Elections 2024: France Round 1

The end of a road or just a fork….hope and fear in France and across Europe. Some reassurances from history?

Continuing our pledge at Andelman Unleashed to report and comment on every national election everywhere in the world, this week we have France Round 1…with Round 2 just around the corner.

It’s not over til it’s over. At the door of power:  France's long-feared political party with whom the Hexagon has long nursed a deep love-hate relationship.

Often close enough to taste, but in the end, unfailingly denied. That's again where the National Rally (RN), its designated candidate for prime minister, Jordan Bardella, and its leader Marine Le Pen, found themselves Monday morning.

And everyone, even the great Emirati cartoonist Paresh was shaken to their foundations.

At the door of power. What's critical to watch is if the National Rally can actually get through that door. But especially how they perform once they do.

Here's how France's leading daily, Le Monde, expressed the panic in so many circles on Monday morning, sending up frantic distress flares:

The far right is on the verge of power. Fueled by political distrust, the rejection of immigration, and rising security concerns, the wave is not unique to France, but for the country which believed itself to be better protected than other democracies by its republican tradition, its institutions, and its two-round majority vote, the shock is immense...

The high level of participation, 20 points higher than two years ago, shows that all camps mobilized, in the wake of a dissolution [of parliament] that will remain one of the most irresponsible acts that a President of the Republic could have committed in the exercise of his powers.

Incidentally this is the same paper that on Friday called for Joe Biden to withdraw as a presidential candidate in an effort to keep a Le Pen lookalike (Donald Trump) from running the tables across the ocean in America in November.

The center-right daily Le Figaro actually seemed to be singing from a similar songbook in its front-page commentary. It, too, is desperately afraid of life under a Le Pen:

Of course, in a two-round election, mass is never said on the evening of the first. Many things can still happen, and the time between the two rounds will be decisive. Everything indicates, however, that the framework is fixed: the polarization which is expressed through the dizzying multiplication of RN-LFI duels, or their triangular confrontation is drawing a radically new political landscape.

It certainly looks bad for President Emmanuel Macron and all those who believe in democracy, the French nationhood, and this nation's position as a leader of Europe. But then, snap elections with a three-week campaign window a month before 15 million people descend on Paris for the Olympic Games are not for the faint of heart.

To get an idea of just where we stand after yesterday's orgy of voting, let's look at the results. Here's how the percentages broke down by party—the RN (far-right), NFP (far-left), Ensemble (Macron’s own party), LR (Les Republicans: old center-right) and Divers (a mélange of misfits):

At 66.71% the percentage of voters who turned out to cast their ballots was among the highest in the history of the Fifth Republic….

More than 4,000 candidates stood across France and its far-flung overseas territories for 577 seats in the National Assembly. In some constituencies, a dozen or more from the entire political spectrum were standing for a single seat. Only two, or at most three depending on the size of the locao vote, will move on to a second winner-take all Round 2 next Sunday. But accumulate 50%+1 and you have no need to move on. You're elected in Round 1.

Here's how that turned out, on the official Ministry of the Interior site:

Pay special attention to the far-right (no pun intended) column….there's the real tale of Round 1. The RN won outright 37 seats (including Le Pen herself in her traditionally hard-right constituency in northern France). The far left, perhaps, even more astonishingly, snagged 32. Macron's party walked away with just 2.

But the real panic will not take hold until after the second round when every seat in the parliament will have been parceled out. Here is the dismal projection right now, from far-left (Nouveau Front Populaire) through the center to the far right (Rassemblement Nationale), with Macron’s own party, Renaissance, squeezed in the middle :

For perhaps a microcosm of how confusing this race can be, let's take a close look at my own 'circonscription' or legislative district—the Second District in Paris which sprawls along the Seine from the Latin Quarter in the 5^th arrondissement, through the chic quarters of the 6^th and 7^th, nearly to the Eiffel Tower. There were 12 candidates on the ballot.

The top three "qualified" for Round Two. By far the biggest winner was the Socialist candidate, Marine Rosset, a schoolteacher with a grand total of 932 Instagram followers, a member of the municipal council of the 5^th arrondissement, who's stood before (unsuccessfully) for this seat. She was followed by Jean Laussucq, the candidate of Rachida Dati, Macron's new Minister of Culture, mayor of the 7^th arrondissement and as a center-right politician, considered a possible successor to Macron in 2027.  (Especially if Le Pen falls on her face with the government she may be running.) The third is Gilles Le Gendre, the incumbent, drummed out of Macron's party, who is still hoping history will carry him through. Far behind and failing to make the cut?  The RN candidate herself, Melody De Witte, with just 11%.

“We obviously heard the anger. But there is an effort to renew, and this shows that we can govern differently."

—Jean Laussucq in the daily Le Parisien.

Differently indeed, but before utter panic sets in among those who love the French and their way of life as much as all the Unleashed Andelmans, I’d encourage a stroll down memory lane.

Let's start with the presidential election of 2002, when for the first time, Marine Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie, made it into the second-round head-to-head with Jacques Chirac. In the first round, with 16 candidates on the ballot ranging from the Workers' Struggle to the Hunting Fishing parties, Chirac finished first with 19.88%, Le Pen second with 16.96%, narrowly edging out Lionel Jospin, the incumbent prime minister and Socialist Party candidate who'd "cohabited," fairly disastrously, with Chirac for years. In the second round, Le Pen did marginally better with 17.79%, with a landslide 82.21% for Chirac.

Five years later, in 2007, Le Pen was back in fourth spot with 10% of the vote. By 2012, Marine had replaced her aging father on the ballot, doing marginally better with 17.9% but still deep in third place, so out of the second round entirely.

For Macron's first term, though in 2017, Le Pen managed to poll 21.3% in the first round, just behind Macron's 24.01%. But in the second round, it wasn't even close. She'd edged up to 33.9%, so a virtual landslide for Macron with 66.1%.

Finally, two years ago in 2022, Le Pen was back again, with 23.15% in the first round versus Macron's 27.85%, though in the second round against an already deeply unpopular Macron she still lost 41.45% to 58.55%.

There is a critical lesson buried in all these numbers. There appears to be a ceiling of how much support the French are prepared to give to a party that for many still reeks of neo-Nazi flavors of the World War II "Occupation" when Hitler's Germany invaded and seized France, enslaving the French people, setting up a puppet regime in Vichy. Admittedly, there are precious few still amongst us with direct experience of those years, the underground Resistance, the public executions and deportations, the horrors visited on all opponents. But the DNA remains deeply embedded in the French psyche. At least, we hope.

Now admittedly, in past contests, Le Pen and her party did not go into a second round with 37 seats under her belt (indeed her entire score in the outgoing parliament was just 87 out of 577 seats).  But there is a fierce determination across the entire rest of the political spectrum to make sure the RN does not seize unilateral and unchallengeable control.  From Ouagadougou in Africa's Burkina Faso, cartoonist Damien Glez, a pillar of the Paris-based collective Cartooning for Peace, weighed in with his view of what Le Pen's designated prime minister might look like in power:

Or as Le Figaro concluded:

There are barely six days left to avoid the worst, to prevent the RN from having an absolute majority in the National Assembly. Only the constitution of a powerful republican front can still block a party which, despite all its dissimulations, remains eminently dangerous.

There is very little time left to try to build the final surge, by mobilizing all the values ​​attached to the Republic. Sunday, July 7, the country is not only playing for alternation, it risks tipping over.

And in any event, the constitution does give Macron the right to dissolve the parliament and call another snap election in a year. Stand by.

Finally, for more of my thoughts, do have a listen to my appearance on CNN Sunday with the extraordinary Fredricka Whitfield:

And then, if you'd like to put a whole lot of this into context, don't miss my MSNBC column that also published Sunday: