The presidential elections of 2017, and the election of Emmanuel Macron, caused a veritable upheaval in the history of French politics. The question then was whether this was about a momentary fluctuation or whether the balance of political forces that it had established would be an enduring one, concluding a chaotic decade notably marked as never before by issues of immigration and national identity, and a centre-right electorate that had become autonomous.
The forces of the ‘old world’, and in particular the two historic parties of government – the Parti socialiste (PS) and the conservative Les Républicains (LR) – wanted to believe in the first scenario. On the basis of their subsequent relative success in local elections, when they held on to most of their control of local authorities, they regarded the large parliamentary majority for Macron’s LREM party, the result of legislative elections that closely followed his victory, as being evanescent, one that had no true anchorage in the country, the fruit of an aberrant presidential election.
But the results of last weekend’s first round of the current presidential elections show they were wrong.
The best indication of this is the fact that the two candidates who have now been chosen to fight a final, second-round duel later this month – Emmanuel Macron and the far-right Marine Le Pen – are the same as in 2017. Once again, and after the test of his five years in office, Macron on Sunday again came in first place in the initial round, with the numbers of votes cast for him even increasing by around one million. Meanwhile, the increase of votes for Marine Le Pen on Sunday, in comparison to those which gave her second place in 2017, was more than 400,000.
In total, the candidates from the far- and radical-right on Sunday garnered more votes than ever before seen in a presidential or legislative election in France.
Above: the change in scores in the first-round of presidential elections from 2002 to 2020. In pink is the Left, in yellow the independent centrists, in blue the Right, and in grey is the far-right.
For the second time in succession, the presidential election will be fought between two political leaders who represent the opposing sides of a divide that centres on the issue of globalisation in its principle.
In face of, and against, the liberals of all types who have rallied behind Emmanuel Macron in a sort of grand coalition à la française, Le Pen appears as if the representative of a nativism that defends the interests of a small, ethnically and culturally homogeneous people. But while she attempts to place Macron in difficulty over questions of spending power and social rights, the duel once again obscures the issue of the structural inequalities of power and wealth.
As was the case in the presidential elections five years ago, radical-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the principal representative of the Left, was narrowly unable to attract enough votes to qualify for the second round and to mount an opposition to globalisation in its different forms, raising the intrinsic democratic, social and environmental issues.
It is true that the plural Left, in its total, garnered four more percentage points in its share of votes cast than in the first round in 2017. But when considering that the term of Macron and his governments has been marked by policies that are strongly inegalitarian and productivist, that increase is modest. It indicates that a significant proportion of the leftwing electorate which Macron had previously attracted have stayed loyal to him.
All things considered, the broad Left finds itself at a historically low level since the constitution of the Fifth Republic was introduced in 1958. Within and across the Left, however, the balance of power established in 2017 remains the same. The radical-left represented by Mélenchon once again clearly led the field against its rivals from the EELV Green party, the Communist Party, the PS and the far-left Trotskyists.
Yannick Jadot, the EELV candidate, garnered fewer votes than did the then Green candidate in the 2002 election first round (Noël Mamère). Over a period of 20 years, and no matter whoever represented it as presidential candidate, the EELV has made no progress in its capacity to mobilize support in this decisive national election; and that is despite the heightening of public concern over environmental issues and the party’s successes in intermediary elections, notably those for the European Parliament in 2019.
But the EELV has, for the first time in a presidential election, now overtaken the score of the PS, the once all-powerful leader of leftwing coalitions, and in which the Greens were a minority partner. The Parti Communiste (PCF) also came ahead of the socialists, for the first time in presidential elections since 1969, when its candidate Jacques Duclos garnered a 21.3% share of the first-round vote. But it did so on Sunday despite the fact that its candidate, Fabien Roussel, garnering just a 2.28% share of the vote (ten times less than that of Duclos), and in what was its second-lowest score in a presidential election.
All of which highlights in particular the humiliating score of the socialists, who had for almost four decades until 2017 been a party of government and a pillar of the French political scene. PS candidate and Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo scored just 1.8% of the vote on Sunday, finishing tenth out of a total of 12 candidates, the worst-ever performance of a socialist in a presidential poll. The party has now become a marginal force, and appears certain to remain so.
Hidalgo’s performance not only confirmed the state of collapse that engulfed the PS in the elections in 2017, it also saw an accentuation of it. The disintegration of the electoral core of the socialists is illustrated in a survey carried out by pollsters Ipsos, between April 6th and 9th, into the sociological make-up of the different electorates, and in which 4,000 people took part. According to that, Hidalgo attracted just 12% of those who in 2017 voted for the then socialist candidate Benoît Hamon (and who's poor peformance was already breaking records). It also found that Hidalgo was the only candidate whose party’s supporters did not describe as their first choice.
But what was new this year compared with 2017 was that there was also a collapse of the post-Gaullist conservative party Les Républicains (LR), represented by Valérie Pécresse, a former minister and head of the Greater Paris regional council. In the 2017 first round, LR candidate François Fillon garnered 20.01% of votes cast, despite becoming submerged in a scandal over his misuse of public funds for the remuneration of his wife and children. Fillon came third in a leading group of four – 0.3% above Mélenchon, and 1.29% and 4%, respectively, behind Le Pen and Macron. On Sunday, Pécresse scored just 4.78%.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
It was as if the French conservatives have been caught in a ever tightening vice between Macron’s LREM party on one side and the radical- and far-right on the other. During Mediapart’s live election night debate (in French, here) political scientist Florent Gougou, a lecturer and researcher with the Grenoble school of political sciences, observed that there were already signs of this in the results of the 2017 legislative elections, and above all in the 2019 European Parliament elections, which was when the LR list of candidates garnered 8.48%, in fourth place well behind that of the first-placed far-right of Marine Le Pen and the second-placed list of the LREM and its centrist allies.
At a local level, some of the results on Sunday illustrate how the mainstream Right’s electorate deserted the LR even in its heartlands, like the Riviera city of Nice, where the haemorrhage of votes for LR was accompanied, in parallel, by a rise in support for the far-right and Macron’s camp.
A detailed example is the wealthy 16th arrondissement (district) of Paris, once an LR stronghold where Fillon comfortably won the 2017 presidential first round with 58.45% of votes cast.
This year, it was Macron who led the field there, with 46.75% (against 26.65% in 2017). Furthermore, the maverick far-right candidate, Le Pen rival Éric Zemmour, came in second place, with a 17.48% share of the vote. In 2017, when Le Pen was the only far-right candidate, she garnered just 4.09% of votes in the district (and slightly more on Sunday). Meanwhile, Pécresse on Sunday came third with a 13.81% share.
That points to how, at a national level, behind Macron’s score is a change in the coalition that forms his electoral base. It also shines a light on the internal affairs of LR, where the traditional, governing Right has been supplanted by those close to identitarian nationalism, just as the red-and-Green leftwing movements have got the upper hand over the old PS.
The election this month has completed the process of disintegration of the two major parties that began in 2017. The headlong rush into neoliberalism (for the PS) and identitarianism (for the LR), together with the accumulated dissatisfactions of one presidency and another, eroded their electoral bases. These were reduced to rubble at a national level soon as Macron entered the Élysée. He himself made the point in an interview earlier this month with French daily Le Figaro, when he commented that “the two former big republican parties have become parties of local elected representatives”.
The bar chart below illustrates the combined scores of the PS and LR in presidential elections over the past 20 years. The decline since 2007 is far more pronounced than that of parties of government in many other western countries.
Above: the combined scores of the PS (in pink) and LR (in blue) in presidential elections since 2002 (in 2015, the conservative party was renamed "LR" from the previous "UMP").
During this process, the radical-left, the centre-right Macronists and the far-right have succeeded in mobilising their camps and in capturing votes from the movements adjacent to them.
The aforementioned Ipsos survey reported that a disproportionate number of voters who hold several higher education diplomas intended to vote for either Macron or Mélenchon, contrary to those who intended to vote for Le Pen who included high numbers without school leaving certificates (baccalauréat).
Another factor the survey looked at was income, with a clear advantage for Macron the higher a voter’s income is, and the opposite regarding Le Pen and Mélenchon. The later two had the support of around 30% of voters who described their standard of living as unsatisfactory, while Macron had little support among them. Instead, he had around 40% of support among those who described their living standards as “rather”, or “very”, satisfactory.
The electorates of the three candidates have different political priorities. While the issue of purchasing power is common to them all, the electorate of Le Pen lists immigration and delinquency as major concerns. That of Mélenchon is the most concerned, by far, about social inequalities, and is also strongly concerned about environmental issues. Macron’s electorate was the most concerned about European Union issues (and the war in Ukraine) and public debt and deficits, illustrating a certain economic orthodoxy that is only elsewhere found among the electorate of Pécresse.
While the Ipsos data requires further research, it is coherent with the election results in areas where the sociological characteristics are very marked, and adds credence to the idea that those who vote for Macron are largely people who are happy, or rather happy, with their living standards. They are part of a France that can live with inegalitarian and productivist policies that have marked Macron's term in office, and which, according to his manifesto, will mark, if he is elected, his second term.
For the time being, the “red-and-Green” Left is incapable of hampering Macron’s political agenda, but it is at least still in existence. At the other end, Le Pen will attempt to mobilise support on both the identitarian theme (and which was not weakened under Macron’s presidency, quite the reverse) and also with the misleading claim that she is the defender of the socially modest against a powerful, moneygrubbing, governing elite that is in favour of multiculturalism.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.