France Election Playbook: Macron wins — Le Pen is here to stay — France divided
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Loading... - Claire James
- 25 Apr 2022
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Bonjour, and good afternoon. It’s Monday, April 25. Around 5.5 million more votes were cast yesterday for Emmanuel Macron than for Marine Le Pen, putting the incumbent president at the helm of France for five more years. For percentage traditionalists, he won by 58.54 percent to 41.46.
Keeping up with the commentariat: Hours after the result came in and a great many things have already been said: Macron crushed Le Pen; this was a victory for the far-right candidate who keeps gaining ground; the result gives Macron a clear mandate; he is the lowest-supported president of the Fifth Republic; Macron managed the near-impossible feat of getting reelected. All of that is pretty much true.
Glass half full: The president got through a rocky mandate and a disastrous 2018 when the Benalla affair and the Yellow Jackets movement made him deeply unpopular. But he managed to slowly get out of the slump, aided in part by his leadership during the COVID-19 crisis.
This election showed that he solidified his core voter base in the first round, where he got a better score than in 2017. He also managed to attract a large enough number of anti-Le Pen voters in the second round. This makes him one of the few presidents who succeeded to get another mandate, the last one being Jacques Chirac who won against none other than Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002.
Glass half empty: When he was elected in 2017, Macron promised to do everything to “eradicate the extremes.” In 2022, he failed to do that. Compared to the 2017 second round, Macron lost almost 2 million votes, while Le Pen gained 2.7 million. Second-round turnout dropped to 71.99 percent, which may sound like a lot to British or American readers, but is the lowest participation rate for a French presidential runoff since 1969, which featured two center-right politicians.
Macron was only backed by 38.52 percent of the entire electorate, also the worst score using that metric since 1969. And a significant number of his voters wanted first and foremost to keep Le Pen from winning.
Muted discourse: While some may have found the Ibizaesque DJ set that played before his speech a tad much given the circumstances of his victory, the winning address from Macron in front of the Eiffel Tower was anti-climatic, as even his own campaign noted. “A speech? What speech?” a government adviser joked to Playbook Paris after it was over.
During the 10-minute talk, Macron noted that he had a certain gravitas that he “owed to the sense of duty and the bond to the Republic” from people who voted for him in order to block Le Pen. He also mentioned people who did not vote at all, saying that “their silence meant a refusal to choose to which we have to answer.”
Method Man: With all that, Macron did not really say where he would take the country in the next five years, although he did indicate that he would change his “method” of governing. “This new era won’t be the continuity of the five-year mandate that is ending, but the collective invention of a reestablished method for five better years at the service of our country and our youth,” he said.
LE PEN IS HERE TO STAY: A couple of hours earlier and a few kilometers from the Eiffel Tower, in the swanky event space booked by Le Pen’s campaign in the west of Paris, an apparently prescient waiter started to put away Champagne bottles with the label “Marine Présidente” a few minutes before 8 p.m, my colleague Juliette Droz reported.
The champion of the far-right camp, defeated for the third time in a row and the second time by Macron, called her better score a “resounding victory.” While she had signalled during her campaign that it might have been her last shot, she did not close the door on a potential fourth run. “More than ever, I’ll carry on my commitment to France and the French,” she said during her six-minute speech. “Marine Le Pen is 53. We’re not in favor of retirement at age 53, especially not when it comes to France,” Philippe Olivier, a close adviser to Le Pen as well as her brother-in-law, told reporters.
A bit of procrastination: Before 2027, however, will come the legislative elections, and Le Pen will hope to do much better than 2017, when her National Front party got only 8 MPs. The party is now filling up the last slots for the 577 constituencies that will be up for grabs in June. The legislative elections are another beast, much harder to predict and much more prone to party alliances. I’ll get into it tomorrow, for what will be the last France Election Playbook. While our little epistolary relationship is ending, you really ought to sign up to our morning Playbooks, namely Brussels Playbook, London Playbook, and now that you’re an expert on French politics, Playbook Paris.
BY THE NUMBERS
A FRANCE DIVIDED: There is much talk today about the division of the French people, and voting day polling does show an increasing polarization between those who voted for Macron and those who voted Le Pen, depending on different socio-economic and demographic categories.
