French President Emmanuel Macron announced his candidacy for the April elections on Thursday. If he wins — and polls show him ahead — he will be the first leader in two decades to be reelected in the country.
There has been much speculation about the French president’s candidacy. The formalization of his participation in the elections was made through a letter to the French, released to local media outlets, and comes amid successive attempts by Macron to assume a leading role in diplomacy around the war in Ukraine.
Macron enters the electoral race about a month before the first round of elections, scheduled for April 10. Opinion polls project him as the favorite to win the race, amid a fragmented left and the rise of the ultra-right.
Poll aggregator on the Politico platform shows the current president with 25% of voting intentions. Then comes Marine Le Pen, from Réunion Nacional. And in third is the polemicist Eric Zemmour, who disputes the conservative base with Le Pen, with 14%.
“I am a candidate to create, alongside you, in the face of the challenges of the century, a unique French and European response”, says Macron in an excerpt from the letter to the French.
Elsewhere, he says he won’t be able to build the campaign as he would like “because of the context”, probably referring to the war in Eastern Europe and the Covid-19 pandemic, which cools down after the increase in cases driven by the omicron variant.
Macron arrived at the Élysée Palace, the seat of the French government, in 2017. He then became the youngest president ever elected in the country, at the age of 39. Before that, he served as Minister of Economy for his predecessor, the socialist François Hollande.
On the part of the opposition, the announcement of the French candidate’s candidacy was met with previous criticism that his role in diplomacy cannot obliterate the debate on domestic matters dear to the population. The rightist Valérie Pécresse, of the Republicans —legend of former president Nicolas Sarkozy—was one of those who raised the issue.
“The seriousness of the international situation calls for responsibility and an upstanding opposition, but the French cannot be deprived of a true democratic debate, because it is France’s destiny and the future of our children that are at stake,” he said in a televised speech. , according to the newspaper Le Monde. Pécresse appears fourth in the polls, with around 13%.
Le Pen took advantage of his participation in a TV show, shortly after the confirmation of the re-election bid, to argue that Macron was to blame for all the recent French crises. He was referring to the yellow vest revolt, the demonstrations against a proposed pension reform, and also the health crisis. “He is responsible for the anguish, for the loss of freedom suffered by the French.”
Eric Zemmour, in turn, a candidate known for an anti-immigration agenda – and convicted of incitement to hatred – rebutted the passage in which Macron proposes investing in the education system to “make teachers freer and better paid”. “Macron hates our identity. We value it and we will pass it on to our children,” the polemicist, nicknamed the French Trump, wrote on Twitter.
Macron faced different turmoil as the leader of one of the biggest European economies. Already in 2018, he found himself cornered in protests by the so-called “yellow vests”, which emerged that year against a new fuel tax and unfolded into broader demands that question the high cost of living in France.
At least 2,500 protesters and 1,800 police were injured, and the government was criticized for its crackdown on the protests. The vest, mandatory in all vehicles as a safety item, is related to the working class and truck drivers.
A little over a year later, Covid came. Macron faced criticism and protests in the streets against measures such as the requirement for the vaccination pass. He even said, in controversial speech, that he wanted to “annoy the unvaccinated” when he reintroduced restrictions in the face of increasing cases.
France has more than 22.9 million cases of Covid since the beginning of the pandemic and more than 138,000 deaths from the disease. About 78% of the population has a complete first vaccination schedule, and 53% have already received a booster dose, according to data from the Our World in Data platform. The moving average of cases has decreased consecutively since the last week of January.
Finally, still in the midst of the spread of the coronavirus, the war began in Ukraine, militarily invaded by Russia. Without Prime Minister Angela Merkel, an important interlocutor of Vladimir Putin, in charge of Germany, it was up to the French president to try to raise diplomatic prominence in the conflict.
There have been 11 bilateral talks with Putin so far, according to a count by the Reuters news agency. The most recent was this Thursday, before the announcement of the candidacy. According to a source at the Élysée Palace who did not want to be named, Macron left the conversation certain that the worst of the war was yet to come.
