随着法国4月24日第二轮总统选举的临近，一种似曾相识的感觉正笼罩着这个国家。距离上次投票已经过去了五年，现任总统埃马纽埃尔-马克龙(Emmanuel Macron)将再次面对国民大会党(RN, or National Rally)的玛丽娜-勒庞(Marine Le Pen) 。在4月14日的第一轮投票中，两人都比2017年的投票结果略有提高。勒庞女士从21%上升到23%，而马克龙先生从24%上升到28%。
By Invitation | France’s election
Even if Macron wins, French politics may already have changed for ever
Catherine Fieschi says the revolt against the establishment is gathering pace
Apr 22nd 2022 (Updated Apr 22nd 2022)
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AS FRANCE NEARS the second round of its presidential election on April 24th, a sense of déjà vu is hanging over the country. Five years on from the last vote, Emmanuel Macron, the incumbent, is once again facing Marine Le Pen of the Rassemblement National (RN, or National Rally) party. In the first round, on April 14th, both of them slightly improved on their 2017 tallies: Ms Le Pen up to 23% from 21%, and Mr Macron up to 28% from 24%.
The dominance of these two candidates shows how French voters have delivered a double body-blow to their party system. In 2017 they trashed the centre-left Socialist Party (then on 6%, today on 2%). This year they knocked out the centre-right by giving it 5% of the vote, down from 20% in 2017.
Ms Le Pen was written off after her defeat in 2017. Her party’s electoral performances since then have been poor. But she dug in, kept quiet, and learned from her mistakes. Having spread herself too thinly in 2017, this time she ran a localised campaign, with more intimate meetings and fewer big election rallies. Her performance in the only presidential debate on April 20th was hailed as slightly stronger than her much-derided showing in 2017. Even if she loses, she is set to far outshine her second-round score of just 34% in 2017. How lasting is this anti-establishment revolt likely to be?
The first-round results suggest it is not just the far right that is flourishing. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a hard-left populist, scored a solid 22%, running Ms Le Pen a close third. His programme is as populist as Ms Le Pen’s in its rejection of elites, its promise of direct democracy through the routine use of referendums, and its pledge to distance France from the EU and NATO.
So the lesson of the first round is not that the far right is starting to dominate but that French voters are continuing to turn to politicians outside the established party system, of whatever political stripe. That, after all, is what they did in electing Mr Macron in the first place. If she were to win on April 24th, Ms Le Pen would most likely have to thank voters who voted for Mr Mélenchon in the first round, either for choosing her (19% are threatening to do so), or for staying at home.
Why is this shift taking place? A recent CEVIPOF/IPSOS poll suggests that it is not because voters are placing their trust in extremist politicians. Only 20% of people voting for Ms Le Pen say they trust her. The rest back her mainly because “she feels closest to people like me” (42%) or “as a vote against the other candidate” (38%). Voters for Mr Mélenchon were similarly inclined: only 15% declared they trusted him; 64% said they felt he had ideas close to their own. Mr Macron’s score on this “proximity”, on the other hand, is the lowest across the board, on 29%.
To signal that she is moving away from her far-right roots, Ms Le Pen changed the name of her party, from Front National (FN, meaning National Front). She shifted her focus from race and immigration to community and wages. Her party’s stance on Islam is now wrapped in a strong defence of Western values and secularism rather than the more blatant anti-Muslim propaganda that used to be the hallmark of the FN. In the first round, she benefited from the presence of Eric Zemmour, a candidate even further to the right than she is, which helped her look less dangerous.
Ms Le Pen’s courting of working-class voters since she took over the party in 2011 has also entailed a shift in rhetoric. She focuses more now on issues closer to the hearts of communities drained of jobs, people and services, who cannot see how the EU or globalisation (or their own traditional left-wing political allegiances) have brought them anything but heartache and humiliation. It is a familiar story in many advanced democracies.
Yet the RN manifesto clearly lays out the party’s distance from the mainstream. It promises a referendum on immigration (the contents of which remain purposely vague), a ban on wearing the hijab in public places, the restricting of jobs, housing and benefits to French nationals (a policy known as “national preference”) and the abolition of the right to French citizenship by birth. All of this comes alongside a vague, barely costed economic programme that promises the slashing of VAT and an increase in wages, as well as the renegotiation of France’s relationship to the EU in a manner strongly reminiscent of Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orban. Ms Le Pen is clearly looking to shake up France from the right much more than Mr Macron has attempted to do from the centre.
Most analysts think Mr Macron will still win on Sunday. That French voters are likely to re-elect a liberal centrist is a blessing. But the election itself should stand as a warning against complacency everywhere. France offers a glimpse of the challenges facing liberal democracies. Over the course of his mandate Mr Macron has consistently argued that he is the only thing standing between French voters and populism. But 20 years ago Ms Le Pen’s party was perceived as a menace to democracy by the 82% of French voters who voted against her father; today that figure is down to 50%. And surveys suggest that many young people are increasingly leaning towards both the Le Pens and the Mélenchons of this world. Citizens seem to be increasingly impervious both to the dangers of populism and to the attractions of liberal democracy. With its offer of “proximity politics”, populism offers more vulnerable voters a sense of belonging and involvement that the liberal centre has forsaken.
This bodes ill for France and for the Western world. In the longer term, whoever wins on Sunday will need to secure the allegiance of French voters not just to themselves as president, but to a politics of negotiated compromise rather than one of invective, and to a politics between opponents rather than between enemies. That will be a much harder task.
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Catherine Fieschi is a political scientist and the founder and director of Counterpoint, a British think-tank.
