During the night of last Wednesday to Thursday, a new website appeared. Entitled Avecvous2022.fr, we see ordinary French people telling their daily lives. It’s the newspaper The world who learned that this site – without a political party logo or the name of a public official –, apparently intended to give the floor to the French, was in reality intended to promote the candidacy of Emmanuel Macron. A poster campaign and distribution of leaflets must accompany this launch. Problem: Emmanuel Macron is still not officially a candidate. But he already has a campaign website.
How much longer can the president keep the suspense going? This is the question that everyone asks themselves as they have been criss-crossing France without respite for three weeks, as they constantly mention in veiled terms their “desire” to go there, as they multiply the aid in the key sectors of security and justice, not to mention checks and tax exemptions against increases in the price of gas, electricity and gasoline. Last sign that does not deceive: the president’s wife, Brigitte Macron, has been on all television sets for two weeks.
Too early or too late?
In France, this balancing act is not new. All of Emmanuel Macron’s predecessors had to solve the difficult equation of when and how they entered the campaign. Too early, it exposes to group fire which protects the presidential overhang. Too late, it gives the impression of a candidate who is afraid to step into the arena and get his hands dirty.
A late entry had succeeded with Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand. In 1965, the first was declared only a month before the election by a simple speech broadcast on television. But, while he intended to win in the first round, he was put on waivers. The second, who was coming out of a period of cohabitation – a majority on the right constituted the National Assembly – waited until 33 days before the first round to declare himself live on the television news. This allowed him to let his two adversaries, Jacques Chirac and Raymond Barre, run out of steam in a fratricidal struggle. But not everyone has the stature of these two.
In 1981, Giscard d’Estaing had an excellent record. He was certain of his advantage. At least that’s what the polls predicted. When 55 days before the vote he declared himself, the tide began to turn. Closer to home, in 2011, Nicolas Sarkozy knew he had a steep climb to climb. He had therefore embarked on the campaign a little more than two months before the first round. However, at the end of the campaign, when he went up in the polls, he admitted that he had missed two more weeks to win over François Hollande.
“Not a Frenchman doubts that he will end up going there. The date is a journalistic subject”, slipped to the Parisian the President of the National Assembly, Richard Ferrand. Since the start of the school year, the president’s movements have drawn a dotted portrait of a campaign that does not say its name. They serve in particular to plug the weaknesses of a five-year term in which the president was perceived as distant from the concerns of the regions and weak on sovereign issues, such as security and immigration.
A misleading campaign
No one is fooled by the fact that this week’s trip to Creuse, where Emmanuel Macron went to admire a sumptuous Limousin cow, was intended to break his image as president of the cities. An image consecrated by the revolt of the Yellow Vests. Admission of failure or outline of a program? Faced with Valérie Pécresse, candidate Les Républicains (LR), who accuses her of having “burned the cash register”, Emmanuel Macron took the opposite view by promising in front of a group of high school students to “put back many more public services and civil servants on field “.
Earlier, on January 10, in Nice alongside the mayor, Christian Estrosi, he had promised to invest an additional 15 billion over five years in the budget of the Ministry of the Interior. With, as a bonus, a salary increase for the police. In all the polls, it is on security and immigration that the president’s record is most disputed.
We also suspect that the presidential management of the epidemic is not free from electoral concerns. For several months, it has also allowed him to consolidate his support in the elderly electorate who supported François Fillon in 2017. According to all observers, the controversial declaration of January 4, in which he said he “very much wanted” to ‘piss off’ the non-vaccinated, was clearly intended to pose him as a defender of the majority and to embarrass the opposition LR, where many deputies opposed the vaccine passport which has just been put in place implemented.
But the result is not there. Even if he remains in the lead in all the polls, Emmanuel Macron recorded his first real fall this week. Satisfaction with its action fell from 41% to 37%, according to an Ifop poll for The Sunday Journal. “For the first time since the first confinement, the crisis does not benefit him”, explains the political scientist and director general of Ifop, Frédéric Dabi, in Le Figaro.
If this fall continues, the president could be forced to descend into the arena before mid-February. The business daily The gallery evokes the rumor of an announcement of candidature at the beginning of the month in Marseilles, symbolic place of the fight against insecurity.
No first-round debate?
Already, the president’s entourage has hinted that he will not participate in the traditional televised debates before the first round. The situation is unprecedented since the outgoing presidents have always reserved themselves for the debate between two rounds. But will Emmanuel Macron be able to make people forget the precedent of 2017 where, as there was no outgoing, all the candidates had participated in the debates on an equal footing? The bet is “risky”, according to Paris-Sorbonne University professor Arnaud Benedetti. “By not going there, he also takes the risk of being the one who shirks, who uses and abuses his status to further distort competition”, he declared to the Figaro.
The lifting of health restrictions which will begin on February 2 could create a favorable situation for a declaration of candidacy. On the other hand, a crisis in Ukraine could delay it, while allowing Emmanuel Macron to assert his presidential stature. Be that as it may, a large number of analysts agree on one thing. What threatens the president most is a form of arrogance that has returned periodically throughout his five-year term. Everyone remembers the example of the young center-left Italian leader Matteo Renzi, to whom everything was promised and who was swept away in 2016 at the last minute. This is also what happened to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1981. It is never good to be certain of winning.