A bullet dodged, but what’s next?

Danielle and I jumped on our bikes on Sunday, for the twenty-minute ride over to the nearby town of Paterna. That’s the seat of the local council to which our own neighbourhood, La Cañada belongs. By sheer good luck, it just happens that it’s where the authorities in Paris decided to place the French school – the lycée français – for our local city, Valencia. 

That’s highly convenient, since it’s to the lycée that we were summoned to vote in the recent French Presidential elections. 

We both have votes. Danielle was born French and I took advantage of living in the country, around the turn of the century, to use our marriage to get French nationality myself – I had a terrible fear that Britain might in time fall for the temptation to shoot itself in the foot by opting to leave the EU, and I wanted to make sure that I retained the right to live elsewhere in Europe if I chose. 

So, Danielle and I have votes and we exercised our rights. We showed up at the lycée armed with proof of identity. And, as in the first round, I was amused by the posters outside, which contained only pictures of the candidates, with not a mention of a policy and a rather banal slogan with each: ‘nous tous’, ‘all of us’, for Macron, ‘pour tous les Français’, ‘for all French people’, for Le Pen. Both seemed concerned to speak for everyone, but Le Pen couldn’t resist a hint of nativism too, no doubt to appeal to her core supporters.

Posters for the Second Round of the Presidential Election
Little more than a beauty parade?

A picture and a slogan. I suppose there’s a kind of honesty there. An admission that most political campaigns are little more than a beauty parade.

I have to say that, by the time of the vote, I was feeling a lot less worried than I had been. The opinion polls might be wrong, but showing a ten-to-twelve-point lead for Macron as they did, they’d have to be catastrophically out, if the result was going to be a win for the far-right Le Pen. Far right in reality, that is, not in her words. She’d been softening her message as the ballot approached, but her plans for setting up alliances of states within the EU and for legislating against respecting certain EU laws in very much a Boris-Johnson way, would have been deeply damaging – a ‘Frexit by stealth’, as her critics pointed out. In addition, her party’s voting record in the European Parliament told a different story from the words she spoke, as her MEPs opposed measures protecting women or upholding gay rights.

As it happens, the opinion polls had indeed been wrong, but in the other direction. Macron’s majority was significantly higher than they’d been predicting. A great relief.

Only a relief in the short term, though. France has dodged the far-right bullet again. But it feels to me as though there’s a lot of ammunition still out there.

Here’s one of the problems. Back in 2017, when he won the presidency for the first time, Macron declared “I will do everything so that there’s no longer a reason to vote for the extremes”. Just the kind of thing many of us wanted to hear.

However, if you look at the first round of the latest presidential election, Le Pen and her even harder far-right opponent Eric Zemmour, scored just over 30% between them. That’s rather more than Macron took.

In any case, the right isn’t the only wing of politics to have an extreme. There is also a dangerously unrealistic far left – dangerous because that kind of unrealism often leads to authoritarianism, to prevent challenge by realists – and its French standard bearer, Jean-Luc Mélenchon took just under 22%. So far right and far left together took over half the total votes cast in the first round.

It seems that we’re a very long way from having persuaded people there’s no longer a reason to vote for the extremes.

The second problem is related to the first: the complete collapse of the moderate parties, of left and right. Between them, the two traditional parties that dominated French politics for decades, took under 7% of the vote in the first round. That means the only representative of the centre ground is Macron himself.

The constitution means he can’t stand in 2027. But he heads a personal party, The Republic on the March or LREM, in its French abbreviation (it may not be a coincidence that the last two initials are his own), with little or no presence on the ground, and with few other significant figures than his. 

Who will stand when he can’t?

Within the collapse of the old centre, it’s the Socialists who’ve fared worst, collecting under 2% of the vote in the first round. The lack of a moderate left-of-centre party strikes me as particularly painful, and not just because that’s where my inclinations lie. It’s more because Macron seems to have preferred to focus on winning votes from the right, neglecting the left, and winning himself a reputation for being the President for the rich, reinforced by being seen as arrogant and elitist.

What that means, above all, is that there’s no social democratic party for the young to turn to. And it’s striking that in this election, the young have been the most inclined to vote for the extremes, the anti-system parties. Which isn’t altogether surprising since, as in other countries, it’s the young that are bearing most of the burden of the pandemic, of the effects of the Ukraine war and of the beginnings of moves towards combating global warming, as jobs vanish, wages fall and prices rise.

So, we seem to have dodged a bullet for now, but only for now. If a party of the moderate left doesn’t emerge fast to start addressing the difficulties of the young, we’re not going to see the attraction of the extremes diminish. And, given his track record, I’m not sure Macron is the man to do that.

Besides, he won’t even be a candidate next time around.