French President Emmanuel Macron has announced he will be on the ballot in next month’s election on the eve of the end of the nomination period. By a simple letter intended for the regional newspapers.
Posted on March 6
A little more and he would say: “Yes, I will be a candidate, but I have other things to do. He is also the only major candidate not to have held a large rally in front of thousands of supporters, yet a passage normally required for any self-respecting candidate.
Obviously, the war of aggression waged by Russia against Ukraine and the important diplomatic role played by the French president in it justify this lack of interest in the electoral campaign. “Of course, I will not be able to campaign as I would have liked because of the context,” he wrote in his letter.
It is the great fear of all opponents of Emmanuel Macron, that the electoral campaign – which will officially begin on March 28 – will take place without any real debate and with an outgoing president who will want to surf on international affairs rather than electoral ones.
This context clearly favors Mr. Macron. He has spent most of his energies in recent weeks becoming Vladimir Putin’s privileged Western interlocutor. Again this Thursday, he spent 90 minutes on the phone with the Russian president. A call proposed by Putin, insisted on specifying the Elysée.
But while President Macron takes care of international affairs, the other candidates have already been campaigning for months in a context disrupted by the conflict in Ukraine. Thus, Mr. Macron now finds himself near the 30% mark in the first round – which is a good score – a rise of more than four points in a week.
In fact, the Russian invasion is playing tricks on some candidates. There are still 10 days, the two far-right candidates, Marine Le Pen and the polemicist Éric Zemmour, found it profitable to speak well of Vladimir Poutine.
Thus, M.me Le Pen had 1.2 million copies printed of an election leaflet in which she proudly posed with Putin. This week, this leaflet was discreetly sent to the pestle. As for Mr. Zemmour, he no longer speaks of his intention to be a kind of “French Poutine”. Unfortunately for him, his past statements had already been immortalized on YouTube.
PHOTO STÉPHANE DE SAKUTIN, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen, seated side by side, during a follow-up meeting on the situation in Ukraine, to which Prime Minister Jean Castex invited the presidential candidates, at Matignon, in Paris, on February 28.
The two candidates from the extreme right also want to get France out of NATO’s integrated command, as General de Gaulle did in 1966. Which, in the current circumstances, seems less urgent.
That said, the far right is growing in France. If the candidates Le Pen and Zemmour united their votes, they would obtain more than 30% and could finish first in the first round.
But the same polls also indicate that Mr. Macron is heading for a fairly easy re-election, although with a less attractive score than five years ago. It is more and more likely that he will find Marine Le Pen in the second round, like five years ago. But this time Mr. Macron’s victory should be closer, around 56% of the vote against 66% in 2017.
In the 2017 election, Mr. Macron had, in a way, blown up the traditional right. Its candidate, François Fillon, was joined by all sorts of ethical issues and finished third with 20% of the vote, the worst score for a candidate claiming to be Gaullist.
The candidate of the Republicans, the Gaullist party, should do even less well. Valérie Pécresse seems to be going nowhere. Since her nomination as official candidate, she seems to be in free fall and is now below the 15% mark.
But if things still don’t go well on the traditional right, Mr Macron now looks set to blast the traditional left. The socialist candidate, Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris, won only 2% of the votes in the polls, less than the candidate of the Communist Party, Fabien Roussel.
A nostalgic communist. His campaign slogan touts France’s return to “happy days” and describes French civilization as “good meat, good wine and good cheese.”
To say that five years ago today, it was still the socialist François Hollande who occupied the Élysée and that it was during his mandate that a young Emmanuel Macron had been appointed minister…
Today, the largest left-wing party is called La France insoumise, but its candidate, Jean-Luc Mélanchon, looks set to do half as much as the startling 20% he achieved in 2017.
But five weeks before the first round of the presidential election, the French know that they will be able to vote. But they cannot be certain that it will be the occasion for a real debate.