Will Macron’s personalism defeat le Pen’s populism?

Tomorrow — Sunday — at 7 pm we will know who shall go into the second round of the French presidential election. It will almost certainly be a re-run of the 2017 duel between two candidates of the Right: the charismatic, technocratic, pro-European liberal centrist, Emmanuel Macron, and the nationalist, populist, anti-immigrant Marine Le Pen.

The election has been dull but matters for Europe and for Britain. Since last autumn it has been a Hamlet without the Prince election campaign. The President of France has stayed out of the fray, refusing all TV debates of any sort with other contenders, neither going into TV studios to defend his record since 2017, nor offering any new ideas or policies of substance.

The Left in France controlled the Élysée or formed a government in 24 of the years between 1981 and 2017, when the socialist President, François Holland, did not seek re-election. But it has been reduced to a pitiful state, even worse than Labour at the end of the Corbyn era. The Socialist Party candidate, the Paris Mayor, Anne Hidalgo, has rarely risen above 2 per cent in the polls. The main centre-Right party, now called Les Républicains, the inheritor of the Gaullist tradition that produced presidents from Pompidou to Sarkozy, has also imploded.

Its candidate, the modernising liberal centrist Valérie Pécresse, a sort of French Amber Rudd, has made no impact. She ends her campaign by refusing to rule out her party members voting for Marine Le Pen, whose photo between two young neo-Nazis in Lyon taken in 2006 has just been published in the French conservative weekly l’Express.

In her last radio interview on Friday, Mme Le Pen veered rightwards. She said if she became President she would instruct the police to fine any woman wearing a Muslim head covering in public. She claimed that the headscarf was an Islamist invention.

She dodged the question about whether a new Le Pen law banning head coverings would apply to the Jewish kippa or indeed Catholic nuns and traditionalist Mass-going women who cover their heads before entering a church. It is assumed that they would be exempt.

More significantly, she said she would reduce VAT to 5.5 per cent, and ensure that jobs and social housing would in the first instance go to French citizens, not to foreigners. This so-called national preference, unilaterally altering VAT, would be illegal under EU rules. After the UK’s problems with Brexit, Mme Le Pen dropped her demands for a referendum on France leaving the EU, quitting the Euro, or unilaterally breaking EU rules.

Perhaps emboldened by the victory last week for the anti-European populist, Viktor Orbán, who was easily re-elected as Prime Minister of Hungary, Mme Le Pen has evidently decided that she can revert to the more muscular anti-EU nationalism of her father Jean-Marie Le Pen.

She got a scare in November and December when the even more Right-wing and Islamophobic Figaro columnist, Éric Zemmour, surged past her in the polls with his rhetoric about the “Great Replacement” – the idea popular in Trump circles in America that Muslims are taking over Christian democracies on both sides of the Atlantic. Mme Le Pen tempered her father’s Islamaphobia and avoided his anti-Semitism, but now to get all of Zemmour’s votes in the second round she has turned hard Right.

Emmanuel Macron is attacking her as Vladimir Putin’s best friend in the European Union. She still opposes military aid to Ukraine and denounces the idea of any embargo on Russian oil, gas or coal. Marine Le Pen says the West should cooperate with Russia on security issues in Europe.

Macron is hoping her pro-Putin record will turn off voters in a France where all sympathy seems to lie with plucky Ukraine. The French president is furious with Poland whose anti-EU Prime Minister, Matesz Morawiecki, accused Macron of being willing to “talk to Hitler” because the French President has gone to Moscow for jaw-jaw talks with Putin and followed this up with telephone exchanges.

On the eve of the poll, Macron retaliated, describing Morawiecki as “the leader of an extremist government interfering in the French election on behalf of Marine Le Pen who has been hosted in Warsaw along with other far-Right party leaders” by the ruling Polish elite. It is an ugly final turn in the campaign, given that for centuries France has seen itself as Poland’s sister nation in the history and culture of the Continent.

In 2017, Macron sought to soar above petty party politics, rather in the manner of General de Gaulle who rejected any submission to injunctions from the French parliament in 1946. Instead he resigned, retreating to Colombey-les-deux-Églises waiting for the call back to govern France. It came already in 1958, after France was humiliated in Vietnam and heading for defeat in Algeria.

Macron was lucky in the sense that the Covid pandemic required a strong state, taking control, borrowing and spending public money to defeat the virus. Other than the usual anti-vaccination and anti-mask libertarians, most of France accepted the lead of the government that a well-led state was necessary. Macron has governed without real parliamentary opposition. He could safely ignore political parties, trade unions and civil society organisations – intermediary associative bodies – that mediate between the head of the state and individual citizens. But politics has returned with more than 70% of voters expressing support for other parties, notably the two anti-system populist movements of the Right headed by Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour.

The anti-system Left in the election has been headed by the French Corbyn, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who was a guest of the Corbynites at the Labour conference in 2018. He also is a supporter of Putin, and wants France to distance itself from the EU. His Left-wing demagogic nationalist populism shares many policies with Marine Le Pen, though not the racism or legacy anti-Semitism of Le Pen politics.

Macron has paid a very high price for his contempt for the tiresome, often irritating, checks and balances of the democratic political process based on political parties. It is even conceivable that he will get fewer votes in the first round tomorrow than Marine Le Pen. Voters may choose to punish him and remind their “Jupiter” president, as he dubbed his mode of governance, that earthlings still count and still have the vote.

The French say of their two -round elections, “First you eliminate. Then you choose.” All but Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron will be eliminated tomorrow. Her vote shows that populism is still the order of the day in modern politics. His vote will show that personalism, the centrality of a strong personality – the qualities that took a Donald Trump or a Boris Johnson to the top — is a rising force in politics.

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