Unctuous Macron skewers Marine Le Pen’s links to the far-Right and Putin
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Fifteen million voters in France last night — a million fewer than 2017 — watched a debate of 2 hours 50 minutes between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. It ended in a score draw. This means a defeat for the far-Right candidate, who has spent five years since losing to Macron in 2017 trying to refashion a new image and reach out to middle France.
This morning most commentators in Paris are declaring Macron the likely winner on Sunday. In the last poll before the debate he had a 13% lead over Le Pen and early indications suggest that the debate has not changed many minds. There is little enthusiasm and none of the excitement of 2017, when this bright, young, Kennedyesque post-party non-politician launched his audacious bid to knock out traditional parties and seize the Elysée.
So the debate was a clash of personalities rather than political philosophies or coherent party programmes. Macron began by copying Gordon Brown and David Cameron in the British general election of 2010, when both the Labour and Tory leaders fell over themselves to say “I agree with Nick”, hoping to detach some voters from the resurgent LibDem party.
Macron was almost unctuous in saying he shared some points of view with Marine Le Pen and ended the debate by thanking her and wishing her well. Le Pen was not prepared for a soft, polite, respectful Macron. Her eyes kept darting left and right, and glancing down at her cue cards looking for a killer fact or line to derail Macron.
He gave her a beginner’s lesson in economics by pointing out that the key plank of her cost-of-living plan, a reduction of VAT to 5%, would mainly help supermarket bosses and indeed people like himself, herself and the two well-paid TV journalists moderating the debate, who could buy expensive items more cheaply with VAT slashed from 20% to 5%. It would be of little help to poor households or pensioners and his policy of targeted financial transfers was more useful to the low-paid or rural poor.
The debate droned for an hour before Macron suddenly started throwing killer punches, accusing Le Pen of being the first European political leader to endorse Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. In exchange, Le Pen was given a giant soft loan by a Kremlin backed Russian bank to finance her party. “You are dependent on Vladimir Putin, Mme Le Pen.”
It was reminiscent of General de Gaulle’s charge that the French communist party then financed by the Kremlin was a “foreign French party”. To anyone who lived through the glory years of French communist politics with its focus on banning foreign workers in France, opposing European partnership, proclaiming a defence of the interests of French workers but proposing protectionist, frontier-closing measures that would weaken the French economy, the language of Marine Le Pen and her father before her is eerily similar.
Macron sarcastically congratulated her on dropping her demand to quit the Euro, which figured in the 2017 debate. She insisted she wanted to stay in the European Union but change it into an alliance of nations. To any Brit this was of course a main line of the anti-EU campaigns earlier this century, which culminated in Brexit.
Macron said being in Europe was like living in a jointly owned apartment block. You couldn’t remove your flat from the common building without pulling down the whole edifice. He repeated his insistence that Sunday’s vote would be France’s referendum on Europe. Again Marine Le Pen looked down at the prompt cards but could find no answer.
Unfortunately for Macron he delivers his message in his haughty professorial style, leaning forward with his chin on his fists as if talking to a rather dim student who has not done her homework. The big politicians who led postwar France — Mitterrand, Chirac, Sarkozy — spent their adult lives manoeuvring in their parties, talking to small meetings all over France as they mastered their profession. Macron has none of that training and his effortless superiority grates on the French. Yet Marine Le Pen, who has political skills as she has shown in taking over and keeping control of a nasty party full of violent views and back-stabbing militants, always seems insecure and uncertain on facts and policy.
Her headline political demand since 2012 has been a law to ban Muslim women from wearing headscarves in public. Macron pointed to a French soldier killed fighting Islamist terrorists in Mali. As his coffin came off the military plane his grieving mother stood there in tears, but proud of her soldier son who died for France. She was wearing a headscarf as a Muslim.
“You want to make France the only country in the world that bans signs of religious identity, That is an attack on French freedom and the tradition of laïcité” — the separation of faith and the state, with the latter allowing Jewish men to wear kippas, Catholic women to cover their head going to Mass, and Muslim women to wear a headscarf.
“Your policy of making it illegal to wear a Muslim head scarf in public will launch a civil war in France,” he told her. She had no answer as she has to attract the votes that went to Éric Zemmour, with his openly anti-Muslim racism.
Marine Le Pen came over as a less shrill, less extreme politician than five years ago, but there is still too strong a whiff of sulphur attached to her person and project. In past years, opponents of her father Jean Marie Le Pen would throw the Nazi charge at him. Indeed, she accused Zemmour of harbouring neo-Nazis in his supporter base.
No-one accuses Marine Le Pen of Nazi tendencies, but she has become Vladimir Putin’s Number One fangirl in West Europe. In April 2022, being associated with Putin, after his Hitlerian invasion of another European nation, is not an election winner.
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