Through the French presidential elections in April and the parliamentary elections in June, I'll be posting here the latest updates, my ruminations, and a sense of just where we are and where we might be going in this landmark series of votes—landmark for the French, for Europe and for the entire western alliance, especially the United States. Follow along with me….stay tuned! And of course, be sure to read the background in my latest book, A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen. Finally, do subscribe here to my SubStack page to be sure not to miss a single issue!
[ Updating with late night phone call between Macron & Putin and the resulting communique.]
Emmanuel Macron has had a busy week.
He spent 90 minutes on the phone with Iran's president Ebrahim Raisi—trying to talk him into returning to the nuclear agreement that had been cobbled together seven years ago with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, and that was impetuously ripped asunder by Donald Trump. During what could turn out to be an epiphanal call, Raisi outlined his conditions while Macron expressed his conviction that Iran needed to seize the opportunity to avoid a major global crisis.
He spent another 105 minutes on the phone on Sunday morning with Vladimir Putin—trying to talk him off his ledge and refrain from launching the biggest land war in Europe since World War II. Then there was a host of calls with President Joe Biden, German chancellor Olof Scholz, Polish president Andrzej Duda, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky and an assortment of leaders of NATO and the European Union. Finally, at 11 pm (Paris) / 1 am (Moscow) / 5 pm (NY), Macron was back on the phone for another hour with Putin. All with the same end in view. A last-ditch chance for diplomacy.
In the end, a communiqué from the Elysée reported some astonishing results:
“ [President Macron] proposed that a summit could be held between President BIDEN and President PUTIN, and then with all the stakeholders, on security and strategic stability in Europe. Presidents BIDEN and PUTIN have each accepted the principle of such a summit. Its content will be prepared by Secretary of State BLINKEN and Minister LAVROV during their meeting this Thursday, February 24. It can only be held if Russia does not invade Ukraine. The President of the [French] Republic will endeavor to prepare the content of these discussions with all the stakeholders.”
What is Macron’s motive for putting so much on the line? After all, for six months beginning this past January France—and Macron, at least through April—holds the rotating leadership of the entire European Union. He aides suggest he was simply asserting his role as the real, as well as titular, head of the continent. Indeed, the stakes could be far higher indeed.
Sandwiched in between was a summit conference Macron hosted with a collection of African leaders ahead of an announcement that France would be pulling its troops from the disintegrating, terrorist-infested nation of Mali and deploying them elsewhere in the Sahel where they might be more welcome and more effective.
All this without leaving the Élysée presidential palace. In fact it seems that about all he hasn't been doing is launching himself formally into a bid for re-election to a five year term as president just seven weeks from now. Which is hardly to say he hasn't been running for president. Like crazy.
And he is still leading a pack that itself is increasingly chewing itself up behind him. The latest polls show Macron still holding a comfortable lead in the first-round race, with three right-wing candidates nearly 10 percentage points behind him, while their separation from each other could be covered with a small pocket-handkerchief of barely a point and a half. The latest IFOP poll for Paris Match shows the far-right media firebrand Eric Zemmour with 16.5%, perennial right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen with 16% and newcomer Valérie Pécresse at 15%.
None of this, of course, is hardly surprising. It's been a bad week—especially for Le Pen and Pécresse. Each found some of her staunchest supporters deserting them—quite literally—right and left. Nicolas Bay, the renowned Eurodeputy and director of Le Pen's Rassemblement National party suddenly defected to Zemmour's Reconquête party, charging her with "infidelity" to everything the French people really want. That followed an earlier defection to Zemmour by Stéphane Ravier of Provence and Jérome Rivière, two more of Le Pen's faithful.
By contrast the moderate right-wing Pécresse, who observers found had begun drifting ever further toward the right in an increasingly vain effort to siphon votes away from Zemmour, found herself losing important support in the other direction. Eric Woerth, a longtime heavyweight in her Les Republicans party and former Pécresse colleague in the cabinet of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, announced he was going over to Macron. "I don't agree with [her] party's message" of a France that is "nostalgic and inward-looking", he told the newspaper Le Parisien. He hadn't even bothered to warn Pécresse ahead of time. His defection to Macron followed that of two other Les Republicans powerhouses, Calais Mayor Natacha Bouchart and Nora Berra, another former Sarkozy cabinet member. Late Sunday, the Les Republican mayor of Cannes, David Lisnard, announced he was bolting to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leading far-left candidate.
But perhaps the most jolting shift in fortunes was the arrival in Macron's camp of Marisol Touraine, Minister of Health under Macron's Socialist party predecessor François Hollande. She urged all French voters to cast their ballots for Macron. "He is the only one with the solidity to face challenges and carry a positive vision of the future," she proclaimed. Touraine was followed to the Macron camp by another leading Socialist, Elisabeth Guigou, minister of justice under Lionel Jospin, the former Socialist prime minister and current member of the Constitutional Court.
These Socialist defections only serve to underline the dire straits of the entire left side of the French political spectrum. All but one (Jean-Luc Mélenchon with barely 11%) sit mired in dismal single digits in the polls, and only Paris Mayor and Socialist Party nominee Anne Hidalgo has even managed to garner the 500 or more signatures of French mayors from 30 different départements (regions) needed to find a place on the ballot in April.
Speaking of which, with just 12 days left to accumulate these 500 signatures of parrains (godfathers), several of the leading candidates have begun to panic. "Ils s'alarment" (They're alarmed), France's leading daily Le Monde reported on Sunday. Indeed, Le Pen, with 366 signatures, appearing on the France Inter radio network Sunday morning,Fran cois confessed to finding herself in "une situation démocratique terrifiante" (a terrifying democratic situation). This should be even more terrifying for Zemmour with just 291 signatures or left-wing stalwart Christiane Taubira (Hollande's Minister of Justice) with just 86. It all begins to sound like Americans panicking over the mechanism of the electoral college.
Speaking of panic, though, it's hard to imagine what must be going on right now in the Élysée, or especially over in The Beehive ("La Ruche"), the lively Macron campaign headquarters on the rue du Rocher, the campaign slogan "Avec Vous" (With You) emblazoned around its entrance.
Though Macron has accumulated more than twice the number of parrains needed to get on the ballot, he still hasn’t managed to declare officially that he's a candidate. Now time is running short.
And with the Beijing Olympics ending Sunday night and President Biden asserting that Putin is on the cusp of invading Ukraine, potentially knocking all of Macron's weeks of mediation efforts into a cocked hat, how embarrassing would it be for both invasion and declaration to take place in the same news cycle.
After Sunday's phone call with Putin, however, Macron and the Élysée seemed quite pumped about the prospects for some diplomatic solution. If that were to happen, with Macron finding himself in a position to claim a large part of the credit, emerging truly as Europe and the West's designated "Putin-whisperer," the president might turn his attention full-on to his campaign and a surge toward a second term with some considerable confidence.
The big question, of course is whether French voters really care very much at all about these peace initiatives. Some of the latest polls suggest Ukraine and world peace are pretty far down on their list of priorities when they decide whose lever to pull in the polling booth on April 10.
Most polls show inflation and purchasing power sit far and away at the top of the list, followed by social safety-nets. Then, just 41% cite security (law & order). The role of France in the world clocks in at barely 14% while even immigration is cited only 36% of the time. Which helps explain the slim prospects of Le Pen and Zemmour in particular, for whom France-for-the-French has been a centerpiece of his campaign.
Macron has made the economy a central plank to his platform for re-election, though in the course of his first term he's run into no end of problems trying to re-jigger parts of the often creaky and antiquated economic and social system—especially the retirement system—of France. This has led to the emergence of the gilets-jaune (yellow vests) movement that protested his efforts at reforming a pension system that dates to the early post-World War II system when the economy of France was in a very different place than it is today. Still, Macron, by shelving for the moment some of his more radical reforms and simply letting a lot of these protests run out of steam, seems to have put much of this behind him.
As for security, barely 22% think it's gotten a lot worse, the rest believing it's better, hasn't change very much or none at all—another warning flag for the right and a potential boost for Macron, especially if he winds up in the second round of elections on April 24 against any of his three right-wing opponents.
And then, there's covid. It seems as though Macron's efforts to contain the spread, especially of the omicron variant, may be bearing fruit. This weekend, the ministry of health observed that the seven-day average of positive cases nationwide had fallen by 76% from its height less than a month earlier. And Olivier Veran, placed in charge of the entire anti-covid effort by Macron, particularly the pass sanitaire which was transformed two weeks ago into a pass vaccinal, said that he saw a host of restrictions, particularly with respect to widespread requirements for masking, could lifted by mid-March. Just in time for the final days of the presidential campaign. Quelle surprise.
Vive la France!