It would seem that the appeal for a united approach against the far-right Front National is no longer enough. With less than a week to go before the crucial second round of the French presidential election, the centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron is now starting to address those who did not vote for him in the first round.
Until now it had seemed that all Macron had on the table to offer his rivals' voters was simply his existing policies, as if he considered his victorious first-round score of 24% was already enough of a mandate for him. The tone has now changed. After Marine Le Pen had gone around the country gatecrashing her rival's appearances, as in her visit to the Whirlpool factory at Amiens in northern France on Wednesday, and seeking to attract both voters of the defeated radical left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the defeated conservative candidate François Fillon, Macron has finally started talking to voters of his defeated first-round opponents. “I hear … the anger over Europe and the incomprehension over globalisation,” he told Le Figaro newspaper on Saturday April 29th.
Two days earlier, following his difficult start to the week, Macron had sought on TF1 television news to attract Fillon voters who “wanted more economic reforms”. He also in passing reminded viewers that Marine Le Pen “defended the colours of a party which carried out attacks against General De Gaulle”; this was a reference to a Front National regional councillor, Thibaut de La Tocnay, who is close to Le Pen and whose father, Alain de la Tocnaye, was involved in an attack on the then-president at Petit-Clamart in south-west Paris in 1962.
To those who voted for the Socialist Party candidate Benoît Hamon or Jean-Luc Mélenchon, meanwhile, Macron said he “understood the democratic and environmental issues about which they are concerned. My policies contain responses to their concerns in terms of spending power”.
On Wednesday April 26th Macron visited Arras in northern France, a place where he came first in the first round but which is surrounded by villages and towns that voted for the far right. Here the former economy minister harked back to a theme used by Jacques Chirac in 1995, that of France being a “fractured society”, and he swore that he was “listening to the doubts, to those people who say that there's no longer a place for them in this world, that at 50 years old they're no longer worth anything”.
Two days later, at a meeting at Châtellerault in central western France, the centrist paid tribute to those who had voted for Mélenchon, with Macron accusing the latter of having “betrayed his own” by not urging voters to vote for him in the second round. “The majority have fought, have signed up to fight against the extremists, to remind themselves of this moral virtue which [Mélenchon] is in the process of forgetting,” said Macron, who hopes to capture the vote of those Mélenchon supporters who have been dismayed by their candidate's approach since he lost in the first round.
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However, Macron has not given anything away on his own core approach. His social-liberal manifesto is still his guiding force. He feels that as he came first in the first round there can be no question of him changing or amending his policy, even on the margins, even though some of those who voted for him simply saw him as a “useful vote” to stop the duo of Fillon and Le Pen getting through to the second round. Those who have suggested that Macron should put a little more “heart” into his policies to appeal to the Left are rejected. Macron keeps a close eye on the internal balance inside his En Marche! ('On the move!') movement, which he says is “of the Left and the Right”, and feels that enough senior figures from the Socialist Party have rallied to his cause.
So between the two rounds of voting it is on the Right that Macron has been looking to recruit the leaders of a future government. In an interview with the western France daily newspaper Ouest-France Macron mentioned the name of conservative Xavier Bertrand, who was a minister under Nicolas Sarkozy and who was elected as president of the Hauts-de-France region in 2015 with support from the Left against the Front National. “We don't want to get flattened,” says someone close to Macron, explaining this firm line on policy. “We have to show that we're holding the line, that we will carry out the promised reforms, which are necessary for the country, and that we will keep the political machines at a distance.” However, personal endorsements by individuals are encouraged, with Macron himself calling for them at the end of the first round.
The political equation is, however, obviously a little more complex than that. To avert defeat or avoid a narrow victory that could cripple him politically, Macron must give people a positive desire to vote for him. The first step is to neutralise the charges of arrogance that have been clinging to him since the night of his first-round victory.
On that evening he gave a speech that was widely seen as not being up to the mark and seemed to behave as if he had won the election, celebrating his first-round score with friends and his election team at a brasserie in the chic district of Montparnasse in Paris. When a journalist questioned him about that evening Macron replied: “It was for my pleasure.” Some find it hard not to find echoes in that remark of the famous saying of French monarchs: “Car tel est notre bon plaisir” (“Because such is our pleasure”). After that he disappeared from the media for two days before being upstaged at the Whirlpool factory in Amiens by Le Pen.
Doubts began to creep in, accentuated by the long silence from Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who appeared to equate the “candidate of finance” with the “candidate of the far right”. Someone close to Macron admitted that the start of that first week was “rubbish”. In Arras on the Wednesday evening the former conservative minister Jean-Paul Delevoye, who chairs En Marche!'s investiture committee, sought to put a lid on things. “We must be conscious of the seriousness of the moment,” he declared. “We have seen many campaigns fuelled by a form of intoxication or euphoria because they have made one camp triumph over another. We can't have that euphoria and intoxication in our campaign as it could undermine our clarity.”
Since then Macron has made great play of his “gravity” and “humility”. When a journalist on TF1 television dared to make a comparison between him and Hillary Clinton, Macron insisted he did not see himself as a “favourite” and swore that he was fighting for the daily lives of ordinary people in the country. He told TF1: “I'm not taking this vote as a blank cheque.” It was the first time he had said this. Macron also said that he would bring in proportional representation for elections to “take into account people's concerns”. He continued: “We have to draw the consequences from everything that's just happened. I don't want to underestimate the anger and the doubts. I won't repeat the error made after the election in 2002 [editor's note, when Jacques Chirac easily beat Marine Le Pen's father Jean-Marie in the second round] and continue as if nothing had happened. I want to forge ways of bringing people together and political action that will allow all Republican political groupings to have a part in the running of the country. Because being elected against the Front National is not like being elected against another candidate.”
At this stage such a commitment is fairly theoretical. Macron knows that if he is elected the honeymoon period will not last long. “About two minutes,” says one supporter. Especially as the centrist candidate had indicated he will reform employment law from as early as this summer, using government orders rather than legislation. Even though he has told Le Figaro that he will organise a “rapid consultation” on the matter, it is a controversial issue that will exercise the Left.
'Not a candidate for the few'
To convince those voters who are uncertain or who do not want to choose, the former civil servant, who was the man behind President François Hollande's economic policy, and who is used to being surrounded by technocrats brimming with ideas and being supported by many employers, entrepreneurs and the world of business in general, is seeking to discard his elitist financier image. The candidate for “the forces of money” was what veteran centrist politician François Bayrou called him, before promptly revising his view and supporting him. Mélenchon still refers to Macron as the candidate for the “oligarchs”.
Because of his career and social networks, his omnipresence in the media and his former life as a merchant banker, Macron does come across as a pure product of the elite. His remarks, when a minister, about the “illiteracy” of female workers at a threatened abattoir in Brittany in western France, and his comments to a worker dressed in a tee-shirt - “The best way of being able to buy a suit is to work” - still dog him. Young and still new to politics, Macron is also the subject of endless rumours. At Amiens, for example, several workers suspected him of not wanting to shake their hands, which was a pure and simple invention as the story originally came from the satirical website Le Gorafi.
Meanwhile Marine Le Pen has been relentlessly pounding the En March! candidate. On Thursday the “inheritor” as Macron calls her – in reference to her taking over the FN from her father – accused the former Rothschild employee of carrying out “open warfare against the workers”, suggesting he showed “insensitivity”, a hallmark of a “merchant banker”. Responding to such charges Macron told TF1: “I'm not the candidate of a nomenklatura, of a small clique. For months I've been described as a former banker remote from the lives of our citizens. But I know where I come from, who I am. It's down to me to show that I understand and that I act on the everyday problems of our fellow citizens.” He added: “I'm not perfect.” This was a declaration that is in stark contrast with the image of him as a good student who is very sure of himself.
In attempting to achieve this political makeover Macron is not always helped by those close to him or some supporters who see “red-brown” everywhere in those opposed to them - meaning extremists on the left and right – or who are stepping up calls on social media to vote. On the day of Macron's visit to Amiens to meet trade union representatives from the local Whirlpool factory, the former advisor to the late President François Mitterrand and Macron supporter Jacques Attali dismissed the whole Whirlpool episode as a “side note”. The following day the former president of the employers' federation MEDEF, Laurence Parisot, said that she was available if Macron wanted her as his prime minister.
The Macron team quickly had to nip each intervention in the bud. “He represents the old world and it's good that he stays there,” Macron's spokesman Benjamin Griveaux said of Attali. “He should shut up,” said Richard Ferrand, secretary general of En Marche! about Attali, before also attacking the “unseemly and vain” comments made by the former MEDEF boss.
Emmanuel Macron, who in under a week could become the youngest president under the Fifth Republic, does not yet even know whether he will have a majority in the National Assembly or whether he will be forced into political cohabitation with the Right – something his movement has officially rejected. But a substantial vote in his favour in next Sunday's second round will give him the chance to launch the political “recomposition” or realignment that he has been calling for. In his interview with Le Figaro Macron talked of an impending three-way division in French politics: one part is a new “anti-European” grouping based around the Front National, another is a “protest” grouping based around a conservative, even “uncooperative” left, and thirdly – based around him – is the centrist camp of “progressives who range from social-democracy to social Gaullism”.
At the same time Macron, who wants to bring about a Republican front against the Front National that does not yet exist, continues to highlight his direct opposition to Marine Le Pen. Last Thursday he presented himself once more as the person who must “bring together the Republican camp, create unity in a France divided in the face of Madame Le Pen”. He called on voters to “take a stance” (“Not taking a stance is choosing to help Madame Le Pen”), portraying himself as the “democratic alternative” faced with the far right.
A little earlier he had been at Sarcelles north of Paris in a working class area where “Marine Le Pen can't come”. He said France was not the “hateful and shrinking” face portrayed by the far right, directly contrasting “Marine Le Pen's plan, that of a France withdrawn into itself, divided, of France betrayed” and his, which was “Republican, patriotic, which aims to … reconcile these Frances”.
In Arras Macron had drawn a distinction between “patriots” and “nationalists” and then last Friday tellingly went to Oradour-sur-Glane in central west France, a village where Nazi troops murdered 642 inhabitants in June 1944 and which is a site of permanent memorial. Marine Le Pen has found it hard to shrug off the support that her father Jean-Marie has shown for the collaborationist Vichy regime in the past. This Monday, May 1st, he held a gathering of “Republicans” in Paris ahead of his television debate with Le Pen on May 3rd. In this rather chaotic between-round campaign, appeals to unity and fear of the Front National remain Macron's main assets.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter