France 2022: Could Le Pen Win?

Could France Finally Succomb To The Le Pen Family?

Jacques Chirac is a notable French President for two reasons - both the only French President to serve 12 years in office, the consequence of a change from 7 year terms to 5 year terms in his first term, Chirac's 2002 victory was also the biggest victory ever - an 82/18 landslide against the National Front - and the first time any directly elected French President of the Fifth Republic had ever received more than 60% of the vote in the second round. It was a shock, not so much because Chirac got that much against Jean-Marie Le Pen, but because Le Pen got into the second round - a failure of the French Socialists to take the first round seriously left the door open, and the fascists in the National Front took advantage - and then, of course they got smashed.

Over the next two election cycles, the Socialists got their act together, running Chirac's successor, Nicolas Sarkozy, close in 2007, only getting 53.1% of the vote in that second round, before beating him in 2012 by a similarly close 51.6%/48.4% result in the midst of the Eurozone crisis and global economic despair. That period was marked by a retreat in the National Front, and the memory of 2002 has seemed to shock the sense back into many in French politics, that the days of the National Front, or extremists generally, was over, as the discourse was dominated by technocratic centrists in Sarkozy and François Hollande, neither of whom would dare do too much, go too far, or push the envelope too much.

The single terms for both men were marked by economic crisis, imported from the Americans and from their southern European partners, and then the end of the Hollande term was dominated by Brexit, and how the EU would respond to the referendum by the British people. Both leaders were constrained by the boxes they were put in, by European commitments, economic conditions that could be best described as sputtering, and the fact that neither of them could hold a candle to the true leader of the European Union, Angela Merkel. Both were hemmed in, both by their own weaknesses and external events, and then the dam broke against both of them.

In 2017, Hollande was so unpopular that he didn't even bother running for a second term, and Sarkozy's attempt to make the ballot as the candidate of his old party failed in what Americans would call the primary stage, and largely as a function of their decade of darkness, the stage was filled with another Le Pen, Jean-Marie's daughter, Marine Le Pen. Riding high, Le Pen was looking like a theoretical President for a while, and after the dual shocks of Brexit and Trump, there was a serious consideration to whether another nuclear power and Permanent UN Security Council member could go the way of the populist, nativist, right.

On the other side of the stage was the Louis the Great wannabe Emmanuel Macron, whose pseudo-self styled movement - En Marche, named for his initials, and evoking the call to battle from La Marseillaises (Aux armes, citoyens/Formez vos bataillons/Marchons, marchons!), the French National Anthem. Macron was a sop to the ideals of France, wanting to portray strength again after years of managed decline, and speaking to past glories. As the centrist, he portrayed Le Pen as the exact kind of extremist that the two round Presidential system had been devised to stop from winning, and portrayed the 2017 election as a choice between the forces of civility, righteousness, and good against Le Pen. Relying on a stereotype of the National Front that Le Pen had tried to distance herself from - by, notably, expelling her own damn father from the party - Macron surged to a 66%-34% beatdown of Le Pen, and has governed the country since.

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Notice the word I didn't use there, well - as in, I didn't say he has governed the country well since his victory in 2017. His nearly four years in office have been shambolic and chaotic, from his handling of yellow vest movements to his chaotic handling of COVID restrictions to massively botching vaccine rollout across his country, and the best defence I can summon for him is that he isn't Le Pen, which is just putting the bar so low that it is literally underground. He would stand up to Trump in minor ways, from the handshakes to needling him in public, and showing off military might just to impress the brain addled man who clearly just responds to strength and grandeur at all time, but in terms of his day to day management of the country, Macron's term has not been a success. So, could he lose in 2022? The short answer is no, and the longer answer is almost assuredly not.

The short answer is that the National Front - or, sorry, the National Rally now, because everyone in France has to change their party names all the time - has never come close to winning office and they won't again. The longer answer is that Macron benefits from the system being slanted to intentionally exclude parties of the extremes from victory, and so barring an insane collapse, he will win. That history matters, because the French system was designed so that you couldn't have the Communists winning power after De Gaulle with some piddling 27% of the vote or whatever because the rest of the vote splintered. Requiring majority support meant that the extremes - originally meant as the communists, but subsequently hampering the Le Pens - got cut out of the process, and even if they squeaked into the final two - as Jean-Marie Le Pen did in 2002 - the end result would be an absolute destruction, which 2002 was. Even 2017 was a landslide by French proportions, with Macron getting the second highest vote share of any directly elected French President of the Fifth Republic. But, according to the polls, Macron is in some trouble, with the two polls in March showing a 53%-47% result for Macron in a second round against Le Pen - a result that should rightly make this race close in a year, right? I have my doubts about all of this.

Before we get into the math of a second round, let's just make this clear - Macron v Le Pen will be the second round. There are six  major parties in French politics - the Greens, the Socialists, the Republicans (the successor name to the centre-right Chirac/Sarkozy party), La France Insoumise (Jean-Luc Mélenchon's left populist party), En Marche, and National Rally. The Greens languish in the mid-to-high single digits these days after smashing results in the 2019 Euro elections, the Socialists join them there, and then Mélenchon's party flirts with 10% these days. The Republicans have been around 15%, give or take, for the last few polls, and then Macron and Le Pen are in the mid-to-high 20s, generally. Barring a shocking, cataclysmic collapse, Macron won't get caught by the Republicans, and then a 2017 rematch is on the cards.

How seriously should we take the questions about how voters would vote in that runoff that show a tight race? Not very, in my view. Macron is in a prison of his own making right now, with vaccine distribution errors, threats to sue AstraZeneca, and just general complete failure to handle COVID at the top of minds right now. He will not be facing these problems in the spring of 2022, and once vaccinations start happening more widely, the need for lockdowns end, and French citizens will be able to make their way to Spain for holidays and to soccer stadiums for games next season, then things will get better for him. I'm highly doubtful that anger because Macron didn't solve things fast enough will continue when things have been solved, partially because of the way that Boris Johnson's polling has been buoyed by his government's successes in vaccination.

Macron might be a wannabe king, best left in the past, but as much as I might laugh at that sort of jingoistic evocation of past glories, both he and Le Pen are running on a form of nostalgia, which often reveals itself as a nativist, bigoted attitude towards anyone who isn't "properly" French - unless, of course, you win a World Cup with a squad full of Black people, in which case there's question of their French bonafides. For any American who looks at Europe as a place to emulate, the way France treats their non-white citizens should give pause to that.

The other part of this question is of safety versus margin - Macron will win, but it might be closer than many people want. If I had to guess right now, Macron will win by something like 20% - a result somewhere between the 32% win he got in 2017 and his current 6% lead in the polls. When the chips are down, the other four major parties of French politics will encourage a vote for Macron against Le Pen, as they did in 2017, and the system will do what it was designed to do - to keep the extremists out of power. It won't be as resounding as when Chirac destroyed the elder Le Pen, but it will result in the same outcome - a third convincing second round loss for the First Family of French Fascism.