Our columnist Mathieu Bock-Côté is currently staying in France, from where he observes French news from a Quebec perspective.
In a week, the French will go to the polls for the first round of the presidential election. Two weeks later, they will return there to choose between the two candidates who will have qualified in the first round.
If the trend continues, they will decide between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen.
This presidential election is paradoxical.
The palette of candidacies and political options that the French have before them is varied – more varied than usual, in fact. The major political and ideological currents that cross France clash through serious candidates, even if they are of unequal value.
Debate
Normally, the debate should mobilize them.
And yet, this election does not excite and we fear a record abstention rate.
How to understand it? The reasons given are many.
For some, COVID has anesthetized the political sense of the French. They would struggle to regain physical health.
For others, the presidential campaign is the collateral victim of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which would have crushed everything in the media, leaving only a minor place for traditional democratic life.
Emmanuel Macron himself has given up campaigning on the pretext of having to deal exclusively with international politics.
It was not completely untrue, but some have affirmed, without being completely wrong either, that he dramatized his diplomatic action to present himself as the only serious candidate, against whom the unfortunate pygmies would agitate.
Be that as it may, this campaign is taking place in a strange political atmosphere, in a mixture of militant aggressiveness and democratic apathy.
This is not without danger in the medium term. Because France is crossed by real tensions. It is the role of elections, normally, to resolve them by allowing them to confront each other in a democratic way, through debates where the desire to unravel turns into a desire to debate.
We will naturally think of the question of immigration, which haunts the country, which everyone agrees, openly or behind closed microphones, when they fear media opprobrium. The most retrograde version of Islam has replaced French culture, which has become foreign to it.
This question is inseparable from that of insecurity. Some neighborhoods have become areas of lawlessness and non-France, all at the same time. It is not good to venture there, even less when one is a woman.
Extremes
Other major social issues cross the country. That of purchasing power is central, in a country which barely experienced the revolt of the Yellow Vests a few years ago. The rise in the price of gasoline and gas, in other words, the rise in the price of energy, could provoke new revolts.
Need we also remember that France is a country with a real tradition of jacqueries and insurrections. The French could go from civic apathy to social anger. In other words, Emmanuel Macron’s next term, if re-elected, could be particularly tumultuous.
It will not be enough, then, to denounce “the extremes” to calm popular protest.
The era of shortages and rationing
The invasion of Ukraine by Russia probably marks the entry into a new era which is reminiscent of old ones. Suddenly there is talk of scarcity, rationing, possible famine. In other words, we see a world coming that will no longer have prosperity as a horizon, but as an exception. How can democracy arbitrate sharp tensions while the middle classes on which it relies are perhaps called to erosion, and even to dislocation?
Laval University is talked about
The openly discriminatory practices of Laval University against white men are beginning to make people talk about them in France. Le Figaro got interested in it. We can expect the subject to gain momentum sooner or later, because the French, on the whole, are not only reserved, but hostile to policies that fall under ethnic discrimination, even when multiculturalist ideologues want to pass this discrimination for positive. Canada’s reputation is damaged.
Two big meetings
On Saturday, Emmanuel Macron gathers his activists for his only major rally of the presidential campaign. He intends to install the themes of his upcoming duel with Marine Le Pen. On Sunday, Valérie Pécresse will rally her troops, in a final attempt to give herself a boost in the polls, to make it to the second round. The memory of COVID seems far behind us, even though we know the epidemic continues. Life takes back its rights.