Postcard from Paris: Some thoughts on French politics
I’ve been receiving a lot of asks and requests in my inbox about my thoughts on French politics since I live and work in Paris. I’ve had many questions about what I made of Eric Zemmour and appraise his chances of becoming President of France. I’ve also been asked about President Macron and his political rivals for the presidency in April 2022. So rather than reply individually to each question I thought it would be a good idea to just do one long read of my take on what is going on in French politics.
Considering the amount of turmoil in European politics - Brexit (cough cough) - in the past half-decade, one would think we would be paying more attention to the French election. French politics is at an exciting crossroads. The dramatic Rightward shift of the French electorate has been incredibly revealing. The entire French Left, representing every shade from Communism to soft-Left social democracy, can barely muster 20% voter support combined. The political centre, represented by Macron, has shifted further towards a traditional perception of right-wing politics. Politics in France revolves around railing against ‘woke’ American cultural imperialism, debating whether Islam is compatible with Frenchness, and moving introspectively towards a markedly more civilisationist discourse about what it means to be European.
Speaking as as foreign British resident - and therefore strictly neutral - I have to say I find French politics refreshingly edgy. The French do what they do best: it’s not worth discussing ideas if you can’t grandly philosophise about it in apocalyptic terms.
But it’s never personal unlike say in the US where one can’t have a reasoned debate with anyone who holds a contrary view and not be tarred as evil or someone to shun. American politics is toxic and no one really talks and listens to the other but prefer to stay in their own respective echo chambers - which of course just reinforce their own preconceived prejudices and deepens their group allegiance.
In France thankfully - in my experience at least - one is expected to engage in robust discussion with passion certainly, but always with civility. Intelligence and good humour are especially prized. Wine generously shared is central to the lubricating of opposing viewpoints. Conversation around the dinner table is as much the art of rhetoric as it is a skill in listening (really listening) to what others have to say. Above all, political discussions should never become personalised. You attack the argument but never the person.
It’s a paradox of the French who pride themselves on ‘Reason’ and yet are one of the most passionate in argument. It’s this weird cold northern European mentality (reason) meeting the hot blooded southern European temperament (passion) that even catches me off guard at times.
Meanwhile, Éric Zemmour’s electrifying/alarming (delete as appropriate) entrance into the presidential race has taken the direction of French politics further Right than it has been in many decades. Openly campaigning against “the Great Replacement,” against the “theft of democracy” by unelected judges and journalists, and promising to pull France out of NATO’s decision-making structures at the helm of his newly-titled “Reconquest” party, Zemmour is rapidly expanding the terrain of acceptable French political speech on the Right. At his rallies he does pontificate, in a somewhat familiar Trumpian fashion, over the epithets applied to him by French tastemakers. “Me, a fascist?” he asked, as the crowd roared in approval, “Well, let’s see.”
This comparison with Trump is lazy and misguided - and must we see everything through American lens for things just to tar people we might sincerely disagree with? It pisses many Europeans (Brits and French) off and rightly so. If he resembles anyone in US political discourse today it would be the the Fox News host, Tucker Carlson. And even then that would be a disservice to Zemmour. Carlson is not as educated as Zemmour or a deeply cultured thinker; he is a shallow sloganeer and a hot button bomb thrower delivered with a frat boy smirk.
Zemmour, or Le Z as he’s sometimes known, has for some years been a leading public intellectual in France, a popular historian as well as a television provocateur, and one of the country’s most famous journalists. Zemmour came to national pre-eminence when he was given his own daily debating show two years ago by CNEWS, a rolling news TV cable station which was re-inventing itself as the French Fox News. CNEWS’s ratings shot up, overtaking its CNN-like rival BFMTV.
Le Z’s style, however, couldn’t be further from Trump’s. “Unlike my rivals, I write all my own books,” he jokes. He is highly cultured, even if critics might argue that his erudition is preserved in aspic: he quotes 18th-century philosophers and 19th-century historians, with nary a concession to popular topics (he likes football and The Rolling Stones). He litters his speech with great quotes: ‘As Victor Hugo said… As Voltaire said… As Chateaubriand said…’
He speaks in newspaper columns: press his opinion button and he’s off. His eloquence is, and even his critics agree, almost hypnotic. “Je comprends rien à ce qu’il raconte, mais il parle drôlement bien,” is a typical reaction to a Jacques Bainville - and Charles Maurras - quoting tirade by Le Z. His style and accent are demotic, his sentences are clear and his opinions trenchant. In a country where columnists, even in tabloids, prefer weighty circumlocutions to punchlines, this singles Zemmour out.
Zemmour, much like other disruptive populist figures, appeals to those voters (and those given up on voting) who had despaired of ever finding a candidate expressing their concerns. He speaks to their fears: the loss of French identity and rising insecurity caused, he believes, by unchecked immigration. His books, which have sold in the hundreds of thousands, compare a rose-tinted past Republic, where teachers were respected, fathers held solid jobs, families stayed together and classical culture wasn’t derided as pale and stale.
This fits French particularism: Les Déplorables here rarely object to cultural literacy, as long as they don’t feel it’s used to belittle them, Énarque-style. Emmanuel Macron specialises in such elitist putdowns as he was, like every other French president (with the exception of Sarkozy, son of Hungarian immigrants), educated at the highly competitive Grande Ecoles and especially the L'École nationale d'administration (ENA) that churned out a conveyor belt of political leaders (left and right) and captains of industry. ENA may have gone now (as of Dec 2021) but the elitist snark hasn’t.
Zemmour is both clever and cultured and yet never talks down to people as Macron does - Macron once favourably compared himself as a Jupiter benevolently looking down on his children. Zemmour relishes dropping live grenades in any debate. His first polemical essay (he’d already written a number of political biographies, including one of Jacques Chirac), published in 2006, was called Le Premier Sexe, in clear reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 The Second Sex. It bemoaned the “feminisation” of values, and whenever talking about it Zemmour never shied from adding fuel to the fire. “How did women enter the National Assembly and the Senate? Through parity laws that forced parties to select them. And I need not tell you how they were picked… They put in friends, wives, mistresses, etc.”
He believes in the “Great Replacement” theory: he described in his Le Figaro column those areas in Paris where “one feels best, physically, the disappearance of the French population […] while, coming from the suburbs, at the end of a long journey from the depths of Africa, an Arab-Muslim people has replaced the former inhabitants.” He has continually hammered home his idea that foreign immigrants to France should give at least one “traditional” French first name to their children, drawn from the Catholic saints’ calendar, helping them to assimilate better into French society. “Your parents should have called you Corinne,” he told the television personality Hapsatou Sy, born near Paris of Senegalese parents. In Zemmour’s France, no one should ever be called Mohammad or any Anglo-American name, it’s just isn’t French and it will not do.
Might his preoccupations with national characteristics, the greatness of French literature and the collapse of western civilisation have something to do with the fact that he is himself an immigrant child? There is truth in this. The Paris-born Éric Justin Léon Zemmour, son of French-Algerian Berber Jews who had to leave Algeria in the Fifties during the independence war, harks back to the old French Républicain model of “assimilation” rather than of “integration”. “I’m a Frenchman of Berber origin,” he says. His grandfather spoke better Arabic than French. His father drove an ambulance. ‘What my family has done in terms of assimilating French culture should be an example,’ he says, proudly. ‘I am a product of French colonialisation. I am not one of these people who condemn the French coloniser. I say thank you.”
His peculiar brand of nostalgia dovetails with the long-standing history of France as a country of immigration, that, until recently, seamlessly crafted Frenchmen and women from anyone who wanted to become French. This approach proved successful for centuries. So much so that the character who most defines, fondly, the French foibles, Astérix the Gaul, was created by the sons of immigrants: René Goscinny, a Polish-Argentinian Jew, and Albert Uderzo, an Italian builder’s son. (Another Italian builder’s son, François Cavanna, founded Charlie Hebdo.) This resonates with Zemmour’s audiences, who smart from being hectored by increasingly woke New York Times journalists shrieking that France is a country riven by structural racism (which it isn’t but one that persists in the victimhood fantasies of the militant woke left).
Zemmour has used his personal Jewish story as a shield while positing particularly contentious theories, such as his idea that Marshall Pétain, the President of the puppet Vichy régime under German Occupation, “made a pact with the Devil, allowing the Nazis to deport foreign Jews in France in order to save French Jews”. This is a known far-Right trope in a country that carries the complicated trauma of the Collaboration.
It’s hard not to see here the influence of the old Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front, now 93, whom Zemmour used to regularly visit in his Château de Montretout lair just outside Paris for long, lively discussions. Le Pen, who was fired from his own party by his daughter, Marine le Pen, himself joined the Resistance for a few weeks in 1944, aged 18. But he’s specialised in obsessive remarks about the Holocaust ever since. He is more of a provocateur than a dyed in the wool anti-Semite and probably helped cultivate Zemmour’s own taste for scandalous statements.
Le Pen was never forgiven in France for his provocations; hence his own daughter’s symbolic parricide. But what is interesting about Zemmour is that, like Boris Johnson or a Donald Trump, his mounting crowd of partisans discount his verbal excesses as just “Le Z being le Z” - except among the Parisian chattering classes, whom he enrages. This, of course, serves him.
I hosted a dinner with my French partner just before Christmas and we had a few friends around - an eclectic group drawn from history academia, journalism (left and right), politics (advisors to two main parties), book publishing, art gallery world, the army, and business. Some were from polar opposites of the political spectrum and others were apolitically indifferent. Nevertheless we enjoyed the conviviality of good conversation over fine wine and a meal I cooked (thankfully no one died from food poisoning).
Whether they were traditional Catholic, or conservative royalist, or secular Jewish, or just left leaning woke, they all found it both amusing and ironic to see their France, that old Gallo-Roman country, the Church’s eldest daughter, rely on a Jew - traditionally scapegoated in French history - to fulfil the threefold mission of eulogising France’s lost greatness, bemoaning its besmirched identity, and proudly raising its old standard once more. At times, it felt Zemmour was the new Joan of Arc. It was he who was holding the sword others had dropped and rallying the troops for battle.
We agreed that Zemmour’s historical mission, as he sees it, is to reconcile the patriotic bourgeoisie and the working classes, almost like a Napoleon.
In concrete terms, this means that he was betting simultaneously - and this is difficult - on both traditional right-wing voters and supporters of the populist far-Right.
The fact that he is Jewish reassures the former group (“he can’t be a fascist so we can vote for him!”) The fact that he maligns Jews despite being one himself entices the latter (“there’s no way he’ll be bought off, we can trust him!”). The former bunch appreciate his harking back to author Charles Péguy and his admiration for De Gaulle. The latter like his scorn for Emile Zola and his rehabilitation of Pétain. It’s a mish mash that insulates him.
As someone archly pointed out at our dinner, unlike Henry IV, the French Renaissance King who was born a Protestant, Zemmour won’t have to reason that “Paris is well worth a mass.” Historically, he is perhaps in the tradition of Arthur Meyer, the editor of the Gaulois newspaper, who converted to Catholicism in 1901. He also borrows from Edmond Bloch, who rubbed shoulders with the French far-Right in the 1930s and also ended up converting to Catholicism. But Zemmour, who aspires to lasting renown where these two predecessors enjoyed only passing notoriety, will not have to follow them to some kind of Christian conversion. Far from being a hindrance to his irresistible rise, his Jewishness is his trump card. Let’s be frank, lamented one secular Jewish friend, a leftist journalist, said at our dinner: this is both masterful and unprecedented.
What he has achieved, as we all agreed, is in putting the three ‘I’ concerns of his potential voters - immigration, identity and insecurity - at the centre of the political discourse.
But thinking further upon it, I would add another ‘I’ that I found just as intriguing as an observer: the individual.
I’ve noticed when Zemmour incisively dissects Macron, he doesn’t go after his policies but what lies behind them. Macron, he claims, is gripped by ‘an individualistic ideology. He thinks every individual is basically the same and can live everywhere. Of course, he will enforce rules here and there, but fundamentally…the existence of peoples to him seems outdated.’
Zemmour doesn’t go for the obvious link and decry Macron for copying the economic liberalism of Thatcher and Reagan that fuelled excessive individualism that Macron champions. For Zemmour it’s “….more a deviation from Christian humanism. As Chesterton said: “It’s Christian virtues gone mad.”’
Western societies, Zemmour suggests, have ‘simply forgotten that in Christian humanism there is indeed the respect for the individual but that is rooted in a culture, a religion, a people, a land… [today] we have the individual who is sacred, very well, but who is completely isolated from his people, his historical context, his customs. You see it is believed that individuals are interchangeable, that they are only consumers. It’s an economistic view that I don’t share. I think that people are first of all a product of their culture, their people, their customs.’
Zemmour prefers the English word ‘globalisation’ to the French ‘mondialisation’ to describe this process. ‘It’s an alliance of left and right,’ he says. ‘Above all it is cowardice.’ By that he means that European leaders have been weak in refusing to tackle the social and political ills concomitant with globalisation. He has said, “For 40 years they’ve been afraid to confront the politically correct, afraid of riots in suburbs, afraid of being seen in a bad light by the media, afraid of not obeying the judges.”
For Zemmour, the most craven expression of this hyper-individualism is militant political correctness - ‘le wokeisme’. He calls it, “hypersensitivity to the rights of the individual, a generalised offensive against French and western culture, against the white heterosexual man. These people want above all to make the French and all westerners feel guilty, ashamed of their history, so that they amputate themselves, destroy themselves, abandon their culture, their civilisation, simply so that they no longer feel guilty.” This wokeness, he argues, is a kind of Trojan horse for the Islamification of formerly Christian nations, “It is by destroying our cultures, our history, that they make a clean sweep of all that and allow a foreign culture, history and civilisation to come and replace it.”
Such talk - echoing as it does ‘the great replacement theory’ of Renaud Camus - causes consternation in progressive circles with the tired finger pointing trope of ‘white supremacy!’ Yet this unfazes Zemmour. He goes on to say, “I think that nations are the pinnacle of civilisation. I like the differences of nations. I like the fact that the English are very different from the French, just as they are very different from the Germans. The great tragedy of globalisation is that previously there were nations that were different to each other and within each nation there was a great cultural coherence.”
Such talk resonates amongst a large cross section of people from different walks of life. His words touches a very deep anguish in the hearts of many. It’s a pessimistic vision, declinist if you will, but many have argued, not unfounded. In a country with the largest populations in western Europe of both Muslims and Jews, Zemmour’s inflammatory language and his talent for setting the agenda have been regarded as extremely dangerous on the left and in the centre of French politics - particularly since he has won the support of supposedly centre-right voters long wary of Marine Le Pen. To the leftists, they argue he has succeeded in making Le Pen and her Rassemblement National party seem almost moderate.
Given certain conditions, and with a little luck, he would be in a position to do what both Le Pens failed to do, namely to seduce republican voters without alienating anti-republican voters, and vice-versa. He would be in a position to shatter - or at least crack - the “glass ceiling” which has kept the far-Right out of power for so long. He would achieve this thanks to his patter, his strategic know-how and his stubbornness. But it would also be in part thanks to his Jewishness, which makes it impossible to call him a Nazi or a fascist. It gives him more leeway on everything controversial.
Indeed Zemmour has repeatedly run foul of France’s strict laws against inciting racial or religious hatred and allegedly denying the Holocaust, and has been accused in 16 such legal cases over the years, according to his lawyer. But he has prevailed in most of them, often using a free speech defence, and he argues that he is being targeted for politically incorrect views. As polarising as he is, there is something genuinely authentic about him that many, who have been let down by professional politicians on both left and right time and time again, find very attractive.
An outsider might be forgiven in assuming that Zemmour’s support comes from the non-university educated and the working class. But that is a mistake. Zemmour is not Trump. Outsiders, especially in the US where everyone sees anything on the right through Trumpian lens.
Zemmour is a completely different animal from Trump. Zemmour is well read; he actually dives deep into complex topics like economics. Trump, needless to say can barely read a 3 bullet point brief before being bored.
The socio-economic profile of his supporters is also very different. The socio-economic category doesn’t seem very predictive of voting intentions for Zemmour. Zemmour has attracted a lot of talented professionals. Most people don’t know them, because they mostly work in the shadows, but Zemmour is surrounded by a lot of people with a very unusual background for a candidate regarded as far-right. They tend to be young and come from the most prestigious schools in France. There are engineers, public servants, people in business, white collar middle class professionals etc.
Those profiles are very different from the crackpots who advise Le Pen. Overall it is not easy to pin Zemmour down or his supporters.
Zemmour has been very explicit about his strategy, so we don’t really have to guess, but in order to understand it you need to know a few things about French political history.
Up until the 1980’s, the French socialist party was a working-class movement. François Mitterrand, the first socialist to become president in France, was elected in 1981 on a platform that included the nationalisation of many branches of industry. He actually implemented this platform after his election, but it was a disaster and he soon had to choose between his socialist economic policy and European integration, because continuing with this policy would have required that France leave the European Monetary System. In 1983, he chose the latter, but this decision created a serious political problem for him. Indeed, if the socialist party was no longer socialist on the economy, it needed something to mobilise voters against the right.
The solution was to pivot from a party that was focused on improving the material conditions of the working class to a party that was focused on social issues and, in particular, on defending immigrants, who gradually replaced the working class in left-wing mythology. (Of course, I’m not saying it wouldn’t have happened otherwise since left-wing parties in other Western countries underwent the same transformation, but it was particularly sharp in France.) Luckily for Mitterrand, at the same time, the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right party, was beginning to rise and its leader was the perfect bogeyman for the socialist party and its new platform.
At first, traditional right-wing leaders did not consider the National Front to be toxic and even made alliances with it occasionally in local elections, but as it turned out Mitterrand was really smart and traditional right-wing leaders were really stupid. Mitterrand very intelligently used his influence to simultaneously give more visibility to Le Pen by getting him invited on national television and also demonise him by supporting various anti-racist activist groups to make him a pariah by pretending that he was a fascist. Thus, while the National Front was rising and taking votes away from traditional right-wing parties, it was becoming increasingly difficult for them to make alliances because mainstream conservative politicians were afraid of the backlash from the media.
Le Pen himself made that easier by making several very controversial statements and soon he was completely toxic. This gradually resulted in a division of the French right, with moderates and the conservative bourgeoisie voting mostly for traditional right-wing parties, while the National Front got more radical voters and, increasingly, working-class voters moving away from the communist party. Despite what many people in the US think, France is actually a deeply right-wing country in many ways, so the total vote in favour of the right is almost always greater than the total for the left, but this division of the right and the “cordon sanitaire” around the National Front nevertheless allowed the socialist party to sometimes win national election because the right couldn’t unite.
This coup was a case of political genius on the part of Mitterrand and, for the past 30 years, it has plagued the French right and made it lose elections that it would otherwise have easily won. While this division of the right-wing electorate was initially pretty superficial, it eventually solidified because, to a large extent, people’s ideology is driven by their partisan identity and not the other way around. Thus, the more time went by, the more difficult it became for the right to escape Mitterrand’s curse by uniting.
Nicolas Sarkozy understood this and his solution was to steal Le Pen’s voters by adopting his platform while avoiding his excesses. Thus, he was able to unite the right without allying with the National Front, which allowed him to win the presidential election easily in 2007. But he quickly betrayed his promises and, under Marine Le Pen, the National Front - which later became the National Rally - rose even higher than it had under her father. However, despite her efforts, it’s still toxic enough that she can’t possibly win the presidential election.
How does this history lesson relate to Zemmour?
Zemmour’s theory is that he can unite the right around him by bringing together the conservative bourgeoisie that currently votes for traditional right-wing parties and the working class who vote for Le Pen. Many people are surprised that his economic platform is not more “populist” and they think it’s because he lacks imagination, but they just don’t understand that he is doing that on purpose, because he doesn’t want to scare the conservative bourgeoisie. At least, he is hoping that he can take enough voters on both sides to reach the second round of the presidential election, which unlike Le Pen he would have a chance of winning because - at least that’s what he thinks - he is not as toxic as her.
Is he right? That’s hard to say.
So far, he is doing worse in the polls than Le Pen when they test them against Macron in the second round, but I have a hard time believing that Zemmour could be as toxic as Le Pen after decades of nonstop demonising of her controversial family. I suspect that it will change as the campaign hots up in the coming months and people who don’t follow politics closely get exposed to him. However, this won’t matter if he doesn’t make it to the second round, and while it’s still unclear whether he will at this point he has been doing spectacularly well so far.
But what is crystal clear is that neither can beat Macron.
The only way the far right can beat Macron is for both Zemmour and Le Pen to come together. Politically, an alliance would make sense. The National Rally boasts a very strong following among the working classes, who feel short-changed by globalisation. Zemmour attracts wealthy voters who want to defend the nation state and family values against immigration. But a Le Pen-Zemmour ticket at this point seems like a very long shot, not least because the far right duo appear to hate each other. Not a day goes by without Zemmour attacking Le Pen, and vice versa. Le Pen in particular has been reported to be livid at Zemmour stealing her thunder. Despite both sides having some back channel between them, nothing has come of it.
Le Pen doesn’t even trust her own party. It’s been reported that there are a sizeable number in the upper echelons of her party who are unhappy with her leadership and are actually drawn to Zemmour’s more purist call to action. If she shows signs of faltering they may well turn on her. Some of her supporters are speculating on a reconfiguration of the far right as the race between Le Pen and Zemmour heats up. If Zemmour succeeds it raises the question as to whether parts of Le Pen’s National Rally party joins Zemmour’s troops or whether they stay put and try to influence Zemmour.
The brutal reality is that if Le Pen and Zemmour don’t join forces, they could scupper each other’s hopes to even make it past the first round. In the French political system, the two candidates with the most votes in the first round of voting face off in a run-off. Both Zemmour and Le Pen run the risk of splitting the far-right vote and canceling each other out and thus playing into Macron’s hands.
As for the left, they are resigned to being left behind.
Ahead of France’s April 2022 presidential elections, all three major left-wing candidates are performing badly in the polls as they struggle to gain traction outside big cities amid a shift to the right among the French electorate.
One of the French language’s most striking expressions is le detail qui tue – the small, devastating detail - that says it all. A perfect example can be found in a 2019 Le Monde series on the alarming decline of France’s Parti Socialiste (PS). Acute financial difficulties had forced the once august vehicle of the French left to sell its exquisite headquarters in central Paris and move to the suburbs. When the Le Monde journalists went to the new headquarters it was so obscure that their Uber driver’s GPS could not find it. They eventually found the party HQ “at the far end” of a “small, anonymous courtyard that turned out to be a company’s parking lot”.
As campaigning has begun for the 2022 French presidential elections, the Socialists' fortunes have not improved. PS candidate Anne Hidalgo is at just 5 percent of voting intentions, according to Politico’s polling aggregate - even less than the 6 percent drubbing PS’s Benoît Hamon got in the first round of the 2017 presidential elections.
Hidalgo has also been accused of failing to deliver on the most basic environmental task: keeping the city clean. The hashtag #saccageparis has gone viral over recent months as Parisians have inundated Twitter with photos of rubbish piled in the streets and floating in Paris’s usually idyllic river and canals.
What is more, her transport policies made her the bête noire of many motorists – a risky group to antagonise in France, since the Macron government was famously rocked by the Gilet Jaunes (Yellow Vests) protests that erupted over his 2018 petrol price hikes.
Many in Paris - even on the left - think she’s gone too far in her war against cars. It also doesn’t goes down well in the rest of France, especially after what everyone saw in the Gilet Jaunes crisis when it seemed like politicians didn’t understand how low-income voters in suburban and rural areas really depend on cars.
Hidalgo has three fundamental weaknesses that she has been unable to overcome. A Parisian image that does not travel well in the provinces; an approach to governing Paris that has been deeply divisive, especially on environmental initiatives; and, most damagingly, a failure to offer a coherent and attractive policy platform.
Paris Mayor Hidalgo’s fellow leftist candidates are not faring much better.
The Greens have a similar problem gaining traction outside of metropolitan areas. EELV under Yannick Jadot won several major cities in the June 2020 local elections, although they have fared poorly outside of big conurbations.
Despite the illusion created by a Green surge in some cities in recent European and municipal elections, France beyond the ring-roads had never gone green. There is a problem of green politics seeming disconnected from working-class people’s lives.
The uncmfortable truth has been that the French left seems to have abandoned the most disadvantaged social classes. Jadot and Hidalgo are attracting far less support among the working class than among the managerial classes. The green EELV’s Yannick Jadot is at 7 percent.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon is the one leftist candidate with any significant appeal among France’s working class. The extreme far-left France Unbowed (La France Insoumise) party firebrand is at 10 percent – a far cry from the nearly 20 percent he reached in the 2017 vote.
However the veteran extreme-left candidate has been increasingly losing his marbles with the onset of age. He’s gone from firebrand Communist to conspiracist over recent years – most recently in June when he predicted that, “in the last weeks of the presidential campaign, we’ll have a serious incident or a murder” orchestrated to manipulate the electorate. The French presidential elections have already been “written in advance”, Mélenchon went on – suggesting that Macron was the creation of a nebulous elite cabal: “In every country in the world, they’ve invented someone like him, who comes from nowhere and who’s pushed forward by the oligarchy.”
This comes after Mélenchon’s notorious proclamation in late 2018, when police searched his home and the France Unbowed party HQ as part of an inquiry into alleged financial impropriety. A video went viral of him shouting at the officers: “I am an MP! […] I am the Republic!” Mélenchon’s taste for conspiracy theories, ready rants and aggressive anti-European stance go down less well among the French public at large than among his party faithful.
Never before has the French left polled so badly at this point in the electoral cycle and never before have they become irrelevant to the public discourse on things that really matter to people.
But what of the conservative and the right in France?
In December 2020, France's conservative party, Les Républicains (LR), chose Valérie Pécresse to challenge Macron, a choice that has already had a major influence on the shape of the campaign.
Valérie Pécresse, is LR’s first-ever female presidential candidate - and if she succeeds, she would become France's first woman head of state. Les Republicains, which traces its origins to Charles de Gaulle, dominated French politics for much of the post-war era with Jacques Chirac and then Nicolas Sarkozy consolidating the hold conservative right had in power. But after Macron redrew the landscape in 2017, it has struggled to unite its centre-right and staunchly conservative factions.
Valérie Pécresse, 54, is the golden girl of French politics. It’s not for nothing she’s nicknamed by detractors as ‘the blonde’. But she is anything but an airhead blonde. She’s probably the most cleverest in the presidential field, including Macron.
Pécresse, was born in the wealthy Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of the city boundary of Paris, where ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy was once the mayor. She grew up, as many girls do in Neuilly, as well turned out: never flashy but conservatively stylish, and never flaunting wealth or an intellectual family background. Such families were once called ‘BCBG’ - bon chic, bon genre - who lived in Neuilly or the western arrondissements of Paris.
I know her type because she reminds me in many ways of my French-Norwegian cousins who also were raised in Neuilly and exhibit the same cheerful, quietly determined, understated ‘BCGC’ look. This isn’t really surprising as they, like Pécresse, went to the same convent school in Neuilly. The dual aim of Sainte-Marie de Neuilly is to turn out faithful and traditional Catholics girls but also tough, intelligent young women capable of competing with men in a men’s world. My French-Norwegian cousins didn’t always enjoy their time there, but it educated them well and set them on a road to high academic achievement and very successful careers.
Pécresse is a role model for many young women like them. Pécresse is a graduate of the now-dissolved École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), the grande école and hothouse for the country’s political elite, finishing an impressive second in her class (a feat not matched by Macron or Hollande). Even before then she had been a brilliant student, passing her baccalauréat at 16, two years early, and learning Russian at 15 while spending time at young communist camps in what was the Soviet Union. She saw for herself how pernicious communism system was and it led her to become a moderate conservative upon her return.
She is currently president of the Île-de-France regional council, which includes Paris. Pecresse had pointed to the cutting of hundreds of jobs at her head office to make way for more high-school staff, reduced spending and higher investment as proof she gets things done. In 2020, she won a second mandate to run the greater Paris region. Not only has she had running things on a regional level (where there is more opportunity for impact), she has government experience. She served as a very able budget minister and forged a reputation as a strong no-nonsense higher education minister during Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007-12 presidency.
Opponents who had nicknamed her "the blond" had paid the price, she said. Asked if France was ready for a woman president, she replied: "Voters on the right have shown they're ready, and they can be the most reticent to trust a woman."
Ten years ago, being the candidate for Les Républicains would have made Pécresse one of the favourites, even the favourite, to be the next President. But life is more complicated now - and it is growing more complicated by the day: part of the centre-right has emigrated to President Emmanuel Macron, while other sections have shifted to the two far-Right candidates, Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour.
During the party’s primary campaign, the main Les Républicains candidates veered from the party’s traditional centre-right territory towards the far right. Ciotti, leader of the hard right wing of the party, declared that he would hold a referendum to stop mass immigration and set up a “French Guantánamo Bay” to deal with terrorism.
Pécresse, who has described herself as “two-thirds Angela Merkel and one-third Margaret Thatcher”, had argued she was the candidate with the experience and prominence to take on Macron. As education minister, she faced down long-running street protests and university sit-ins to force through reforms to higher education. As a former budget minister, she has, until now, been pro-European and moderate; she promised to focus on the economy and on building consensus if she made it to the Élysée Palace, and also pledged to increase salaries and end the 35-hour maximum working week. She campaigned on promises to halve the number of residence permits for non-EU migrants, stiffen judicial sentences in tough neighbourhoods where police are under pressure, and ban women accompanying their children on school trips from wearing a Muslim headscarf.
That pitch was enough to get her over the line and win her bitterly divided party’s candidacy.
The response by harder-line Républicains or by Zemmouristes to her victory was brutal. They called her a “girouette” (weather-vane), “Valérie Princesse”, “Valérie Traitresse” and “Macron in a skirt”. Indeed the immediate aftermath of Pécresse’s victory, Zemmour made an open pitch to disappointed Ciotti supporters to join his far right movement. As a further sign of his seriousness, he appointed the aristocratic Breton general Bertrand de la Chesnais as his campaign manager, a much respected army general. In doing so, Zemmour showed he had the power to drag the centre-Right rightwards as he does to splinter the hard and far-Right.
However Valérie Pécresse didn’t get to where she is by letting moss grow under her feet.
Pécresse has toughened her language on immigration and identity, seeking to neutralise the threat from Le Pen and Zemmour, whose promise to "save France" from Islam has polarised France. She says she would end the automatic right to French citizenship for people born in France and stiffen judicial sentences in places where police have lost control. On a table in Pecresse's office sits a photograph of Samuel Paty, the teacher decapitated by a Chechen-born teenager in a suburb of Paris in 2020 because he used caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad in a lesson on free speech. Pecresse said the teacher's portrait would follow her to the Elysee Palace if she won the election. "We have to be unbending in the respect of our values," Pecresse said. "In the public space, the law comes before faith. It's the same rights, the same duties for all."
Still, she has her work cut out for her if wants to presents herself as a voice of moderation, both within her party and to the public who are anti-Macron but can’t decide who’s is better placed to defeat Macron.
Pécresse for her part scarcely ever mentions either of her right wing rivals. All her criticism is aimed at Macron, who is floating up to 10 points ahead of the field in the opinion polls. And so far it seems to be working. Recent polls show Valérie Pécresse from the conservative Les Républicains party is in the ascendant. Pécresse could run French President Emmanuel Macron close in the second round of this year's election if she can squeeze past right-wing rivals in round one. So far she has cleverly taken a leaf out of Macron’s playbook and tried to appropriate Zemmour’s language to win over his supporters.
Pécresse put on a show of strength by unveiling her campaign politburo, including two of the men she defeated in the party primary on 4 December. They included the hard-Right parliamentarian, Eric Ciotti, who makes no secret of his admiration for Zemmour. They also included the former EU Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier. She called them “my great army of conquest to serve France”. “Grande Armée” was a reference to the Emperor Napoleon while “conquest” was a reference to Zemmour’s new anti-migration, anti-Islam, Europhobic party, “Reconquête”.
Moderate members of Les Républicains have been unhappy with Pécresse’s first couple months of campaigning. They fear that, far from proving an inspired general, she has been taken captive by the Right wing of her own army. That, they fear, will make it harder to ‘reconquer’ the parts of the centre-Right vote which deserted her party for Macron in 2017 - and the many other moderate voters who are tempted to stick with the President this year.
Other party insiders say that Pécresse has no choice but to campaign to the Right to push ahead of Le Pen and Zemmour in Round One and claim one of the two places in the run-off. Most recent polls place her neck and neck with Le Pen on 16%, with Zemmour just behind and Macron 7 to 10 points ahead. If she reaches the second round, many seasoned political observers believe she could win.
President Macron has not been idle and has been alert to the danger that Pécresse presents.
In the past month or so he has been making headlines with a couple of controversial things. He ordered the European Union flag to fly solo under the sacred arch of the Arc de Triomphe, where traditionally a French flag has flown. He also gave an explosive interview where he declared that he wanted to “emmerder” (piss off) the 8% of non-vaccinated French and make their lives impossible by forcing them out of cafés, restaurants, cinemas, and other public places if they are not vaccinated.
There were several reasons why Macron approved the solo appearance of the EU flag on the Arc to mark the beginning of France’s six months presidency of the EU council. There were several reasons why he abandoned presidential decorum and said that his government’s anti-Covid strategy was to harass and “piss off” the non-vaccinated.
To those watching closely it was clear that much of the guile behind Macron’s actions was aimed at Pécresse. He is doing all he can - with some success - to place explosive charges in the fault lines of her party and to widen the splits in the traditional centre right. It is no coincidence that both actions caused some embarrassment for Pécresse, who continues to struggle to hold together the two wings of her party: the moderate conservative, pro-Europeans and the hard-line, nationalist and populists.
Pécresse was obliged to follow Le Pen and Zemmour in making a fuss about the flag, unsettling the moderate pro-Europeans. She felt obliged - despite Macron’s uncouth description of his strategy - to continue her support for the government’s proposed, tougher “vaccine pass”, which will deny all fun and travel to the unvaxxed. That threatens to anger the libertarian and populist sections of Les Républicains.
Macron’s manoeuvres in recent weeks suggest that the President will do all that he can in the next 100 days or so to split Les Républicains and embarrass Pécresse.
Éric Zemmour’s entrance into the presidential race has taken the direction of French politics further right than it has been in many decades. No one disagrees with that. It is also true that the next presidential election will be fought on the political playing field largely determined by Zemmour’s ideas of how to restore France to her former glory. So the table is set but Zemmour might not even get a seat at the table. In other words, the political playing field may yet be barred for Eric Zemmour. There is every chance he may not be able to even be allowed to stand for President du to the ‘parrainage’ rule.
In France, to stand as a presidential candidate, you need to gather at least 500 signatures of support (or parrainages) from elected representatives like councillors, mayors, MPs and senators. The purpose of the parrainages system is to ensure that candidates have at least some level of support across the country before entering the race. In the French system, these signatures must be drawn from at least 30 different départements (regions), with no more than 50 signatures coming from the same one.
This is easier said than done. It is surprising to learn that even Marine le Pen struggles to garner enough signatures to be eligible to run for office. She managed only 627 in 2017. This time around, far-right minded officials will have to decide between her and Zemmour - and they can only vote for one. Robert Ménard, the mayor of Béziers who has promised his parrainage to Marine Le Pen, has gone on record to state that Zemmour will struggle to attract support even from those who have pledged it already. Zemmour has said he’s has around 350 pledged to him but nothing concrete. But Ménard has said, “I know people who promised him their signatures and who will not give them. Today he will really struggle to have the 500 parrainages because of the harshness of his speeches. That will be very complicated for certain mayors.”
What makes it extra hard is a law passed in 2016 (thanks to ex-President Hollande) in which the Constitutional Council is obliged to publish a complete list detailing who elected officials give their signature to. In effect it means that many local officials are afraid to offer signatures of support out of fear of alienating their own voter base. In 2017, only 34 percent of elected officials offered their signature to hopeful candidates.
Critics say it is undemocratic because it limits opportunities for people outside of the established political class. Candidates from big parties that already have lots of elected representatives can generally rely on those officials to get them over the 500 mark. That may explain why other, non-mainstream candidates are also finding it difficult to hit the 500-person target, including far-right leader Marine Le Pen and hard-left figure Jean-Luc Melenchon. Zemmour has used the media to reach out and address the mayors around France and other eligible officials with a warning, “You have the power to give a voice to millions of French people. Use it. Help me. Do not allow yourselves to steal this election.”
Potential candidates have up until March 4th to collect the required signatures and submit proof to the Constitutional Council. The final list of presidential candidates is published on March 8th.
Meanwhile all the candidates of the centre-right are Zemmour-ising themselves. At least until they get past the first round and only two are left for the final run off. The true battle-within-the-battle of the French presidential election is already raging. It is not a battle of Left vs Right or even centre vs far Right. It is a battle of centre vs centre, between two versions of the post-war French political consensus.
The consensus amongst the many polls makes Macron the election's likely winner, in line with recent surveys that have shown his closest opponents failing to gather momentum despite criticism of Macron's Covid 19 policies. Various polls have shown Macron would get around 24% of votes in the first round of the election. Far-right politicians Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour and conservative Pécresse were generally all tied on 16%. Many of the polls also said Macron would win in April's run-off vote, estimating a margin of 51-49% if he faces Pécresse, 55-45% against Le Pen, and 61-39% against Zemmour.
The election is, of course, still a long way away. Opinion polls bounces come and go. Just ask Eric Zemmour, who is sinking steadily after surging from 0% to 19%. The only exception to this rule seems to be President Macron, who continues to float serenely ahead of the pack on 23 to 25%.
All the same, Macron and his chieftains and supporters remain worried. They are confident that the President would beat either Le Pen or Zemmour if they reached the second round. They are far less certain that he would beat Pécresse. They know fully well that she appeals to a chunk of the electorate which dislikes Macron and would like a change, albeit not too much change. The prospect of a woman as President would, in itself, appeal to the perpetual French dissatisfaction with incumbents; there has been no female leader in France since the regent Marie de Médici four centuries ago.
Pécresse, though more socially conservative and fiscally stringent than Macron, would also be more acceptable in a run-off to parts of the French Left - simply because she is not Macron.
Ultimately, in the first round, some of Pécresse’s advantages will become handicaps. A large part of the wider French right and even her own party want radical change on crime, migration and Europe. Pécresse may be more socially conservative than Macron: she was once a leading figure in a movement to try to block gay marriage, though she now accepts “marriage for all” should not be challenged.
But the French Right regard Pécresse, correctly, as a continuation of the centrist consensus which has survived, with a few twists and turns, from Chirac through Sarkozy, François Hollande and Macron. And unlike Le Pen and Zemmour, Pécresse is a typical product of the French political elite (Sarkozy the only one who wasn’t churned out by the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) - this pisses off as many people as it reassures many others in tackling deep rooted problems France faces. It’s a very real case of ‘plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’ (the more things change, the more they stay the same).
What would that change in France? Perhaps not much. Pécresse would bring a change of style. She would be marginally tougher than Macron on migration. She would be less ambitious about France’s role in Europe and Europe’s role in the world. But the fundamentals would change little.
What of the far right?
All the indications are that Zemmour’s campaign will fall flat and fail this spring. His negative ratings have grown during the campaign. Does this mean Marine le Pen outlast Zemmour past the first round? Could she therefore beat President Emmanuel Macron in a two-way battle on 24 April? The polls suggest that she would get closer than she did in 2017 (66-34%) but Macron would win by 10-12 points.
Zemmour’s people though remain bullish about his chances this year. They see some of the political defections from Le Pen as proof that the campaign is about to swing back in his direction. They speak of further defections, this time from the centre-Right Les Républicains (LR). One reasonably senior centre-Right figure, Guillaume Peltier, a former vice president of the LR, has already joined Zemmour. But his move isn’t such a shock as he was previously a supporter of Le Pen. No core personalities from Les Républicains have moved into the Zemmour camp so far.
The next big political defection ironically could come once again from the Le Pen camp - or at least the Le Pen family. All eyes are on a possible pro-Zemmour declaration by Marine Le Pen’s estranged niece, Marion Maréchal. Maréchal, the grand-daughter of the far-Right patriarch Jean-Marie Le Pen, has split with her aunt Marine and stepped away from frontline politics to raise a family and become politcally active in civil society and re-brand herself as a traditional Catholic and social conservative. She also happens to be a friend of Zemmour.
Whatever happens I fear that the deep political divisions in France would persist; they might even deepen after the next presidential elections. The real battle for the soul of France is coming - but probably not until 2027.
In my humble opinion this election won’t really matter as much as the next one. If Macron wins it will be because many will have been holding their noses when they vote for him. There is every chance that his own party En Marche will be decimated and perhaps even cease to exist by the time Macron steps off the presidential stage. His party was built upon his cult of personality and now it’s a pile of sand ready to be washed away.
As we all know, like nature, politics abhors a vacuum. It’s the perfect stage for Marion Maréchal stake her claim for the presidency. Although only 32, she is seen by many people on the French Right and far-Right as the possible leader of a new nationalist-conservative movement which could mount a serious challenge for the presidency in five years’ time when she will just be 37 years old - although Valérie Pécresse will have something to say about that.
She is one to watch. Marion Maréchal was first elected to the French National Assembly in 2012 at the age of 22 as the member for Vaucluse’s 3rd constituency. She was one of the youngest parliamentarians in modern French political history and soon began to be seen as the rising star of the French right. Many see her as a far more interesting politician than her aunt, Marine le Pen.
But Maréchal disappointed many in 2017 by deciding not to seek re-election and resigning her position as regional councillor, stating that she wished to spend more time with her family. Her marriage to businessman Matthieu Decosse, which lasted two years, produced a daughter, who was then three years old. But Maréchal’s resignation from politics has not slowed her down. That same year, she helped found L’Incorrect, a conservative magazine that serves as an outlet for many of her conservative ideas.
In May 2018 she launched a private graduate school, the Institut de Sciences Sociales, Économiques et Politiques in Lyon. She has tried to open similar centres across Europe trying to equip the next generation into conservative public life.
Her personal story is messy but no one really care in France about such things. Her biological father, Roger Auque, who passed away in 2014, was a well-known journalist, diplomat, war correspondent, and Israeli spy. Maréchal’s paternity only came to light rather recently, and in 2013 Maréchal successfully sued L’Express newspaper for invasion of privacy for publishing these facts about her father, winning £7,200 in damages. Interestingly, her personal history has contributed to her pro-life convictions: in 2016, while opposing a law that would censor pro-life websites, she noted that “I am myself an accident.”
Maréchal is, in short, one of the most interesting people on the political scene today.
In her 2018 speech to CPAC (the American conference for conservatives), Maréchal had declared that “[w]ithout nation, and without family, the limits of the common good, natural law, and collective morality disappears, as the reign of egoism continues.” Rod Dreher, a noted American conservative writer, had noted that Maréchal was much more “traditionalist” than her American counterparts, “focusing on natural law, religion, and culture.”
She has declared that, “The project of the individual society … is still the subject of a consensus among the French ruling class. Almost all the media as well as a large part of the political world or corporations are united around the idea of progress. They share a childlike fascination for the future that drives them to wipe out the past. They share this tendency to abstraction, they despise the real world by subjecting reality to great ideological principles, [and] they continue to aim at universalism to the detriment of the particular and the local.”
In Maréchal’s view, the media, politicians, and corporations are united around a “contractualist vision of the nation where the individual freely chooses his or her membership and transforms his or her desires into rights without any consideration for the community and the common good. They have all adhered to the relativism that denies the existence of a truth, the relativism that transforms principles into mere ‘values’ and morality into opinion.”
Interestingly, Maréchal pinpointed American progressives as part of the problem, noting that “our [French] elites” are particularly susceptible “to American influences,” especially with many of them increasingly receiving an education in the United States. As a result, these elites, she said, “are importing a model that until now was foreign to us: a racial vision of society. This is how we saw the ideas of ‘positive discrimination,’ ‘decolonialism,’ ‘white fragility,’ and quotas flourish everywhere in the public debate. This approach produces eternal victims, who by the mere fact of their origins are locked in resentment and a claiming posture that further dislocates the cohesion of the nation.”
The decline of religion has also contributed to social disintegration in France. “The Catholic Church, marginalized by the small number of practicing Catholics and by the profoundly anti-clerical DNA of the French left, no longer plays the role of cement in French society,” she told me. Additionally, “[t]he social fractures between metropolises and their peripheries, fuelled by crazy economic and land-use planning policies, are erecting an increasingly impenetrable wall between populations that no longer understand each other. All of these phenomena contribute to an increasingly individualistic and dislocated society.”
Add to that the fact that in France, “the Catholic religion has become a rather bourgeois religion with a predominantly left-wing Church (although it is more discreet on this subject today),” and “[t]he Church no longer plays a structuring role in French society.” Instead, Maréchal observed, “the popular religion is Islam or materialism. Let us add to this the existence of a form of anti-clericalism fueled by the French left and which has expressed itself exclusively against the Catholic religion since the revolution. This further reduces the Church’s authority or influence.”
Her words have electrified many social and religious conservatives who have felt uncomfortable with the Le Pen’s brand of political nationalism and also felt let down by Les Republicains. No wonder, political commentators suggest, she would have a credible shot at the presidency once Macron finishes his last term in five years time.
But five years is a long time away. Maréchal has no actual support to give other than her endorsement. That’s why a Marion declaration for Zemmour would not be enough to revive his campaign but it would almost certainly help her lay a marker down to his supporters for the future. It would be a political version of the celebrated sign at French railway level crossings. “Un train peut en cacher un autre. (One train can conceal the next.) ” One campaign can also conceal another.
With my tongue firmly in my cheek I can wryly say that France might have the opportunity to elect its first woman president within this decade. Either this year with Valérie Pécresse as a reincarnated Marie de Medici or wait five years for Marion Maréchal as the self-styled second coming of Joan of Arc.
Ex-President Georges Pompidou said famously, “A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation. A politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service.” Let’s hope France elects the former and not the latter because as much as we Brits like to joke about the French we also recognise Europe is nothing without a strong and stable France.
