[ Updated (below) on Monday morning 9 am EST with Pécresse comments on RTL network, explaining her broadly panned performance the previous evening at Le Zénith]
Eight weeks until the first round of the French presidential elections. And sudden some clear and present dangers begin to confound candidates—announced and even unannounced—from the top to the bottom of the prospective ballot.
Across the board, the race seems to be devolving into three quite distinct groups. At the top, still unannounced, President Emmanuel Macron, sitting somewhat comfortably and unsurprisingly ahead of the entire field. Grouped behind him are the three right-wing candidates in a virtual tie for the honor of challenging Macron in a second-round runoff on April 24: Valérie Pécresse, the moderate-right governor of the Ile de France region where Paris is situated; Marine Le Pen, the far-right, perennial #2; and Eric Zemmour, the television commentator and newcomer even further to the right. Finally, there's the third group—everyone else, buried firmly in the single digits.
This latest IPSOS poll for Le Monde tells the whole story, with 12,542 polled including 7,741 who expressed a firm intention of voting in April.
The numbers go a long way toward explaining a whole lot of the sturm und drang that's been going on behind the scenes in the past week.
Let's start at the top with Macron. So far, he's been just a trifle pre-occupied. There's been the seven-and-a-half hours or so he's spent with Vladimir Putin—nearly six hours with the two facing off at opposite ends of a 20-foot table in an ornate Kremlin conference room where Louis XIV or Ivan the Terrible would have felt equally comfortable. Then there was the additional hour and forty minutes on the phone with Putin on Saturday. So far (at least as of mid-day Sunday when we publish Andelman Unleashed), there's been no concrete result—neither war nor peace, which is the question most folks ask me in one fashion or another, on camera or off. And which to a degree does leave Macron and his campaign in a degree of limbo.
Clearly, the last thing Macron wants is to leave himself open to being labeled the Neville Chamberlain of Russia's blitzkrieg into Ukraine. To remind you, it was Chamberlain who undertook several in-person negotiating sessions with Hitler in an effort to halt a German takeover of Czechoslovakia and invasion of Poland. He returned to London with a paper, signed by Hitler that he waved at reporters, beaming "peace on our time." And then of course, Hitler simply blitzkrieged Poland when he was good and ready. (You can find full details in my book A Red Line in the Sand or in episode two of the podcast.)
Still, despite the fact that some American commentators concluded the Putin-Macron dialogue consisted of little more than "trash talk" and that Macron had been "humiliated," Macron, for those who watched him closely, has pretty carefully insulated himself or at least hedged his bets. While France still has not slimmed down its embassy in Kyiv nor suggested its citizens flee the country as President Biden has urged, Macron has never done more than present himself as speaking for the bulk of the European Union, which he has every right, indeed obligation, to do during the six months through June while France occupies the rotating role as the continent's official leader. Parenthetically, the last time France held this position was in 2008, when Nicolas Sarkozy was president, and Sarkozy played a similar role of go-between with Putin, successfully brokering a truce after Russian troops had pushed deep into another former Soviet republic, Georgia. Of course, that was a case of finding a path toward a truce to bring an end to hostilities rather than head off a potential military campaign with far broader scope and consequences. Incidentally, Sarkozy was roundly defeated for re-election. But that came four years later and by then there were many other forces at work to take Sarkozy down. Today, Macron continues to govern.
At home, Macron has continued to safeguard himself—and France—from any impact of an invasion and all the attendant horrors, especially the cut-off of cheap Russian natural gas to heat homes and fuel electric power plants in Western Europe. On Friday, Macron made a quite pointed announcement, traveling to a nuclear turbine factory in the eastern French city of Belfort. Before thousands of workers and political supporters, he unveiled "a rebirth of France's nuclear industry" with up to 14 next-generation reactors and a host of smaller nuclear plants. The goal is to slash France's reliance on foreign energy sources and, in a clear nod to his presidential opponent, the environmental candidate Yannick Jadot, a giant step toward slashing planet-warming emissions from carbon-based fuels. Of course, Jadot is currently hovering around a dismal 7% in the polls.
Indeed, right now there don't seem to be many forces working very effectively against Macron. Behind the scenes, he's assembled an extraordinary team of professionals and political allies, many drawn to an individual increasingly perceived as a winner and away from others struggling to find their footing. The Macron team has a sprawling campaign headquarters on the rue du Rocher in the 8th arrondissement, appropriately dubbed "La Ruche" (The Beehive). From here, there the team has launched a shadow campaign website with the slogan "avec vous," (with you) though one wag pointed out that's also the trademark of frilly Korean-manufactured ladies' undergarments. Since he is still undeclared as a candidate, his name appears nowhere, but the website touches all the bases, proclaiming "discover the voices of France and make yours heard." There are images of young and old, factory workers, shop keepers and small restaurateurs, farmers and vintners, towns, villages and cities.
Since France has no real version of America's Hatch Act forbidding members of an administration from participating in a political campaign, Macron has hardly been constrained from turning to his brilliant secretary general at the Elysée palace, Alexis Kohler, to serve has his campaign chief. Le Monde describes him as "le 'jumeau' du president de la République, l'inoxydable secretaire general," meaning he's effectively Macron's stainless steel twin, or at least an "un-rustable," unflappable Teflon political operative. He's been with Macron, at his side or just behind him, from the get-go.
Kohler and Macron have also succeeded in luring over or simply attracting a host of allies, from across the political spectrum, skillfully cutting the legs out from under his key opponents and bolstering his appeal to a host of new voters. Some of these new allies have come from the one individual who at the start of the campaign season more than a month ago was seen to be Macron's principal challenger. On Thursday, the defection to Macron of Éric Woerth sent tremors through the organization of Valérie Pécresse. Woerth, a longtime supporter of Sarkozy and pillar back to 1981 of his Les Republicans party, whose banner Pécresse is now bearing, has a day-job as the powerful chairman of the Finance Committee of the National Assembly. His defection made most difficult efforts by Pécresse to peel votes away from Macron at the center and continues to see others moving away from her to the right, especially to the media personality Zemmour.
All of which would help explain how the three leaders behind Macron are separated by barely one percentage point from each other—well within the poll's margin of error. It also means that each of the three is making major efforts to distinguish him- or herself from the other and claim the mantle of the sole viable leader to take on Macron. So Pécresse announced a major "re-launch" of her presidential campaign Sunday at the Zenith, a hall in the Parc de la Villette in the 19th arrondissement in far northeastern Paris. With a capacity of 6,000, her screaming admirers waved tiny French flags as Pécresse, surrounded by ranks of arm-linked security guards, made her way through the mob in a scene, absent some of the violence, that I saw greeting Zemmour at his launch event two months ago. With chants of "Valerie, Valerie," she began, "my dear compatriots, at last we are united here. Thank you, my magnificent équipe, you are always here. It is a privilege to be your candidate."
However, she failed to electrify the nation and by Monday morning was on the RTL network explaining that while “may not be the greatest orator (I) know how to get things done.” Or as a Le Monde “alert” put it “the boredom of being ‘Madam perfect.’” Still, my experience has been in France and beyond, a leader needs to inspire as well as perform. And in the course of an interminable—well, okay, 90 what seemed endless minutes—”sa prestation a peu convaincu,” as one observer put it: her performance was barely convincing.” She remains trapped between an undeclared Macron on one side and the Zemmour and Le Pen on her right flank.
Still, she now is officially and legally on the ballot—as it happens, one of now three individuals who have made it over the hurdle of 500 signatures of mayors of French cities and villages (“parrains” or godfathers) that any candidate must accumulate by March 7. In fact, Pécresse's efforts have surged her to the front with 1,249 signatures, ahead of Macron with 1,050 and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist Party candidate with 790, though barely 2.5% in the last voter poll. Further behind are both Le Pen (274) and Zemmour (181), which has to be making their teams just a little crazy, combined with all of the other grim realities of this utterly bizarre campaign.
Vive la France!