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! Moreover, 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. And of course, subscribe here to my SubStack page….don't miss a single issue!
Now, as you will see by the dateline, I am back in Paris through the second round of les presidentielles and their aftermath!
PARIS—One week until France’s voters will express themselves—at least those who care to rouse themselves from an April lethargy and trundle down to their local polling place, identify themselves, then choose a ballot bearing the name of one candidate (they have 12 choices), place it in an envelope, then slip that into the ballot box.
The silence for many will be a welcome respite from the cacophony that has marked the last four months or so of a campaign that has nevertheless not been without its, well, occasional distractions.
On the Ultimate Weekend of the campaign, as France’s all-news channel BFM puts it, candidates are racing back and forth across the Hexagon (the nickname of France deriving from the nation’s look on an outline map). The Green party’s Yannick Jadot is hitting Compiegne, the northern village where in a rail carriage in its forest the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender ending World War I and Germany accepted France’s surrender at the start of World War II in the same rail car. On Saturday, Jadot was leading a “march against hunting,” which he calls cruelty in the extreme, but is unlikely to resonate very strongly among the French who love to go hunting. On the other end of the political spectrum, right-wing firebrand Éric Zemmour and his own, hastily constructed Reconquête! party (yes, with an exclamation point) will be heading south to Aix-en-Provence. And Valérie Pécresse, current governor of the Paris region will be rallying just outside Paris on Sunday not far from which President Emmanuel Macron, seeking a second term, is assembling his faithful on Saturday,
Still, the one president who’s really been sucking much of the oxygen out of the campaign holds sway in Kiev, 1,494 miles (if you’re driving), 1,257 miles (if you’re flying, though no airlines are) from Paris. The spirit of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has hovered over the entire race from the time Vladimir Putin began assembling Russia’s troops along the Ukraine frontier.
So with this kind of background noise and a host of uninspiring candidates, most of them retreads from elections past, even in what should be some exciting closing days it’s not hard to see how so few may really get themselves roused to turn out and vote.
So it’s perhaps most instructive to look at a most frightening, for Macron, poll by BFM of those expressing a real intention to vote.
The vote certainly has tightened dramatically, Macron dropping below 30%, right-wing perennial challenger Marine Le Pen closing with 22% and in a surprising third place the left-wing firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon at 15%, the cornerstone of whose platform is scrapping the entire Fifth Republic established by Charles de Gaulle in 1958 and moving to a Sixth Republic where everyone would be guaranteed a minimum monthly income.
In the second round, too, there is fear among the Macronistas. Sunday morning, the Journal du Dimanche, France’s leading Sunday newspaper, which leads their front page with a four-page package by their Macron correspondent, Sarah Paillou, headlines: “The plagues which menace Macron” found the incumbent falling 5% and Le Pen rising 5% (a 10 percentage point swing) since the last poll two weeks ago.
Every other first-round challenger is buried in the single digits including the one-time newly-minted darling of the right, Zemmour, who’s managed to eat his electorate down from nearly 20% when I first ran across him four months ago to 13% a month later, now languishing in the environs of 9%.
But two candidates, both women, seem poised to take their historically powerhouse political parties—long the two leading forces of the Fifth Republic— down with them. Valérie Pecresse, the proud standard-bearer of Les Republicains, heir to the Gaullist parties that sent five previous presidents to the Élysée palace, most recently Nicolas Sarkozy, is now languishing in fifth place with just 8%. And Anne Hidalgo, the sitting mayor of Paris and the proud candidate of the Socialist Party which has held the presidency of France for 19 years with François Mitterrand and Macron’s predecessor François Hollande, barely registers at an utterly embarrassing 1.5%. One veteran Le Monde editorial writer lamented to me at lunch on Friday there was a very real chance the Socialists might not even win a single seat in the National Assembly elections in June for the first time since its creation not long after the collapse of the Paris Commune in 1871.
All of the leading candidates, as it turns out, and many of the minor party candidates hoping for a break-out sprint to the wire, happen to be hobbled by a totally French media law that mandates that for every one minute one candidate gets on nationwide, each other candidate must get precisely (down to the second) same amount of time in the same time period. So if BFM or any of the major over-the-air networks were to broadcast the hour-long speech at the four-hour rally of Macron’s campaign Saturday afternoon, they’d have to do the same for Valérie Pecresse and her Sunday afternoon rally. Equally every other candidate down to the Trotskyite candidate Nathalie Arthaud with 0.5% would be gifted the same.
“Liberté, égalité, fraternité” can sometimes come back and bite you where it hurts.
So the only folks who could hear Macron strut his stuff Saturday at the La Defense Arena, standing on a pure white hexagonal stage surrounded by 35,000 crazed fans, were those who signed on to the candidates’ social media or a few newspapers declaiming, “A few hours from here they are bombing democracy…. Democracy is a combat. Some would take us into into the past. [But] France always has something to tell the world.”
Meanwhile, Pécresse was trying desperately to gin up a full house for her Sunday event. As I’d begun writing this after lunch on Saturday, our landline phone rang. It was Valérie, excusing the intrusion. She then launched into a two-minute summary of the platform she’d unveiled three days before and urged me, please come to see me on Sunday. The platform was utterly unremarkable and just 10 days before the vote. “Why,” a French journalist asked, kicking off the question period that followed, “did it take you until so late in the campaign to reveal this.” She hesitated, then added, “because we wanted to perfect it.”
Vive la France.
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Remember, though, there are two other elections in Europe, a week before the first round of the French elections. On Sunday (April 3), Serbia and Hungary go to the polls to elect their prime ministers—the two European nations the closest to Vladimir Putin, yet the former lusting after membership in the European Union, the latter already a member. The only, frightening unknown is the persistently huge undecided vote even days before the balloting.
On Monday, I’ll be writing about Hungary for NBC News/Think. On Wednesday, I’ll be raising the curtain on the future of France for CNN Opinion.
And next weekend, we’ll be counting the votes right here in Paris. Don’t miss a beat!