even if all factions of the Left were united, they could not match the political Right.
As for Macron himself, he is center-right. But more importantly, he is also intelligent and actually understands the issues that France faces. (I say that as someone who disagrees profoundly with his solutions.) His recent and widely reported comment that he wanted to “piss off” the vaccine refuseniks was a matter of shrewd calculation, and it seems to have paid off. His only real enemy is abstentionism.
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All photos are from Shutterstock.com.
Valerie Mazuir, “Sondage présidentielle 2022: tous les résultats de notre baromètre quotidien,” Les Echos, January 10, 2022.
“Jordan Bardella ‘appelle Emmanuel Macron à descendre dans l’arène,’” Sud Radio, January 24, 2022. https://www.sudradio.fr/politique/presidentielle-jordan-bardella-appelle-macron-descendre-dans-arene
“Élection présidentielle: les règles pour les parrainages des candidats,” Vie publique, https://www.vie-publique.fr/eclairage/23872-parrainage-des-candidats-la-presidentielle-les-500-signatures
