The video did not go unnoticed. We see President Emmanuel Macron as war chief in the very secret Jupiter command post, at the Élysée. Shortly before, he had spoken with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to assure him of his support. Less than six weeks before the first round of the French presidential elections, the war in Ukraine is radically changing the course of this election.
While the president must announce his official candidacy before March 4, his first major campaign meeting, scheduled for Saturday in Marseille, has been canceled. Even his visit to the Salon de l’Agriculture, a usually unavoidable political tradition, was reduced to the bare minimum.
Between the COVID-19 epidemic and the first European military conflict of this magnitude in the 21stand century, what space will there be left for a presidential campaign that was announced as crucial? This is the question that has been asked in all the political staffs for a week, while the president is on all the television sets as chief of the armies and president of the Council of the European Union. A presidency that he himself had chosen not to postpone, despite the campaign to come.
Never had such an international crisis erupted a few weeks before such a decisive meeting. Neither the interventions in Libya and Mali nor the wars in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia took place during an election period. The event is unprecedented, so much so that the experts are wondering what the campaign that is beginning may look like.
Already, the polls have recorded the obvious popularity of the head of state. A normal phenomenon in a crisis situation. “The calendar was already favorable to him”, affirms in Point Institut Montaigne adviser Dominique Moïsi. “But the Russian-Ukrainian war may offer him a second term on a silver platter. »
According to the daily Elabe barometer The echoes, Emmanuel Macron’s confidence rating has gained five points. More than 50% of French people say they trust him to deal with the crisis caused by the invasion of Ukraine. While 65% of French people do not hesitate to say that this war will influence their choice, voting intentions in favor have increased by two or three points to reach, according to the polls, between 26% and 28%. These rates place it far ahead of its main competitors.
Overhang strategy
In the middle of the storm, “we will undoubtedly have the feeling that it is not time to take the risk of changing captain”, declared political scientist Dominique Reynié to the daily. Le Figaro. This is what the American political scientist John Mueller called in the 1970s the “rally around the flag” syndrome.
The strategy of Emmanuel Macron, who wanted to keep his presidential overhang as long as possible before descending into the arena, is thus confirmed. Difficult to install in these circumstances a duel of equals with a candidate who spends his time on the telephone with Joe Biden and Vladimir Poutine. Already rejected by those close to the president, the idea of a major televised debate between the main candidates before the first round now seems more than unlikely.
But there is more. Faced with a president at the helm, the candidates walk on eggshells when it comes to Ukraine. If all without exception have denounced the Russian aggression without hesitation, many are now being reproached for what could appear as a form of tolerance with regard to the regime of Vladimir Putin.
For the past few days, Jean-Luc Mélenchon (LFI), Marine Le Pen (RN) and Éric Zemmour (Reconquest) have had to justify step by step their past positions with regard to Russia. The first had in fact gone so far as to support the Russian intervention in Syria. “I don’t agree with making Russia an enemy. We brought ten countries into NATO in the East, which was felt as a threat by Russia,” the president of La France insoumise declared as recently as last January.
On the populist right, Marine Le Pen’s ties with Russia are old. Unable to finance his campaign in France, in 2014, his party had borrowed several million euros from Russian banks. In 2017, in the middle of the presidential campaign, the president of the National Rally had even metVladimir Poutine.
Zemmour points to NATO
As for the candidate of the nationalist right Eric Zemmour, he has never hidden his admiration for the patriotism of the Russian president. “Vladimir Putin defends his interests. He is a Russian patriot,” he said in early February, even as Russian troops were active on the Ukrainian border. In 2018, he even said he dreamed of “a French Poutine”.
According to him, if Putin is “guilty” of having attacked Ukraine, those responsible remain “the French, the Germans, the Americans, who have not enforced the Minsk agreements and who have continued to extend NATO to be around Russia as a kind of encirclement”. On RTL, he reiterated that “the culprit is Putin, those responsible are NATO, which has continued to expand”.
In the hours following the Russian aggression, the man who disputes Marine Le Pen for second place in the polls even offered to send two mediators to Moscow: former President Nicolas Sarkozy and the former Minister of Foreign Affairs by François Mitterrand Hubert Védrine. A proposal described as “idiotic” by the latter, according to whom only the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the secretary general of the UN, the Israelis or the Chinese could play such a role.
Refusing to give in to “emotion”, Zemmour is also the only candidate to refuse to welcome Ukrainian refugees in a France, he says, “already overwhelmed by immigration”. “I share and I understand the emotion vis-à-vis the Ukrainian populations”, but “I prefer that they [les Ukrainiens] are in Poland. They will be able to return home more easily when the war is over.” The candidate proposes in particular to help this country by lifting the economic sanctions imposed on it by Brussels.
This position was described as “unworthy” by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Clément Beaune, who, parodying François Mitterrand on Russian missiles, concluded that “Putin is in the East”, but that “Putinists are in the west.
Would Emmanuel Macron have gone so far as to “script” this crisis? The President of the Senate, Gérard Larcher, is not afraid to affirm it. If there is no debate, he said on Europe 1, “then it will be a form of democratic omission with a risk of legitimacy” during the next term.