Macron leads in the polls, but a second term is far from certain

Will Emmanuel Macron win a second term next year?  Many British papers refuse to believe it. In March the Spectator ran the following headline above one of its almost weekly attacks on the French President: “Is Macron Losing Control of France?” The current New Statesman gravely denounces Macron’s “illiberal liberalism that deepens divisions”, adding: “As Macron’s nemesis, Le Pen, waits in the wings, his hubris augurs his own downfall.”

As the monolingual sans-culottes of our Right- and Left-wing weeklies wait for the blade to fall on Macron, the voters of France seem less certain. A Figaro/AFP poll published this week produced this list of candidates and their votes in the first round of the French election in April:

Emmanuel Macron 24%
Marine Le Pen 23%
Xavier Bertrand (centre-Right Les Républicains) 16%
Valérie Pecresse (Les Republicains) 14%
Jean Luc Mélenchon (Corbynite Left) 14%
Anne Hidalgo (Socialists) 7%
Yannick Jadot (Green) 6%
Arnaud Montebourg (ex Socialist minister) 5%

The key figure to note is the gap between Macron and any other centre-Right, let alone Left or Green, candidate. That gap shows no sign of narrowing so far. The poll also shows that in the second round Macron would beat Marine Le Pen by 55 per cent  to 45 per cent, a margin of 10 per cent.

Macron’s other polling is no less impressive. The latest poll for Les Echos, the French Financial Times, shows that despite all the demonstrations against his tough policy on getting France vaccinated — including making vaccinations compulsory for public service employees and requiring everyone to show a Covid passport to go into a café, restaurant, get on a coach, go to a football match or a movie — he has enjoyed a 3 per cent hike to 37 per cent. It is his highest score in a year.

So while the Macron-hostile UK press seeks to portray him as beset by opposition in the streets, from the gilets jaunes to today’s anti-vaxx protests – often with overlap and support from both the hard-Right and the far-Left – the average French voter seems unmoved. In fact, he is on track for re-election.

I was struck by this on a two-week swing through France last month. No-one is passionately for Macron. But when asked who they would put 100 euros on to be the next President of the Republic, most told me “Emmanuel Macron”.

If he does win both the presidential and parliamentary elections, it will be a first for the French Fifth Republic. The system was set up by General de Gaulle following his putsch-like return to power in 1958, after the failure of the different parties created after 1945 to handle foreign policy questions like Indo-China, Suez or Algeria.

Under the present republic, the French have been very reluctant to grant two normal full terms to their president. De Gaulle won his first presidential contest based on direct election by all voters in 1965. Four years later he held a referendum on minor changes but said he would resign if the French electorate rejected his proposals.

They did and de Gaulle was out. His successor Pompidou died in office. Valery Giscard d’Estaing, also a reforming liberal pro-business young president – a Gaullist but not unlike the former socialist Macron – served one term, but was ousted by the socialist François Mitterrand in 1981.

Mitterrand ran for re-election in 1988, not on his record as President but as a socialist opponent of the Gaullist Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac. The RPR party headed by Chirac had won in the parliamentary election of 1986, held on a five-year cycle, unlike the seven-year presidential term put in place by de Gaulle. Chirac was held responsible for all sorts of unpopular and reactionary measures he legislated for to appease his Right-wing base. Mitterrand stayed above the political fray and easily beat Chirac, to stay President until 1995.

Chirac then won, finally, but made the idiotic error of holding parliamentary elections in 1997. These were won by the former Trotskyist leader of the French socialists, Lionel Jospin. I worked with Jospin’s ministers as the New Labour government, which also won power in 1997, sought allies in Europe. But the French socialists refused all modernisation reforms and did not pick up on the rising tide of fear of Islamist terrorism, exploited by Jean Marie Le Pen, who defeated Jospin in the first round of the 2002 presidential election.

There was no way France would elect a racist, anti-Semitic and Europhobic populist like Le Pen, so Chirac won easily. Le Pen’s daughter Marine has tried to appear more moderate, but there is still more than a whiff of her father’s old extremism, which may whip up a crowd but is not what the French want in the Elysée. Under Chirac, the presidential term was shortened to five years’, with the Elysée election held a month before the National Assembly election. The idea was to give the president and the prime minister a majority to legislate and govern.

The next two presidents were one-termers – Chirac’s former Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, who lost to the socialist, François Hollande, in 2012. Then, in 2019, it was the turn of Hollande himself, who knew he would be defeated as the internal divisions in the French socialist party had made it a political laughing stock. He did not even make it to the run-off.

Forgive this potted history, but the key point is that the French have never been keen to let one man rule over them for more than one term and have only re-confirmed a president in office if he, in effect, runs as an opposition leader against the government of the day. Macron is the government and very much a one-man government, though he has able ministers. But he cannot run against himself.

To be sure, all rules have their exceptions. But for those interested in the French presidential election, it is worth just tucking away the fact that Macron’s bid to claim and obtain ten years’ untrammelled power – the constitution limits the presidency to two terms for any one person – is audacious. It has never happened before.

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