Macron Set to Be Top Leader in Europe As Old Parties Fade in French Election

??????????Summary.?After a lacklustre campaign which saw candidates from traditional parties flop and far-right demagogues fail to make a breakthrough Emmanuel Macron should win a 2nd term as French president. He will seek to continue his modernisation of France agenda at the expense of 20th century political thinking. He will be the dominant leader in Europe. As Germany rearms and the EU funds weapons on war for Ukraine Macron’s concept of “strategic autonomy” gains traction. Relations with Brexit Britain will remain difficult. The ruling Conservative Party and the Brexit press have mocked and denigrated Macron thus reviving age old Franco-English enmity. While his re-election is almost certain, his second term may see major revolts from the left-behinds in France as?la rue?– the street - rises up against the monarchical style of Macron.

????????After months of a phoney non-campaign, the French election (1st round 10th April, 2 round 24th Apil) is poised to be a victory for President Emmanuel Macron which will make him the uncrowned leader of Europe.

????????The war in Ukraine will hang over the election but not affect its outcome. Indeed Macron’s energetic leadership of Europe in first trying to persuade Vladimir Putin to choose peace and then when the Russian autocrat invaded Ukraine, Macron’s denunciations and mobilisation of Europe to agree the EU should fund and send arms to Ukraine as well as shutting the global Swift down to Russian banks and oligarchs has seen his ratings rise in France.

????????The first years of Macron’s presidency were the last period of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s remarkable sixteen year leading Germany.

????????The new German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, heads a coalition against nature of his trade union linked Social Democrats which only won 25% of the vote in the September 2021 federal election. He is in alliance with the low-tax, small-state libertarian Free Democrats and the anti-industry, anti-nuclear, politically very correct Greens.

????????Scholz is a cautious, unflamboyant one-step-at-a-time politician. He has now taken the very bold step of a massive increase in Germany’s defence budget. This will be used in due course to build new warplanes and tanks in Europe in line with Macron’s concept of “strategic autonomy” for Europe. Macron has spent the last five years chewing at the European bone and is full of ideas for rejuvenating the European Union. Other than Scholz there are no other leaders of weight in sight in European.

Spain and Italy are governed by?uneasy coalitions. The Nordic EU nations once pioneers for social experimentation and innovative new firms like Nokia and Skype have turned inward looking with stern illiberal policies on immigration demanded by Danes and Finns.

????????The ex-communist countries of Central, Eastern and Balkan Europe produce varieties of nationalist, populist politics with accusations of collusion between politicians and wealthy business leaders.

????????Brexit Britain, under Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair, both big leaders in European Union policy-making, has turned its back on Europe for the foreseeable future with worries about the United Kingdom even holding together as pro-European Scots keep voting for separatist nationalists.

?????????Anglo-French Relations Likely to Worsen

????????A re-elected Macron will be a problem for British prime minister, Boris Johnson, who has openly mocked and denigrated the French president on a range of issues from Covid vaccines, access to the Channel Islands for small family owned French fishing boats or bigger issues like the decision of the Australian government to tear up a major defence contract with France for submarines which was cooked up with Johnson without even the courtesy of a call to President Macron.

????????Even as the first days of the Ukraine war unfolded there were endless attacks on Macron by the pro-Brexit London press and by Conservative politicians who said he was appeasing the Kremlin by spending time talking to Putin to stop the conflict. Churchill’s line “Jaw-Jaw is better than War-War” seems to have been expunged from the English political lexicon. But opposition candidates in France have supported Macron’s efforts to try, try, and try again to avert war. The bellicose rhetoric in London has not been echoed in France perhaps because the nation knows what invasion, war and occupation means.

????????Late in 2021 Lord Peter Ricketts, the former head of the Foreign Office and a former British Ambassador in Paris said “Franco-British relations have fallen to an all-time low, a deterioration reminiscent of the deep divisions over the Iraq war in 2003. Restoring confidence will require a lot of effort.”

????????At one level this is the small?change of centuries of rivalry and bickering between England and France but five more years of Macron in the Elysée and Boris Johnson in Downing Street will only deepen this?mésentente non-cordiale.?

????????First however Macron has to win. A year ago there was a big question mark over his second term. The last two presidents, Fran?ois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, only managed one term. Even the great General de Gaulle did not manage two full terms as a directly elected president. The two presidents that have done to terms – Fran?ois Mitterrand, 1981-1996 and Jacques Chirac 1996-2007 – had to govern in what was called?cohabitation?with prime ministers and governments formed by opposition parties after National Assembly elections repudiated the president’s party in 1986 and 1997.

????????Macron has faced waves of popular discontent often whipped up by populist political activists since 2017. France does not need big trade unions or big anti-establishment political movements to generate opposition. Each French president has faced his main opposition from?la rue?– the street – and Macron has been no exception. What was to his logical trained mind – the need to raise the price of fuel for CO2 emitting cars, pick-ups and trucks turned into a 2 year long revolt by the?Gilets jaunes, the yellow vests.

Angry workers in their yellow vests from left-behind poorer communities in France blocked entries into towns, roundabouts, and organised major demonstrations in Paris that often descended into violence?with vehicles and news kiosks set on fire.

Post-political party politics seems to work for Macron

????????Macron suddenly found himself alone. He won the presidency in 2017 by deliberately casting himself as a leader not a party functionary or party hero. It was the first time in modern European history that a head of government (and state) emerged with no party network below him. Even General de Gaulle who liked to pretend he was above petty party politics made sure with his RPR movement he had a de facto party with a presence in very corner of France.

????????This post-party politics carved out by Macron has allowed him to take a sequence of modernising decisions including lowering rate of tax on wealth creators and encouraging start ups, investing in 40 small size nuclear reactors, and a gently liberalisation of 20th century?controls on economic activity like opening hours or working hours.

????????Macron created a centrist government bringing in competent minister from previous left and right governments as well as technicians. There have been a series of reformettes to increase the number of judges, doctors, and nurses.

????????Macron did a lot of listening. He arranged a sequence of town-hall meetings that allowed those living in?la France profonde?– deep France far away from Paris elites to have their president in their local communities. The third and fourth years of his presidency were overwhelmed by the Coronavirus Pandemic along with all other governments.

????????After a slightly?slow start France accelerated?its vaccination programme. The Prime Minister Jean Castex was filmed on TV being jabbed with the UK developed Astra-Zeneca vaccine. France has vaccinated 94.2 per cent of its population compared with 92% in Britain. By February 2022 161,000 had died from Covid under Boris Johnson’s management of the Pandemic compared to 135,000 in France. Macron took a hard line on Covid passports mandating them even to enter a café or get on a?bus. There was a backlash from anti-vax movements and those opposed to Covid-passports supported by the far-right and far-left similar to such movements in Britain, the US and Canada.

????????But in the country of Louis Pasteur, there was not much support for a repudiation of the core science that lay behind public policy decisions on vaccination policy and anti-Covid infection precautions. Macron’s Health Minister, Olivier Véran, 41, is a neurologist first elected as a Socialist deputy in 2012. He backed Macron for President in 2017 in dismay at the disintegration of the Socialist Party into partisan personality driven factionalism which destroyed all hopes of Fran?ois Hollande’s re-election. An effective calm TV and radio communicator his authority as a doctor has helped take France through the Pandemic.

????????Most of Macron’s ministers are non-ideological can-do professionals. France seems to have adapted well to a being a post-party political democracy. The evidence of the election campaign has further exposed the end of the post-1945 era of big all-encompassing political parties that drew up policy and sought to sell them to voters.

?????????The disappearance of the left

????????The disappearance of the left in the campaign is utterly astonishing. Only five years ago the Socialist Party controlled the Elysée and named the prime minister and minister. Since 1981 when Fran?ois Mitterrand won the presidency the Socialists have held the presidency or the prime minister position for 24 years - far longer?than Labour in Britain or the SPD in Germany in the same era.

????????Now the official Socialist candidate against Macron is Anne Hidalgo, the high profile Mayor of Paris which she has tried to turn into a “green” city. Yet the polls since she was designated by the Socialist Party show her hovering around 2 per cent of voters’ support. This is an extraordinary humiliation for her personally but also signifies how once mighty parties have lost traction. We can see the same with Labour in England, and other west European nations. Olaf Scholz is Chancellor on the basis of just 25 per cent of votes in the election in September 2021. The Spanish socialist prime minister , Pedro Sanchez, only manged 28 per cent of votes in the 2019 election to the Cortes, Spain’s parliament. He governs in an uneasy coalition with Podemos, a harder left party.

????????There are other left candidates in France but all with just single figure voting support according to polls. The Greens who performed well in European Parliament elections in 2019 hover around 7 per cent. Their main pitch – ending France’s nuclear power programme – is not gaining traction as countries dependent on Russian gas are exposed as vulnerable especially as a consequence of Vladimir’s Putin invasion of Ukraine and the consequent rise in energy prices.

????????For more than three decades after 1945, the French communist party could count on 25-30 per cent of votes in most election. The communist candidate has the same support as the socialist – 2 per cent. There is a flamboyant leftist, Jean Luc Mélenchon, a Gallic Jeremy Corbyn type populist who denounces capitalism, globalisation, the United States, the EU and NATO with demagogic interventions that enthuses voters, often younger ones, who like their politics to be warm, emotional and red.

????????Mélenchon has spent many recent years explaining why Vladimir Putin is much misunderstood and is right to resist the EU and Nato. The violent war of conquest launched by Putin against Ukraine has shocked France and left Mélenchon exposed as he had to mumble out a condemnation of Putin while still blaming Nato and Washington for provoking Putin into war.

????????He has been stable on 11 per cent. Above him in poll ratings are two hard right candidates.

Marine Le Pen is the leader of the National Rally, a nationalist, racist, anti-EU party founded by her father Jean Marie Le Pen. She has sought to de-toxify her party but the problem is a large section of her voter base wants to hear denunciations of Muslims and Brussels and the proclamation of a France as a global puissance based on white Christian identity.

Her softening of classic far right populism has left a space for a journalist, Eric Zemmour, whose aggressive TV style accusing Macron and the political establishment of betraying French essentialism has won the same kind of support that Donald Trump was able to generate in America.

????The rise of white supremacist populist demagogy – ugly politics in France

????????Zemmour is a white supremacist who promotes the far-right thesis of “le grande remplacment” – the replacement of white France as Muslims and non-white immigrants?take over. It is nonsense in population terms and?most French Muslims aspire to a middle class life like most other French citizens and indeed are happy to marry French men or women.

????????Zemmour mixes in claims France has open borders and most criminals are Muslims. Neither are true but Zemmour play on classic 21st century rightist them about the need restore French industry by limiting imports, leaving the European Union and repudiating Nato as an American Anglo-Saxon imposition preventing France from again becoming a dominant world power.

????????Marine le Pen and Eric Zemmour cancel out each other with less than 20 per cent apiece of voting intentions. Zemmour is so violent and extravagant in his language that while he attracts large audiences for his demgagogic denunications of Macron as a President who has sold out France, promoted the ‘great replacement’,?and takes orders from Brussels and Washington he also repels in equal numbers French voters who know?dans leur tripes?– in their guts – where such excessive language about national identity and purity ends. The Chief Rabbi of France says Zemmour is an “anti-semite and a racist.” Although Jewish, and at 63, about to become a father again with his 28-year-old girlfriend, Zemmour has defended Marshall Pétain, who was Collaborator-in-Chief with Hitler and authorised the deportation of French Jews to Nazi extermination camps.

????????Finally there is the representative of classic French conservative pro-business centre-right tradition which from General de Gaulle to Nicolas Sarkozy, president 2005-12, have delivered the majority of post-war directly elected presidents of France. She is Valérie Pecresse, 54, a middle-of-the-road Minister and regional council under Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkoy. A practising Catholic married to the French CEO of General Electric she went through the thorough training France reserves for her elites destined to be chieftains of politics, state administration, business and public institutions and non-ministerial agencies.

????????She defeated three men, including Michel Barnier, who had held top ministerial posts in previous centre-right government and then was the EU negotiator who comprehensively out-played Boris Johnson with a Brexit deal that many in Britain think is disadvantageous but are obliged to live with an a legally binding treaty unless they want to plunge the UK into a new crisis of broken links with Europe.

?????????The lady flops. The unhappy campaign of Valérie Pécresse

????????It was hoped Mme Pécresse, who has always come across as a highly professional, likeable, moderate, problem-solving politician, would outshine the two far right extremists, Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour, and restore the status of?Les Républicains, as her party was now called, as a natural governing party in France. As a woman, team-worker, and mother it was hoped she would be an attractive alternative to the one-man, cerebral but not clearly completely human Jupiter – the odd metaphor Macron used to describe himself early in his presidency.

????????But the French want, perhaps need, a lofty grandeur?- a sense of apartness in their head of state who is more than a prime minister or political chief. De Gaulle understood this as did Mitterrand. Fran?ois Hollande tried to be?Monsieur le Président Ordinaire, pottering out of the Elysée on the back of a Vespa to visit his girlfriend. Nicolas Sarkozy profiled himself as one of the lads telling a protestor who accosted him a giant agricultural fair to “Go fuck yourself.”

????????Macron has ticked every box as he passed all the exams to qualify as a member of the French mandarin class?then worked for Rothschilds as an investment banker, learning perfect English. He took a huge risk in launching himself as a presidential candidate. He had some money but no party behind him. He had admirers but no followers. His ministerial experience was slight and alienated colleagues at the Ministry of Economic Affairs as he always wanted to be in the limelight and get the credit for others’ work.

????????That arrogance and sense of destiny seems to have proved more appealing than Valérie Pécresse’s more homespun womanly appeal. She then blew herself up at her major launch rally in Paris in February when she suddenly started using far-right language from Eric Zemmour about “the great replacement” or people who are only French on the basis of their “papers” – those that had been naturalised not born French.

????????France is a nation of immigrants. Nicolas Sarkozy’s father was Hungarian and his mother Greek-Jewish. The last socialist prime minister of France, Manuel Valls, was born in Barcelona has Spanish parents and Anne Hildalgo’s parents were Spanish. It was ugly language from Valérie Pêcresse and contrary to her style and history as a centrist liberal conservative in the manner of Angela Merkel with whom she likes to compare herself.

????????France was shocked at this turn to far right and racist demagogy. If Mme Pécresse was hoping to win voters from Marine Le Pen or Eric Zemmour by adopting their language it did not work. Polls at the end of February marked her down to 14%, the same level as Zemmour and 2-3 points below Marine Le Pen.

????????So as the last full month of campaigning began before the first round on 10th April, it seemed as if France was heading for re-run of the 2017 election – Emmanuel Macron vs Marine Le Pen. In that case few give any chance of Le Pen beating Macron on 24th April.

?????????Marine Le Pen – a re-run of the 2017 presidential election

????????She appears tired, listless,?carrying every one of her 53 years. She had had to pulp 1.2 million election brochures as a big picture seeking show her international status showed her with Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. The whiff of sulphur associated with the family name – Le Pen – has faded.?Her father, Jean Marie Le Pen,?93 still makes remarks that are only just within acceptable political discourse. The family name is part of French far right history. That gives her a certain base which may be sufficient to get her into the second round given the poor quality of other candidates but never enough to win the Elysée.

????????In fact the campaign which has been underway since the autumn is devoid of new ideas. It lacks any of the policy excitement once associated with French politics whether Gaullist or leftist. Politics in France in the sense of big politicians, with big ideas and a strong party machine has gone to sleep.

????????Surprises are possible. The French love decapitating their monarchs and Macron can come over as very regalian. Again and again I have met French men and women who simply detest him. They are on the left, the right, of all ages and all points of view. He simply grates on them. There are no intermediary political bodies like parties or trade unions or NGOs that manage the relationship between Macron and 47.5 million voters. Each has a view on their president.

????????However so far no other would-be president has emerged as a serious challenger. Valérie Pécresse might have done so but she veered off to the ugly right. Donald Trump could manage that but no-one in America has lived with non-democratic government. They have in France and won’t repeat the experiment.

????????So expect President Macron to win for a second final term – ten years in total as long as Tony Blair but much shorter than Angela Merkel. He has to win a majority in the National Assembly elections held over two rounds on 12 and 19 June. The political parties ignored by voters who may election the non-party Macron may come back to life. The president proposes but he needs a National Assembly majority to impose laws. In the second round of the National Assembly elections there will be a chance to elected deputies from the old parties who can block Macron’s 2nd term proposals.

Macron’s 3 Advantages and 3 Disadvantages in a 2nd term

????????He starts with three advantages and three disadvantages. By any ranking he has been France’s most impressive president this century. Compared to Biden, Johnson or most EU or world leaders he resonates authority and skilled leadership. Germany’s Olaf Scholz has ordered a massive uplift in the German armed forces – a call Macron has made. The German arms build-up will be set in an EU context as a go-it-alone Germany rearming on a purely national basis has its own legacy problems. Macron is going to be a major player in his second term and Brexit Britain will have to adapt to a Europe that has shown remarkable unity and purpose faced with Putin’s war or continue to be marginalised and gradually getting weaker.

????????Secondly, there is an era shift away from Anglo-Saxon ultraliberalism which took off forty years ago under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.?The state is back implementing more managed economics to respond to the Covid Pandemic, continuing the progress towards de-carbonisation and Net-Zero, and fund 21st century post-material capitalism. The state has to regulate much more toughly than in the past. Brits and especially the City establishment with its belief in a small state, and a non-interventionist, low-tax, de-unionised, deregulated economy have been in the driving seat for decades but Macron’s France with it pro-business, highly trained elites who glide effortlessly between private and public sectors are well placed for the new economic paradigm

????????Thirdly,?Macron is a free agent in his second term. He cannot run for a third term. He will be beholden to no-one and can take long term strategic decisions especially in making France more business-friendly and less beholden to unions or middle rank ‘Blob” public sector jobsworths. He has his legacy to consider like all vain national leaders but doesn’t have to worry about his successor a process which did serious damage to the later years of Tony Blair and Fran?ois Mitterrand.

????????His three disadvantages is that the turn to?la rue?– the street – by French citizens who feel powerless in face of the omnipotent president can become serious. General de Gaulle thought he was firmly in charge of France and then midway through his second term the 1968 revolution a protest movement of young people in universities and schools and a general strike which stopped the wheels of the French economy turning derailed him and he never recovered.

????????The French economy in macro(n) terms is doing well. But prices for middle, lower-income and poor people are rising fast. Macron is holding down the rise in energy prices to 4 per cent but as with efforts to control the price of bread by authoritarian leaders denying?the existence of the market is not long-term economics.

????????Secondly. He has a vision for Europe as a stronger player than it is today. The Ukraine crisis which he handled well despite some childish sniping in London’s Franco-phobe press has brought about a revolution as Germany goes in for a major arms spending and the EU funds military equipment to intervene against Putin.

????????These measures are overdue and in tune with Macron’s thinking since he denounced Nato as “brain-dead”. It was seen as an insult at the time but given Nato’s utter inability to read Putin right or stop his war Macron crude criticism of Nato may turn out to be like the child pointing out the Emperor’s nakedness.

????????Yet a fast rearming Germany and a European Commission moving from peace to war carries its own dangers. Will Gaullist and left-wing France welcome Germany as major military power? There is a big audience in France for criticisms of the European Commission as an over-bearing interfering bureaucratic power. France rejected the modest European Constitutional Treaty in a referendum in 2005. Most French think that if France had held a Frexit referendum, mainly turning on immigration and foreigners in France similar to the UK’s Brexit vote, the result would been to leave the EU.

????????Alexis de Tocueville warned that “the most dangerous time for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform." Macron does not lead a bad government but he is a revolutionary reformist. Revolution is a good word in France. Reform isn’t.

????????The second?term Macron government will seek to reinvent France and reinspire Europe. It is a double challenge that no previous French leader has been able to meet.

Denis MacShane was the UK’s Minister of Europe. He lived in France for fifteen and appears regularly on French TV and radio commenting on European and British politics. He writes regularly for French papers. He wrote the first biography in English of Fran?ois Mitterrand published in 1982.