The French presidential campaign is increasingly unpredictable, with one forecast crashing after the other – and there are still three months to go until polling day. Sunday’s victory in the socialist primaries by Benoît Hamon, a leader of the party’s left wing and a virulent critic of the “treason” of President François Hollande, over former Prime Minister Manuel Valls, is just the latest of these unforeseen developments.
Only a few weeks ago, Hamon, a former education minister with limited experience, was seen as a distraction with no chance of success against a former prime minister and minister of interior who had confronted terrorism, after a discredited Hollande chose not to run for re-election.
Leftwing voters decided otherwise, opting to punish a disappointing legacy by the outgoing government and promote a different voice, less social-democratic and more radical, with policies including a 32-hour working week, a universal wage and a tax on robots – a real left, as young militants call it, even though it makes victory for the party in May less plausible.
In the same way, rightwing voters in November rejected the former president Nicolas Sarkozy in the first round of their primaries, and the favourite of the race, former prime minister Alain Juppé, in the second round. They went on to pick the candidate who had trailed far behind both with a socially conservative and economically ultra-liberal agenda, another former prime minister, François Fillon. The surprise winner of the primaries of Les Républicains thought he had done the most difficult part of the job: he had likely secured his place in the second round of the election, against Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate whom he was expected to defeat.
But at the end of last week, Fillon awoke to news of the publication in Le Canard Enchaîné of highly damaging revelations that he had employed his wife Penelope, in what the newspaper implied was a well-paid parliamentary assistant role, funded with public money. His defence was clumsy as his wife had several times been on the record saying she did not work and stayed away from her husband’s political career.
With a judicial inquiry into “Penelopegate” (as the scandal has been called) on the cards, Les Républicains are in a panic, looking for a plan B. Fillon has been struggling to restore confidence in his campaign, as it is harder to sell a programme that envisages the suppression of 500,000 public service jobs when you have used public money for your own wife, even if it was legal.
A Socialist party that makes a radical turn leftwards, and a rightwing party that has a wounded hero: and the winner is … Emmanuel Macron. When the former Rothschild banker, adviser to Hollande and later economy minister, left his cabinet post last August and launched his campaign, commentators in the country were convinced that the Macron “bubble” would quickly burst. They recalled that no one in French political history had ever won a presidential bid without the backing of an established political party. His movement, En Marche!, is only a few months old, and it has been decreed that the lack of experience of the youthful Macron, 39, would be so blatant that he couldn’t go very far. If it really is a bubble then it’s a robust one, because not only is it still there, but it’s grown considerably to make Macron the third man in the race, according to polls, not far behind the two leading contenders, Le Pen and Fillon.
But what of the populist wave that was supposed to sweep through Europe in the wake of Brexit and the Donald Trump victory? It has far from disappeared in France, even if Le Pen has been a rather discreet actor on the political scene for several months, perhaps because international events were favourable enough for her to keep her energy for the last leg of the race. Last week she praised Trump’s initiatives in his first few days in office, claiming that the US president was only implementing what she had advocated for years. Protectionist measures and closing the country to Islamic immigration are indeed Front National policy, and it’s certainly been a boost to Le Pen’s credibility to have the “leader of the free world” making it official policy.
The FN, like other populist movements, have strong appeal with victims of the globalised economy, the disenfranchised, and those who feel threatened by an increasingly multicultural society; but it is still seen as a threat by the mainstream majority. This is unlikely to change in the three-month period to voting day, even if one cannot rule it out completely.
That leaves the election race down to three questions: can Fillon recover from the blows to his reputation, or will he waste a historic chance for the traditional right to return to power? Can Macron build on his initial success and turn popularity into votes as the competition gets real, particularly as personal attacks and the rumour mill start turning against him once he becomes the polls’ favourite? Can the leftwing candidates unite to offer a credible alternative, or will party patriotism and egos make it impossible, condemning their party to be excluded from the second round?
Now that the Socialist party has chosen its candidate, ending the primaries season, the real presidential campaign is about to start. The international context will also begin to count, with French voters having to choose the person who will face Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s world, the continued threat of terrorism, and Europe’s highly unpredictable economic environment, in part thanks to Brexit.
A few months ago, French voters feared that they may have to face a repeat of the 2012 election, with a re-run of Sarkozy versus Hollande. But up to this point they have managed to disrupt every script that was written in the political establishment’s cosy world. That makes the outcome of the presidential election in May highly uncertain and unpredictable, and a crucial appointment with democracy in a highly volatile and dangerous world.
