FRANCE GOES TO the polls tomorrow in the first of two votes over the next two weeks that will decide who is president for the next five years.
Emmanuel Macron is seeking re-election and should he win it will be the first time in 20 years a French president has been returned to office.
Macron is facing a strengthening challenge from resurgent far-right leader Marine Le Pen, whom he defeated a runoff vote in 2017.
Firstly, a quick explainer on what a runoff vote is and how the process works.
La République
Unlike the electoral college system that’s so familiar to followers of US presidential politics, France’s president is directly elected by voters.
The candidate with over 50% of the popular vote is elected president but it usually takes two votes for this to happen.
The wider field is put to the electorate in the first round and if no candidate secures a majority then there’s a runoff election between the top two candidates.
It means that voters who selected an eliminated candidate in the first round must decide if they want to vote for an alternative candidate in the second round.
This year’s runoff election is being pencilled in for 24 April and tomorrow’s vote will decide who makes it.
French presidential elections take place over two rounds: a free-for-all and a run-off vote between the top two contenders.
— POLITICO Poll of Polls (@pollofpolls_EU) April 7, 2022
Emmanuel Macron looks likely to win a second term, but far-right opponent Marine Le Pen looks likely to challenge him both times. pic.twitter.com/xsgSV9OjHl
All the polling indicates we’re likely to see a repeat of the 2017 runoff between Macron and Le Pen but the result isn’t quite so predictable this time around.
Macron beat Le Pen by 66% to 34% in the 2017 head-to-head but polling this time around puts them virtually neck-and-neck.
A survey published on Monday showed Macron’s second-round lead at just 2 percentage points while another published Thursday gave Le Pen a 1 point lead.
“What people said was the automatic re-election of Emmanuel Macron turned out to be fake news,” Le Pen said last week.
Tomorrow’s vote
Before talking in greater detail about the potential repeat showdown between Macron and Le Pen, here’s what to know about tomorrow.
A total of 12 candidates are going forward but only a few have a realistic chance of reaching the runoff.
After Macron and Le Pen who head the way, far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon has been drawing large crowds.
Known as “Melen-show” for his crowd-attracting rhetoric, the veteran is aiming to unite left-leaning supporters after a lowly few years for French Socialists.
A former Trotskyist, who has previously been known for tirades against globalisation and the “elites”, Melenchon is polling in third place.
Melenchon has criticised Macron’s plan for different teaching methods in school and has backed lowering the retirement age from 62 to 60.
Elsewhere on the left, the Greens and Communist candidates failed to make an impact while Socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, is projected to struggle to reach even two percent.
Fourth in the polls is far-right ex-journalist and TV pundit Eric Zemmour.
Zemmour enjoyed a surge in the polls last year and for a time looked like taking the Far Right baton from Le Pen before slipping back in 2022.
Zemmour’s platform has been focused on anti-immigration policies and he recently suggested that Ukrainian refugees should be welcomed in France unlike those from Arab nations.
In 2018 Zemmour had said he wished there could be a “French Putin” and his pro-Russian positions have cost him in the polls.
Significantly though, his apparent closeness to the Kremlin has acted as a kind of mud-guard for Le Pen, who also previously visited Putin in Moscow and indeed Viktor Orban in Hungary.
On Russia, Le Pen has condemned the “immoral” invasion of Ukraine but her party is reportedly still paying off a €9 million loan to a Russian bank it took in 2014.
Commentators have suggested however that her position on Russia looks more inoffensive alongside Zemmour, who has blamed the west for creating the circumstances for the invasion of Ukraine.
Valerie Pecresse, the candidate of the main right-wing party The Republicans, the political home of former presidents including Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, appears out of contention after a campaign that never found momentum.
24 April
Back to the Macron-Le Pen battle and a reminder of who we are talking about.
After inheriting the leadership of the far-right National Front party, Marine Le Pen has sought to detoxify her party from the heritage of its founder and her father Jean-Marie Le Pen.
She has renamed the party the National Rally (RN) but Macron and his allies insist it has not changed. ”It’s not a rally, it’s a clan,” Macron said about the name change.
Whereas in 2017 Le Pen’s pitch was anti-globalisation and in many ways sought to echo the victories of Brexit and Trump, this time Le Pen has focused on cost of living issues in the face of rising inflation.
But the detail of her programme has changed little including measures like removing benefits from many immigrants, repudiating the primacy of EU law and closing the door on most asylum seekers.
This week she returned to familiar ground by promising to issue fines to Muslims who wear headscarves in public.
“People will be given a fine in the same way that it is illegal to not wear your seat belt. It seems to me that the police are very much able to enforce this measure,” she said.
A Le Pen win would send shockwaves around Europe. Her plans include a so-called “national preference” for hiring French workers over foreigners, exclusion of non-citizens from some social benefits and opting out of parts of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Although she has stopped using the term ‘Frexit’, Le Pen’s party recently joined with 14 other Eurosceptic parties to form a “grand alliance” in the European Parliament.
For his part, Emmanuel Macron is seeking to be re-elected after joining the campaign trail late in the race.
Macron had said he was focusing on presidential duties following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but Le Pen has spent that time crisscrossing the country.
With his internationally reported phone calls with Putin as part of efforts to stave off Russia’s invasion, Macron enjoyed a poll bounce that has petered out in recent weeks.
At one point he leaned so heavily into the wartime president role that he was pictured in the Élysée Palace wearing a sweatshirt bearing the label of French Special Forces unit CP-10.
Macron decided to turn up to work in a pair of jeans and a French paratroopers hoodie to be more like Zelensky. pic.twitter.com/pYivvXwOga
— Sam Street (@samstreetwrites) March 14, 2022
Instead Macron now largely faces a referendum on his presidency, a situation that all incumbent face when they go to be re-elected.
It is worth remembering at this point that Macron’s 2017 election win was somewhat of a surprise.
Macron had been part of was Francois Hollande Socialist government before he resigned in 2016 to pursue his own ambitions through a party he founded a party that shared his own initials, En March (On the Move).
His pitch was was liberalisation of labour laws to make them more business-friendly s but these pro-business leanings led to the charge from his opponents that he was a “president of the rich”.
This came to a head in late 2018 when the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) movement led to protests and riots throughout France.
The movement began as a protest against fuel taxes and the belief that French people in rural areas in particular were facing increasing costs.
As his ratings plummeted in December 2018, Macron was forced into range of concessions to the yellow vests. This included a minimum wage increase and a rollback in taxes on pensioners.
In the years since, Macron struggled to encourage French vaccine uptake during the Covid-19 pandemic but his position has improved from the nadir of three years ago.
Now, however, with inflation a major issue once more his weakness in this area is being exposed.
At his first major campaign event last weekend, a rock concert-style rally, Macron sought to put the focus back on Le Pen.
“Look at what happened with Brexit, and so many other elections: what looked improbable actually happened.”
- With reporting by © – AFP 2022
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