(Paris) Despite the pandemic, despite the war in Ukraine, Emmanuel Macron’s game plan – which he had drawn up a long time ago – has come true perfectly: he finds himself not only in the second round against opponent he wanted, Marine Le Pen, but she is rather poorly placed to win.
Posted at 6:00 a.m.
The most important development of Sunday evening is that the Republican Front against the extreme right, which existed in 2002 and 2017, reformed even before the two protagonists of the second round had finished their speeches in front of their supporters.
It was neither obvious nor acquired. Mr Macron must defend a record his opponents have criticized throughout the campaign. The fact that they all said vote Macron – or, at least, not vote Le Pen – is, in itself, a big victory for the incumbent president.
This shows that France is not a country that recognizes itself in extremes, even if they can sometimes be very noisy.
“It’s not us,” Macron said several times during his speech. This clearly dismissed his only remaining opponent in the camp of those he called “xenophobes and populists”.
In the end, the French will even have given the lie to the trend that seemed to be detected in the polls. Mr. Macron is the only candidate who has done better than five years ago, and the path for Mr.me Le Pen could get more than 50% of the vote is very narrow. What is called here “useful voting” has already done its job.
In particular, the score of polemicist Éric Zemmour, at 7.1%, is a little lower than the polls indicated. This leaves a lower pool of votes than expected. There was not the “hidden vote” for the extreme right that some expected.
But Mr. Macron may say that nothing is settled, this result is a wider victory than he could have expected. Because he almost creates a vacuum around him and his party.
This election marks the end of a certain way of doing politics in France. The traditional parties, on the right and on the left, the Communists, the Socialists, the Ecologists and even the Republicans – heirs to Gaullism – are crushed.
These parties of the traditional right or left did not even obtain the 5% of votes required to receive reimbursement of election expenses. The defeat on Sunday evening could therefore also lead to enormous financial problems. And as money is the sinews of war in politics as elsewhere, this should accelerate the necessary re-foundation of these parties.
Even the party which finished third, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France insoumise, will also have to reinvent itself since it is unlikely that its candidate and main asset, who is 70 years old, will be in the next meeting.
Mr. Mélenchon passed 1.5 percentage points of being qualified for the second round, when nearly 98% of the votes had been counted. Meanwhile, the Communist candidate Fabien Roussel – who had been invited in recent days to withdraw in favor of Mr. Mélenchon – obtained 2.3% of the vote. There are going to be big discussions within the left over the next few days!
That being said, nothing is ever completely settled in politics and no one is safe from a blunder or losing a debate – as there will be on April 20.
The question thanks to which Mme Le Pen has won the majority of its support is clearly the high cost of living and declining purchasing power. Mr. Macron said yesterday that his plan on these issues was better than that of his opponent, he will now have to prove it. Similarly, he will have to defend his record of the last five years where not everything has been good, especially in health.
But he, too, could criticize the program of Mr.me Le Pen, and especially the elements that she has largely succeeded in camouflaging since the start of the campaign, in particular on immigration, security and identity issues. Questions where his program causes a lot of divisions in French society.
The links of Mme Le Pen with Vladimir Putin’s Russia – her 2017 campaign was partly funded by a loan from a Russian bank and after the invasion of Ukraine she was forced to throw away more than 1 million campaign leaflets that contained a photo of Mr.me Le Pen with the head of the Kremlin – will also be highlighted.
This second round will therefore be a repeat of the second round of 2017. But with major differences that leave only a very narrow path for Mme The pen. With the Republican Front which has been reconstituted spontaneously, the path to the Elysée of the candidate of the National Rally seems strewn with pitfalls.