The Least Bad Option: Célia Belin and Agneska Bloch on the French Election
“France is suffering from a Le Pen-ization of the mind. There is now more acceptance of discussing discriminatory policies. This phenomenon has affected the political sphere across the board."
GEOPOLITICS
French voters go to the polls on Sunday in the second and final round of their country’s presidential election. On the surface, things look a lot like France’s last presidential election, in 2017. The two candidates are the same: Marine Le Pen and the incumbent, President Emmanuel Macron. And once again, France’s traditionally dominant center-right and center-left parties—the Republicans and the Socialists—were knocked out in the first round on April 10. Dig deeper, however, and important differences emerge. The most worrisome is that Le Pen, a far-right extremist who’s tried to moderate her image in recent years, is doing much better in the polls this time. To understand the issues at stake, the key differences between this election and the last, and the likely outcome of Sunday’s vote, I turned to two of the best U.S.-based France watchers I know. A former adviser to the French Foreign Ministry, Célia Belin is currently a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. Joining us on the call was Agneska Bloch, a senior research assistant at a D.C.-based think tank; she was also the 2020 Geostrategy & Diplomacy Fellow for Young Professionals in Foreign Policy. We spoke yesterday.
Octavian Report: This election looks, at least superficially, a lot like the last one. What are the important ways in which it’s different from 2017?
Célia Belin: This election is the similar to the last one in the sense that we have the same two candidates, but otherwise, it’s not the same. The reason is that both candidates have changed a lot in the past five years. Following her crushing defeat in 2017, when she earned only 34 percent of the vote, Marine Le Pen understood that she and her party were identified as extremist, as radical. So for the past five years, she has engaged in a process of normalization, trying to mainstream herself, her image, and her platform.
Meanwhile, in 2017, Emmanuel Macron was a newcomer, with a vision, optimism, and a promise to overcome the left-right divide by pursuing a very pragmatic, centrist policy. Five years down the line, he has governed mostly from the center-right, and his pragmatism is now perceived as cynicism. So he has alienated a lot of the left, which puts him in a weaker position probably than he was five years ago when he faced Le Pen then.
OR: Is Le Pen’s transformation real or superficial?
Agneska Bloch: Le Pen’s transformation seems more than superficial to many, but it really is not. Her focus has been on changing her persona and her brand. It’s about changing her talking points away from those that many identify with her father—issues and themes like nativism, racist identitarian politics, and xenophobia. All of those things are still at the core of her platform, but they aren’t what she speaks about at her rallies. She’s trying to focus not on the nationalist aspect of who she is, but on the populist side. These days, she talks mostly about the suffering that many French have experienced due to globalization and de-industrialization. That’s a way for her to criticize Macron for what she calls his globalism and his liberal internationalism. She is focused on the number one issue for a majority of French voters, which is purchasing power—an issue that’s been made worse by the war in Ukraine and its effect on gas prices, inflation, etc. in France.
OR: If you were to summarize each candidate’s main pitch to voters, what would it be?
Belin: Macron hasn’t really made one. That’s partly a function of the way he’s treated this election: before the first round, Macron barely even campaigned. He was fully occupied with the COVID crisis and then, of course, with the war in Ukraine, where he was very much at the forefront of uniting Europeans and leading shuttle diplomacy between Russia and Ukraine. When he finally entered the fray, it was through a letter to the French public on March 3, the very last day one was allowed to join the campaign. Then, before the first round, he held only one political rally and met a just few voters.
So his pitch has to be interpreted as competence and the capacity to lead the country through crisis. And I think that is actually his strongest argument. He has been the president of crises. One was probably self-generated: the 2018 yellow vest protests. And the other two—COVID and Ukraine—are external. On all three, he managed to get France from one point to the other in a mostly cohesive way, and probably strengthened France in the process. What he’s not been, however, is a reformer or a visionary. That’s where most of the disappointment comes from: he hasn’t implemented the transformative agenda that he promised in 2017.
Le Pen has been much clearer, even though she’s hiding the racist and radical elements of her platform. Her pitch, which she’s developed over the past year, is a defense of the working class and of the parts of France—rural areas and the suburbs—that are systematically impoverished and disenfranchised. This was the population that mobilized during the yellow vest protests. This is the population that is the most disappointed with Macron. To them, she promises better purchasing power, higher salaries, and a lower cost of living. And also greater dignity through work for the working class, which she’d provide through a national preference—which means discriminating against foreigners, fighting against immigration, and fighting against the European Union.
Bloch: There’s also a strong focus in her platform on people under 30, because she recognizes that she is much more popular with Macron among this demographic. It’s also a demographic that abstained in huge numbers in the first round of the election; over 40 percent of voters aged 18-34 did not vote in the first round. So she’s proposing income-tax exemptions for people under 30, along with other ways to support younger people who have not felt heard by Macron.
OR: Why does France hold its presidential elections in two rounds?
Belin: The idea is to ensure that the president of the French Republic is legitimate, by making sure that person is elected by more than half of the electorate. In the first round, everyone gets to express themselves. We saw that this year: 70 percent of French voters supported the top three candidates [Macron, Le Pen, and the far-left Jean-Luc Mélanchon], but a good 30 percent of voters chose smaller candidates. In the second round, however, which comes two weeks later, everyone must choose between the two front-runners. That ensures that one of them will win more than 50 percent, giving them the greatest possible mandate.
OR: When Americans think about populist leaders, they think of Donald Trump. What are the similarities and differences between Le Pen and Trump?
Belin: One similarity is their anti-immigration platforms. Another is their skepticism of international institutions, including, for Le Pen, the European Union. Another is a fascination with authoritarian strongmen around the world. Both Trump and Le Pen are quite fond of Vladimir Putin and also of Hungarian President Viktor Orban, for example.
But if you look at Trump’s strategy to gain power—the way he won the Republican primaries in 2016 and then went on to win the presidency—as well as the way he exercised power, and finally at the way he contested the results of the November 2020 election, you see that Trump has always been against the system. He has refused to belong to the mainstream, and constantly berates it. He exacerbates differences, never trying to unite. He tries to elevate his devoted base while trying to crush the other side. Marine Le Pen has an opposite approach to the system. She seeks the mainstream. She’s has tried to transform herself into a normal candidate. She has hidden her radical platform in order to make herself a more acceptable persona. And in the process, she’s made concessions. Five years ago, for example, she was still in favor of France leaving the euro and of possibly leaving the European Union. Today those things are gone from her platform. She’s seeking power in the most mainstream way possible, which is why she’s getting closer and closer to the 50 percent threshold.
OR: You just alluded to her support for Putin. Her party also infamously took a loan from a Russian bank a few years ago. Given the war in Ukraine and the way public opinion has swung against Russia throughout the West, is her fondness for Russia going to hurt her in the election?
Bloch: So far, Marine Le Pen’s pro-Russia proclivity hasn’t hurt her. I think that for many in France, it hasn’t been particularly surprising. Many analysts there don’t expect it to impact her hugely in the polls. That’s surprising for international observers. But two things happened during the first-round election that made a difference. Number one, Éric Zemmour—the other far-right candidate, who is even more extreme than Le Pen and embraces the more radical tradition of Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen—is also pro-Russia and pro-Kremlin, and he did nothing to try to tone down those impulses during the campaign. He called the war in Ukraine a distraction, and many of his supporters defected to Le Pen. Although only part of that movement can be attributed to Zemmour’s pro-Russia stance. I think another big part of it was strategic voting on the far right, with people flocking to Le Pen because she seemed the more realistic candidate.
Le Pen, meanwhile, condemned the invasion and said that she supports welcoming refugees from Ukraine. She also said that she doesn’t support sending weapons to Ukraine, but that hasn’t hurt her overall. What is hurting her is that many French voters say that she’s not well prepared to handle the crisis as president. Polls show that the French overwhelmingly trust Macron in this area, by about 80 percent.
OR: One of the striking things about the first round was the level of xenophobia expressed by candidates—not just on the extreme far right, but on the center-right as well. Why has this kind of language become such a feature of French politics?
Belin: France is suffering from a Le Pen-ization of the mind. Due to the actions of Le Pen and her father, there is now a higher acceptance in the French media and in French politics of discussing discriminatory policies and bashing progressive policies. This phenomenon has affected the political sphere across the board, from the far right to the traditional right to the Macron camp. During his five years in power, Macron regularly attacked progressives for being naive on identity issues. For example, his minister of education created an association to defend the Republic against wokeism.
Then came Zemmour, who revitalized the far right and helped put these concepts out in the general discourse. One of these ideas is the concept of “the great replacement”—a very conspiratorial fringe concept that French culture and society are being replaced by immigrants of Muslim origin. This is a deeply disturbing concept, but the fact that he kept talking about it pushed regular politicians, including the Republican candidate Valérie Pécresse, to discuss it as well. All this has worked to the advantage of Le Pen, because it has allowed her to transform into a normal candidate. She doesn’t need to talk about any of it; she can leave these topics to everyone else on the right.
One last point on this. The trend has not affected everybody. There is a counter-movement, mainly driven by progressive young people. But this movement has been highly unrepresented during this election. The only serious candidate of color, was Christiane Taubira, a former minister of justice under Socialist President François Hollande. She is a hero to the progressive left, but she didn’t get enough signatures to qualify to enter the first round.
OR: Both of France’s traditional parties, the Socialists and the Republicans, did very poorly in the first round. Why have they virtually disappeared from relevance?
Belin: In 2017, Macron argued that having leftist and rightist parties had created artificial divisions and partisanship. You were either a Socialist or you were a Republican. But there was actually very little difference between the two parties’ platforms, and for decades, they had passed power back and forth to one another without ever fully implementing solutions.
Then Macron came in and presented a pragmatist platform that took ideas from both sides and tried to make them work. In the process, he accelerated the crumbling of the traditional parties. He believes he has replaced the left-right divide with an open-closed divide. He calls it “nationalist versus progressive,” which are probably not the right terms. But he does represent a centrist platform that is open to the world, pro-European, and has more liberal ideas on the economy, on society, etc., while Le Pen supports a more protectionist, nationalist agenda.
OR: What do you think a Le Pen presidency would look like?
Bloch: First, I think a Le Pen presidency would mean a weakened and hobbled Europe. Le Pen no longer calls for a Frexit or for ditching the euro. But she certainly wants to move toward a Europe that’s what she calls an alliance of free and sovereign nations. For her, that means a sovereign France where French law has primacy over EU law. She thinks France has been weakened by being in the EU and by having to work with Germany and other partners. So she would focus on that and on revitalizing France’s rural working class and younger people. She would focus on reducing the value-added tax, etc.
But I think she would be quite constrained by the fact that we still don’t know what the next parliament will look like. There are legislative elections coming in June. And without the support of the legislature, the Rassemblement National, it would be very hard for her pass a lot of her priorities regarding both the EU and France’s domestic policies.
Belin: Agneska is exactly right. The parliamentary election coming up in June is crucial. What would happen if Le Pen were elected? You would have a very strong counter-movement focused on opposing her in the legislature. She would be very unlikely to get a majority, though she might get a coalition with the other right-wing parties. And she would have a lot of strong opposition from other European countries. Just today, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, and Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa published a joint op-ed in Le Monde calling for her defeat. That kind of direct interference is very unusual, and it’s a sign of the level of rejection she would probably encounter as president, both internally and externally, which would make the next five years highly dysfunctional and chaotic.
OR: Who’s going to win on Sunday? What are the odds? And how scared should we be?
Belin: I believe the odds are pretty good for Macron at the moment. Especially because the one second-round debate, which was held on Wednesday, was indecisive and didn’t provoke a major shift among voters. No one really won. Meanwhile, Macron has held himself together pretty well. The only caveat is that there’s likely to be an extremely high abstention rate. That said, unlike during the first round, the French have really focused on this election. So bookmakers are giving Macron an 80, 85 percent chance of reelection.
OR: Will people across the spectrum rally together to block Le Pen, as they did in 2017?
Belin: Yes, but in much lower numbers. If we trust the polls, he’s still up by 10 percent, and because you don’t have swing states in France, the polls are more reliable. The difference from 2017 is that fewer people will vote for Macron. So his margin will be lower than it was last time, because rather than vote for him or Le Pen, who many still consider toxic, a lot of people will just sit it out. I hate to make a prediction and be proven wrong. But no one is really believing the opposite at the moment.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.