Eight days before the presidential election, Emmanuel Macron appealed. He, who built his career on the promise of breaking with traditional politics, filled his rally on Saturday (2), one of the highlights of his reelection campaign, with references to the left.
He recalled the message of François Mitterrand, an emblematic figure of socialists in the 20th century, and stole excerpts from the speech of Trotskyist candidate Philippe Poutou, a folkloric figure in national politics.
Like everything else in macronism, the president’s movement was calculated and his objectives previously demarcated. The first, more evident, is to establish a direct dialogue with leftist militants. The main leader of this current, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, third in the polls, has already indicated that he will consult his supporters if he is eliminated in the first round. In 2017, he refused to support Macron against Marine Le Pen.
The second objective is more subversive and revealing of French political reality. With his rhetorical turn, Macron is also targeting the popular classes, who form the hard core of Le Pen’s electorate. Last week was marked by the poll that placed the far-right candidate within three points of Macron in an eventual second round. A historic result, the result of a successful standardization strategy.
To escape the noise caused by the emergence of his rival Eric Zemmour, Le Pen exchanged migratory phobia for social discourse and entered a personalist and parochial campaign. She appears riding a horse and talking to the artisans of “Deep France”. Between two tirades about purchasing power, her campaign banner, she reveals details of her life as a single quinquagenarian, cat breeder and e-cigarette lover.
The daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, a Holocaust denier, who once embodied all the nation’s ills, has become the next-door neighbor and reached the second place in the ranking of the French’s favorite political personalities.
Meanwhile, its extremist program remains intact. Her promise to hold a referendum in the early days of her eventual government on a law on French identity, which would allow her to bypass the country’s high courts, is seen by jurists as a first attempt to establish the illiberal model of Hungarian Viktor Orban.
Le Pen’s victory is still a statistical improbability, but the resilience of his candidacy does away with the myth of centrist technocracy as a solution to populism. Elected from the ruins of social democracy, Macron failed in the task of building a new political system.
Verticalized and centralized, his party failed to create regional bases and deepened the chasm between local politics and national leaders. The void was filled by the anti-system candidates, who organized a society upset by the fury of the Yellow Vests and the anguish of the triple military, health and climate crisis.
The dynamics of this election show that the image of Macron as a president disconnected from the population is not a simple anti-elitist fantasy. It is the manifestation of a serious pathology of French democracy.
