How the French presidential election could turn on attitudes to the English 

French presidential elections usually boil down to a straightforward choice between Left and Right, or sometimes centre-Right and far-Right. Yet the 2022 contest may prove to be the most unpredictable so far. With just six months to go, nobody can be sure how the cards will fall or even who the players will be. And this time there are at least a couple of jokers in the pack.

For the moment the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, is the clear favourite. He has youth and experience on his side, he has a strong personality and a distinctive vision of France’s place in Europe and the world. With his almost demonic energy — he is said to sleep just four hours a night — Macron will be hard to beat.

Yet the President does not speak for the whole Republic. Outside Paris and the major cities he is widely loathed. Not all French citizens warm to a man who often seems to mistake them for his employees and himself for their CEO. He is determined to escape the curse of his predecessors, Nicholas Sarkozy and François Hollande, both of whom were ousted after only one term in office; but for all his eloquence, intelligence and assiduous cultivation of his presidential image, Jupiter” remains aloof, remote and unloved.

While Macron has been wooing voters on the Right, it is from that quarter that the main threat still comes. He must still reckon with Marine Le Pen, his previous antagonist and leader of the National Rally, the rebranded version of the far-Right National Front she inherited from her now estranged father. Ms Le Pen’s strength lies in the southern heartland of what was once Vichy France, where immigration and Islam dominate the landscape. She should never be underestimated, but her appeal seems to be waning. 

On the moderate Right, a crowded field is competing to represent the Republicans, another rebranding of the old Gaullists. The party will choose its candidate at a convention in December. From northern France, Xavier Bertrand looks solid but uninspiring, a conventional bourgeois to defend the interests of the bourgeoisie. From the Paris region, Valérie Pécresse has a less provincial, more intellectual and internationalist image. So far, however, neither Bertrand nor Pécresse has looked like breaking through.

Then there is Michel Barnier. Now 70, the former foreign minister and Brexit negotiator is the oldest in the field — but in a land still living in the shadow of General de Gaulle, this is not necessarily a disadvantage. Barnier has projected a calm, reassuring and slightly patrician air, differentiating himself as much as possible from Biden and Trump, the other septuagenarians on the world stage. He has also tacked sharply to the Right by distancing himself from his most recent employer, the European Union — an act of hard-nosed realpolitik or rank hypocrisy according to taste. It remains to be seen whether the silver fox, who spent the last decade in Brussels as a loyal servant of the Commission, will get away with this daring pirouette.

For Macron, the most dangerous challenges, however, may come from none of these official candidates, but from one who has yet to declare. On the divided and demoralised Left, there are stirrings in the undergrowth. Unhappy with the Socialist candidate Annie Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris, who languishes in the polls, some are encouraging ex-President Hollande to re-enter politics to rescue the republic. Still only 67, he certainly ticks the elder statesman box and, unlike Barnier, remains a familiar face to voters. They may by now have forgiven him for having one affair too many while in office, even if they find it hard to forget the laughable sight of the President riding pillion on a motor scooter to an assignation. The woman in question, the actress Julie Gayet, is now accepted as his partner and he is back on form. If he were to persuade Ms Hidalgo to stand down, reunite the Left and attract voters disillusioned with Macron, Hollande could yet stage a presidential comeback that would be unique in the history of the Fifth Republic. 

More formidable opposition, however, is likely to come from the extreme Right. Éric Zemmour, the so-called French Trump, is leading all his rivals in the polls even before declaring. His latest book, France has not said her last word, sounds a more optimistic note than the 2014 bestseller Le Suicide français (“The French Suicide”). His book tour has morphed into an election campaign. At a rally in Rouen last week, Zemmour exchanged his usual theme of “the Great Replacement” (i.e. French Christians are being replaced by Muslim immigrants) for an audacious attack on the Americans and the English. As usual, his speeches and interviews are laced with extravagant amateur theories about French history. So the liberation that followed D-Day was dismissed as an act of “colonisation” by the US, while the English “have been our greatest enemies for a thousand years, and it’s the English who stopped us from dominating Europe.” The man who sometimes calls himself a Bonapartist added: “I have not forgotten Napoleon.”

More absurd, though, is Zemmour’s claim that the British and Americans “supported Nazi Germany against us because they considered that France had too much influence in Europe”. And his defence of Vichy France for allegedly “protecting” French Jews is positively sinister. The viciously anti-Semitic Pétain regime collaborated, often enthusiastically, with the Nazis and some 76,000 Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps, of whom 26,000 were French. Yet the fact that Zemmour is himself Jewish has lent credence to this myth about Vichy, just as his own North African background has given him license to make hostile and indiscriminate comments about Muslims. As a writer and television personality rather than a politician, he has so far largely avoided scrutiny and accountability. 

Perhaps most striking is the way in which his mobilisation of anti-English sentiment segues into a critique of Macron. In Rouen, where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake by the English in 1431, he argues that the heroine of French resistance during the Hundred Years’ War was sacrificed by those who betrayed their country: “The elites were in favour of the English because they thought it was a good way of getting power in Europe.” Zemmour sees the President as the voice of today’s similarly unpatriotic elites, while he lays claim to be the heir to Joan, the unofficial patron saint of France. Yet he also attacks Macron and Barnier for punishing the British for Brexit, telling The Times correspondent Adam Sage (behind a paywall) that “the English always win their wars, so it’s better to be friends with them”.

However improbable and contradictory Zemmour may seem to outsiders, his rhetorical flourishes strike a chord with French voters like no other candidate in the presidential race. After Trump’s triumph in 2016 astonished the world, especially Hillary Clinton and the coastal elites who had forgotten the “flyover states”, Macron is not taking anything for granted. If and when Zemmour declares, the President may try to crush the upstart before his bandwagon gets rolling. This campaign has already been galvanised by Zemmour and promises to be the most entertaining for many years. Yet it matters, too, because France matters, not least to the UK. We can only hope that if attitudes to “the Anglo-Saxons” are to be a theme in this French election, British politicians are not tempted to reciprocate. Relations between Downing Street and the Élysée are already cool, not to say frosty. We can do without a new round of mutual antagonism. As if cross-Channel migrants and fishing rights were not enough, we may have to revisit St Joan and Napoleon, resistance and collaboration. History is never really about the past, it seems, least of all if it were to reignite the oldest rivalry in Europe.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.