It's time to take the French election seriously
(Alamy)
In less than a hundred days’ time, Europe will decide its political future. The first round of the French presidential election takes place on Sunday April 10th. These are the most important elections to be held in the third decade of the 21st century this side of the Atlantic.
Other countries matter too, of course. But more and more they are chained by the iron bonds of coalition politics. Germany has a new Social Democratic Chancellor in Olaf Scholz after 16 years of Angela Merkel at the helm. But few in Germany expect any radical departure in policy.
Mrs Merkel, after all, freely told her close associates that she was pretty much a social democrat at heart. Scholz was her vice-chancellor. German Social Democrats, like German Christian Democrats, are inextricably linked via the famous social market economic model to the promotion of thing-making capitalism, of trading material goods to the English preference for trading money, today’s immaterial capitalism.
Hence the unwillingness of Berlin, even with a Green foreign minister in the coalition, to take measures that challenge the supremacy of Germany’s open trade ideology. This leaves Germany unwilling to challenge the would-be regional hegemons in Moscow or Ankara. Putin and Erdogan can shrug off the fury of the Anglo-Saxon commentariat, as they know Germany will not risk the profitable politics of stability in energy supply, metal, chemical and pharmaceutical exports, or in the case of Turkey exports of submarines, which upset the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean.
Britain has for the time being opted out of being a European player. Even though Brexit is delivering few if any of its proclaimed benefits, no-one sees much chance of Britain re-engaging in European policy or politics under the current generation of British politicians.
Italy may finally make its breakthrough as a European policy-player, but the idea of Silvio Berlusconi returning as Italy’s President, on the assumption that the current Italian technocrat PM, Mario Draghi, stays as head of government, will do little to enhance Italy’s European credibility.
Elsewhere the iron rule of coalition means permanent lowest common denominator politics. France is the exception. The genius of General de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic constitution marries a real executive president with a parliament whose deputies can stay his hand but not relapse into the deadlock of immobility so often seen in that other great presidential democracy, the United States.
Hence whoever emerges as President of France will, in the absence of any other major political leaders in Europe, wield disproportionate influence and power on European and world affairs when he or she — there are two serious women candidates — takes office.
Alas, the coverage of the election so far has conformed to every cliché of how English language journalism — there is little difference between US and London reporting — writes about France. There has been excessive personalisation with almost cartoonish depictions of the main candidates. Here the pro-Brexit press has presented Emmanuel Macron as the latest successor to Napoleon, trying to bully and dictate to England.
The left-liberal press has denounced Marine Le Pen and the journalist Éric Zemmour as throwbacks to 1930s ideology and politics — racist, nationalist, Islamophobic and populist, with an exclusive not inclusive French identity patriotism.
France has waited for 200 years for a moderate centrist politics to emerge. So there are hopes that Valérie Pécresse, the former Sarkozy minister, who climbed over the bodies of grand fromage chiefs of Les Républicains, the main centre-right party in France, to win her party’s nomination can make it to the Elysée.
Then there is the sad plight of the French Left, once so important in influence even if France is basically a status quo bourgeois nation. The French Left today has put up eight candidates – half of them hoping to get to the second round. Only one of them, the ageing Jean-Luc Mélenchon, ever scores more than 10 per cent in the regular opinion polls. As with his British admirer, Jeremy Corbyn, Mélenchon’s role is to guarantee that the Left will remain in opposition.
Anne Hidalgo, the official Socialist Party candidate, has scored just 2 per cent and 3 per cent respectively in the most recent polls. In 2017 the French Socialists controlled the Elysée and all the main ministries. Never in European history has a governing party fallen so fast and so far.
2022 opens with President Macron still heading the polls, with either Valérie Pécresse or Marine Le Pen likely to be his main challenger. In the latter case, it would be a re-run of the 2017 presidential election. But Macron is still around six or seven points ahead of both female candidates of the Right. For Britain, a re-elected Macron as President of France and the dominant leader in Europe raises interesting questions, especially given the language used about him by Boris Johnson, other ministers and many senior Conservatives.
Macron has been showered with abuse and insults by most of the Tory or Brexit supporting commentators in the London press and social media. One can assume he takes no notice, but how will British public opinion take to the re-election of a French president they have been told is an enemy of England?
So the French presidential election, which restarts this week after the Christmas-New Year break, really matters for Britain, for the EU and for transatlantic democratic values, as well as for France. Is there a chance that editors in London can start to take this election seriously, instead of using the next 100 days as a chance to indulge in every cliché of French bashing in which we Brits so often revel?
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