Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the presidential elections was a historic event in French politics. It is the first time that a candidate from an independent centrist position has won the election, and what’s more with the aid of a movement, En Marche! (On The Move!), that was founded barely one year earlier, operating in an entrepreneurial manner that has rarely been experimented on such a scale.
Of course, this novel aspect will not be carried through in the probable application of public policies that consist of aligning the French economy with the most liberal variants of capitalism (which French economists Bruno Amable and Stéfano Palombarini describe as the politics of the “Bourgeois Bloc”).
But the configuration of the French political scene will be truly altered. The election of the leader of En Marche! came about in the context of a long period of restructuring of the French electoral order, a process which will not stop with the election result. The legislative elections in June will again put to the test those traditional political forces which regard themselves as eligible for power.
While Macron’s victory was a convincing one, it is far from representing “two out of three” of the French electorate as was suggested by his centre-right ally François Bayrou on Sunday evening. It was a reference to former president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s 1984 essay 2 Français sur 3 which argued that the French aspired to a centrist government, and that essential reforms required the support of two-thirds of the electorate.
Like most presidents before him, Macron was elected by 44% of registered voters. That reflected an abstention rate that rose above that recorded in the first round to reach the highest of any presidential election since 1969, along with a historic level of blank and spoiled votes which represented 11.6% of all votes cast.
Across France’s départements (counties), the lowest turnouts were recorded in those where, in the first round, conservative candidate François Fillon and radical-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon produced their best scores - such as, respectively, the Sarthe, in the north west, and Ariège in the south west.
Macron fell well short of Jacques Chirac’s score in the exceptional 2002 presidential elections when, in the second round vote between him and the then Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen (the only other time a far-right candidate reached the second-round playoff), the conservative leader was returned to power by 61% of registered voters. In sum, the new president was elected on Sunday by a ‘normal’ share of the electorate, despite facing off against a quite abnormal adversary in the form of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen (who succeeded her father as Front National leader in 2011).
Although defeated by Macron, Marine Le Pen’s score on Sunday, with 33.9% of votes cast (totaling almost 11 million), was a record for the far-right. Her ability to increase the support she had attracted in the first round was essentially due to a porosity of the rightwing electorate (of which a majority continues to reject her policies) and a mobilization among those who otherwise intended to abstain. That progression, which was massive compared to her father in 2002, testifies to the change that has come about since the European Parliament elections in 2014, when the Front National won most votes cast at a national level, illustrating a much larger potential electorate for the far-right than anything seen before then.
That said, the Front National continues to be unable to transform the support it has in the first round of an election into a winning majority in the second round. Le Pen came first in 45 out of France’s 577 parliamentary constituencies. While that has no importance as such on the result of a presidential election, which is decided by a national count of all votes cast, it has obvious relevance for the June legislative elections. But it remains a small number for someone who seeks to govern the country. Furthermore, the Front National is struggling to broaden its sociological and geographical base of support. Its low support among those social groups who are particularly mobilized in elections - such as the retired, the most educated, and the higher professional categories - continues to represent a major obstacle.
There is a striking correlation in the geographical bases of support for Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, and those of Marine Le Pen in 2017, when the evolution in the ballot-box score does not reflect a structural evolution of the far-right electorate. The most significant increase in volume of support for Le Pen in the second round came from the party’s heartlands, where she had often been in the lead locally during the first round. In contrast to this, Le Pen remained largely unpopular in those major towns and cities such as Paris, Lyon or Toulouse with knowledge-driven economic activity that is part of the globalised economy.
The costly infighting on the Left
Similarly, between the two rounds, Macron increased his score the most in those geographical areas where he, or the Left, had scored best in the first round. But he also benefitted from a wider transfer of votes from other electorates, except for supporters of hard-right sovereignist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (who rallied Le Pen after the first round). According to a study by polling organisation Ipsos, Macron’s score in the second round included a significant number of votes from a broad political mix, from those who describe themselves as “very Left” to those who label themselves “rather to the Right”. Le Pen, according to the Ipsos survey, drew a small majority of those who described themselves as being “on the Right”, while unsurprisingly enjoying strong support from those who said they were “very to the Right”.
That study adds nuance to the suggestion from both of the candidates that they had replaced the traditional battle between the Right and the Left with, variously, one between “progressives” and “conservatives”, or “patriots” and “globalisationists”. Rather than witnessing the disappearance of the Right-Left confrontation, it is perhaps its redefinition that we are seeing, translated into cultural representations to the price of social issues. While social questions will of course remain important, they may be losing expression in political debate, deprived of sufficiently strong actors who are capable of placing them high on the public agenda and to respond to the interests of the worst-off and the socially insecure.
There lies the challenge and the historic opportunity for Emmanuel Macron. Through the makeup of his government and the choice of his En Marche! movement’s candidates in the parliamentary elections in June, he has the potential to cause the implosion of the Socialist Party and to disorganise the Right and gain a comfortable parliamentary majority – faced with a broken-up and polarized opposition bracketed by the far-right and the “Left of the Left”. The goal, (which would be harder to achieve with the electoral system of proportional representation than that of the current first-past-the-post process), would be to marginalize any political force that sought to function as an independent party outside of the dominant bloc. That bloc would be resolutely pro-business, but also universalist, and protective of public freedoms in exchange, to please those most on the Right of the coalition, for a few guaranties on security issues.
Within such a scenario, the Front National would represent an ‘ideal’ adversary, sufficiently antagonistic and gross to ensure a republican union across the political divide. The far-right party in its current form, rooted in the old French populist-nationalism, would find difficulty in hegemonizing the opposition to globalization and European integration. The differences between the geographical base of support for Le Pen in the 2017 presidential elections and that of the “No” vote in the 2005 French referendum on ratification of the Treaty for a European Constitution (which was rejected, but nevertheless implemented), indicate that there was a leftwing, non-xenophobic electorate which voted against the treaty.
Such a perspective of an enduring minority position might embolden those within the National Front who argue for a less statist policy line. The adoption of policies for economic liberalism would encourage a unification of a nationalist rightwing bloc, rather than an alliance at all costs of those who oppose globalization. In that case, a more dangerous adversary to Macron would appear, although it presupposes the decomposition of the conservative and centre-right parties, respectively Les Républicains and the UDI, which for the time being are intent on fighting the legislative elections on their separate platform rather than handing themselves over to the new president.
Apart from a resilient mainstream Right and a clearly transformed Front National, another form of resistance to Macron’s power can also be envisaged on the Left. During the first round, a political space emerged made up of a section of the electorate which demanded a more radical system of democracy, more representative and less intermittent, and which aspired to a reduction of inequalities in society and a proactive programme of energy transition. This space was represented by the Socialist Party candidate Benoît Hamon, a party leftwinger who was part of a rebellion against the Hollande government, and the radical-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his La France insoumise (France Unbowed) movement. The combined vote for both represented about a quarter of votes cast in the first round, and the contradictions between the national economy and the eurozone could well lend force to the political message of this movement. As a result, Hamon and Mélenchon will not disappear by the grace of Emmanuel Macron’s victory alone.
The problem however for this new political space is that it is paralysed by infighting between the Hamon and Mélenchon camps that would be difficult to bring to an end in just a few weeks and which could prevent it from obtaining a parliamentary representation that reflects its weight in society. That is what is at stake with their negotiations for the June elections.
The Socialist Party, allied with the Green party EELV and the Communist Party, has proposed a traditional electoral alliance of the Left, which the Mélenchon camp can only envisage if it is led by their France insoumise movement (except in a few constituencies). The latter argue that their relatively successful presidential election campaign, which saw Mélenchon come a tight fourth, far ahead of Hamon, and a fraction behind conservative candidate François Fillon, was proof of the success of a ‘populist’ approach which they don’t want to blur by entering into a cartel of traditional parties. Behind the negotiations lies the major question of the survival a political force that is not content with ensuring a meritocratic system of economic competition, but which contests capitalist rationality in the name of common rights and assets which it wants to preserve outside of the market system.
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Fabien Escalona is a political scientist and researcher with the University of Grenoble, specialised in the study of European social democracy. A regular contributor to Mediapart, he is the author of several analysis articles on the French presidential and legislative elections.
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- The original French text of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse