Three weeks on
Sunday, French voters will go to the polls in the first round of the presidential
election. After the developments of the last few days, this seems as good a
time as any to weigh up the stakes and try and imagine which two of the five candidates
might face each other on May 7.
I say five, as only five represent large numbers of voters. The other
six, all from one extreme or another, are only of electoral interest insofar as
they will shave a percentage point, possibly two, from the scores of the main
candidates.
There have been three significant developments over the last few days:
Jean-Luc Melenchon has again ruled out joining forces with Benoit Hamon; Manuel
Valls has come out in support of Emmanuel Macron to howls of protest from Hamon
and his supporters and Penelope Fillon, like her husband, has been placed under
formal investigation by a judge on suspicion of embezzlement.
This last event, however embarrassing for François Fillon, may,
paradoxically, put an end to the endless media attention surrounding his employment
of his wife as a parliamentary assistant. Unless further damaging revelations come
to light, and media willing of course, the judicial investigation should now take
a back seat to campaigning until the election is over.
Melenchon’s refusal to join forces with Hamon is not unexpected and
probably final. A united left will not contest this election. Melenchon, after
all, left the socialist party in 2008 to go his own way. My reading is that
he prefers to snipe, with great talent, from the sidelines, rather than play
second fiddle to Hamon and make a serious bid for power, where he would run the
risk of seeing his utopian programme collide nastily with economic reality. He will do his best to come in ahead of Hamon on April 23, declare, if
successful in this limited ambition, that progressive forces have won a great
victory, decide not to endorse either of the finalists and then retreat to his
comfortable seat in the European Parliament to ponder his next move. As for
Hamon and his allies, with the Melenchon option now closed off and the right
wing of the party increasingly hostile, a long period in the political wilderness
looks more than likely.
The support expressed by Valls for Macron has a different significance. Although
Valls is not the first leading figure of the socialist party to declare such support,
he was until recently President Hollande’s Prime Minister and the other finalist
in the socialist party primary. By going back on his promise to support Hamon, the
winner of that contest, he has probably initiated the realignment of the socialist
party, a strategy he is thought to favour. If Macron wins the presidency, Valls will probably try,
with other leading socialists, to line up as many candidates as possible for
the parliamentary elections in June, labelling them, possibly, candidates of the
presidential majority rather than of the socialist party.
So what about the three leading candidates? The latest polls put Le Pen at
25%, Macron at 26% and Fillon at 18%. However, we are also told that 41% of the
electorate remains undecided.
Things could go one of two ways for Marine Le Pen: either she will attract
more votes than the polls give her credit for, as voters have often been reluctant
in the past to tell pollsters who they will really vote for or, as the inanity
of her economic policies becomes clearer, even to her electorate, do considerably
less well. It is interesting to note that in another poll, 82% of respondents
say that they do not want France to ditch the Euro, which is the key plank of her
economic policy. However, whatever she polls on April 23, and assuming she is
one of the finalists, she is unlikely to do any better on May 7. A question that nobody seems to have asked yet
is whether voters who do find her economic policy unpalatable may choose to entrust
their protest vote to Melenchon. It would not be the first time that voters have
moved from one extreme to the other.
Which leaves Fillon and Macron. When given the airtime to explain his programme,
Fillon does so calmly and clearly. It is not too much to hope that as the election
draws near, serious political debate will take precedence over media tittle-tattle.
To be sure, some voters will have been put off Fillon for good, but with 41% still
undecided, it is not impossible that after surveying the alternatives, many
will cast their vote on the day for the candidate whose programme sounds the most
convincing and forgive his lapses of judgement.
Macron for the moment is still the darling of the polls and, it must be
said, of the media. But with only three weeks to go, more searching questions
are likely to be asked about what he really stands for, who is paying for what
looks like a very well-oiled campaign, whether his youth and relative inexperience
are more of a drawback than an advantage, whether future parliamentary
battalions will materialise and from where.
Is he really a clone of Hollande, as Fillon is now trying to portray him?
What will be the role of his ally Bayrou, the eternal loser in French politics?
A future Prime Minister? The leader of a small party seeking to cement his own
position by placing as many candidates as possible into winnable constituencies?
A parliamentary majority of rightward leaning socialists and leftward leaning
centrists, from different political traditions and who have never governed
together, plus assorted hangers-on, may prefigure a realignment of political
parties in France but is likely to be a combustible mixture on which to base the
bold and pragmatic programme of government that Macron has promised the country.
Without going as far as far as the parliamentary elections however, my
dearest wish at this stage would be a run off between Fillon and Macron. This would
be a chance, at last, to witness a real political debate between the two most
serious candidates, to compare their personalities, their programmes, their
respective chances of attaining a majority in parliament and to assess who comes off
best. With a relatively small shift in the
figures one way or another, it may still happen, I haven’t given up hope yet!
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