Luck and fear had a hand in Macron’s victory over far right

Well, in the end, it seemed relatively easy. 

An impressive 58.5 per cent. Not quite the crushing two-thirds of the vote Emmanuel Macron won five years ago. But almost every other winner of the French presidency would have been very happy with his score.

“Is he lucky?”

That was the question Cardinal Mazarin always asked about prospective ministers. The cardinal was the right-hand man — the prime minister in all but name — of Louis XIV for almost two decades in the 1600s. Mazarin was apparently deeply superstitious, and only wanted “lucky” lieutenants.

In Macron’s case, the answer has to be “yes.”

The French president came to office five years ago promising to push through major change. Instead, major change pushed him and his government around. 

There was a leaderless uprising in the smaller towns and countryside of France called “les gilets jaunes,” or Yellow Vests, who resisted an “environmental” tax on diesel fuel that they claimed would drive poorer drivers into debt. (The tax was dropped.) Then, the devastation of COVID-19. Meanwhile, the eight-year French military expedition in several countries of sub-Saharan Africa, sent to wipe out ISIS groups, has largely failed. The French forces are pulling back and the extremists hold even more territory.

But Macron could rely on his luck.

The Yellow Vests exhausted themselves and the country three years ago — although it took months, not weeks as in Canada with the recent truckers’ protests. 

After a stuttering initial response to COVID-19, Macron’s push to vaccinate the population earned grudging support from the majority of voters.

And the African debacle has been completely overshadowed by war in Ukraine.

A splintered opposition

French presidential elections are run in two rounds. The first round is wide open; the second, two weeks later, is a runoff between the two candidates with the most votes in the first round.

Macron’s biggest luck lay in the lineup of opponents against him for the presidency this time around. There were no fewer than 11 candidates in the first round, splintering the opposition vote.

Marine Le Pen, the French presidential candidate for the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party, salutes supporters after a speech at the Pavillon d’Armenonville in Paris on April 24. She ended up getting 41.5 per cent of the vote. (Christophe Archambault/AFP/Getty Images)

Further luck: far-right leader Marine Le Pen found herself battling for votes with Eric Zemmour, a man with even more pronounced extremist views. On Jan. 16, in the midst of the campaign, Zemmour was fined almost $15,000 by a Paris court for inciting racial hatred. He had said on television in 2020 that unaccompanied child migrants in France are “thieves,” “rapists” and “murderers.”

Zemmour called the court’s decision “ideological and stupid.” But he faded and Le Pen came second in the first round, almost five per cent behind Macron.  

Le Pen was running for president for a third time, the second time against Macron, the man she and many voters denounced as arrogant.

The incumbent president didn’t so much defend his record as attack Le Pen’s program. Macron said she was anti-Europe, anti-immigrant and beholden to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the candidates’ debate on April 20, Macron referred to a nine million euro ($14 million Cdn) loan her party obtained from a Kremlin-linked bank in 2014.

“When you talk to Russia,” Macron said to her, “you are not talking to its leaders; you are talking to your banker.”

‘A victory of relief’

This was a killer line. Le Pen had been loud in her praise of Putin right up to his brutal invasion of Ukraine earlier this year.

Le Pen also managed to fumble her strongest argument, the sharply rising cost of living. Macron pointed out that he had capped energy prices and was sending special cost-of-living cheques to the poorest voters while Le Pen proposed cutting the value added tax (VAT) across the board, which Macron said would benefit “people like you and me,” who didn’t need help nearly as much.

And so he won. Macron is the first French president to be re-elected in 20 years, but commentators like Brice Teinturier, of the polling institute Ipsos, called it “more a victory of relief. Hope seems quite absent from the result of this election.”

Even Macron seemed pensive in his victory speech. “I know that many people voted for me not in support of my ideas, but to block the extreme right.”

These defaced campaign posters for Macron and Le Pen in southwestern France demonstrate the broader discontent with the choice of candidates in the runoff in the 2022 presidential election. (Bob Edme/The Associated Press)

His speech was short and sober. The election-night party under the Eiffel Tower was over by 10 p.m. European leaders rushed to show their relief and congratulate the president. Macron’s ministers told interviewers that the Macron II government would be much more open and voter-friendly.

There is a whiff of worry in the air.

Macron and his custom-built party, La République En Marche (Republic on the Move), now face parliamentary elections in June. The battle will be uphill.

Lingering divisions

As Teinturier and other analysts underline, the far-right candidates gathered almost one-third of the votes in the first round. Add to that votes for far-left candidates and you have almost 58 per cent of the electorate. The candidates for the traditional centre-right Republicans and centre-left Socialists won, together, less than seven per cent.

Already the parties on the far left are holding coalition talks and the third-place finisher in the first round, Jean-Luc Mélenchon (who almost squeaked past Le Pen in a last-minute surge), sees himself as the leader of a majority and a prime minister-in-waiting.

Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the leftist party La France Insoumise (Unbowed France), seen here in 2017, could become prime minister after legislative elections in June. (Reuters / Alain Jocard)

This has happened twice in recent history. The French call it “cohabitation,” and when the opposition has a legislative majority and forms a government, the president finds himself all but politically naked, stripped of most economic powers.

The good news for Macron is that Le Pen and Zemmour are still fighting on the far right and won’t form a coalition. The bad news is that his own party is seen as little more than yes men and women. 

More bad news: the election analyst Jérome Fourquet said the election results showed the deep geographical and economic split in the country. In the first round, Le Pen won less than six per cent of the votes in the capital, Paris, while racking up big first-place scores in poorer areas in the north and south. 

“The presidential campaign was fleeting and lacked substance,” Fourquet said in an interview with the newspaper Le Figaro. “It offered no safety valve or cathartic purge of the tension running through the country. The fear is that all this will move from parliament and spill into the streets.” 

Macron could be wondering if his luck is about to run out.