He wanted it to be his Super Bowl moment.
Last Saturday, only a week before the first round of the French presidential elections, Emmanuel Macron held his first public rally in front of 30,000 flag-waving sympathisers in Europe’s biggest sports venue, the Défence Arena, just west of Paris. For three hours, the President-Candidate galvanized his audience with the success stories of his first five years in power and promised much more good news if re-elected. The first round of voting takes place on Sunday.
The rally was atmospheric: all joyous noise and bonhomie. At one point in his marathon speech, Emmanuel Macron stopped to blow a kiss to his wife Brigitte, acknowledging all he has owed her since they first met, when he was a bright pupil, and she was his French teacher. The crowd gave the misty-eyed Brigitte the biggest cheer of the afternoon - but there was political success to cheer too.
Earlier this month, an independent study showed that since 2017 unemployment in France has decreased to reach 7.4%; even Le Monde newspaper, often critical of Macron, branded it “spectacular”. Job numbers are the best they have ever been since 1975. The irony, perhaps, is that unemployment has now disappeared from the hotlist of election topics - and nobody seems to be crediting the President for it. But that won’t be the only thing troubling Macron in the final days before the first round of voting.
It was easy, earlier in the campaign, to think Macron was a sure winner. At some point, some algorithm gave his re-election a 98% chance, and among the 11 other candidates, only four can be considered as serious challengers to Macron: the mainstream Right candidate Valérie Pécresse and current president of the Greater Paris region, the hard-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Extreme-Right polemicist turned candidate and self-proclaimed “saviour of France” Eric Zemmour and Far-Right Marine, of the Le Pen dynasty. Of those, only Le Pen has been constantly rising and rising in the polls.
But there is a rising concern in France, especially within presidential ranks, that Le Pen could not only find herself through to the second round of the elections, just like in 2017, but that she is in a better position than last time to get closer to winning the presidency. Macron himself warned sympathisers against complacency. When the 44-year-old candidate mentioned the Far Right, the public booed, but was quick to retort. “Don’t boo them, fight their ideas!”
Far from splitting the far-right vote, by sheer contrast, Zemmour has helped Le Pen look more serious, acceptable, competent, almost statesman-like; his admiration for Putin has even eclipsed Le Pen’s adoration of the Kremlin Tsar. Indeed, thanks in part to Zemmour, Marine Le Pen has achieved her political normalisation exactly twenty years after her father Jean-Marie shocked France by going through to the second round of the elections opposite Jacques Chirac.
At the time, the Left massively voted for Chirac, and he was re-elected with 80% of the votes. But today, Left and Far-Left voters are of a different brew, ready, almost happy to play with fire. In a recent poll, 41% of Jean-Luc Mélenchon supporters said that they refused to choose between Le Pen and Macron while 31% said they would vote for her, hoping perhaps that this would mean their eventually gaining power in 2027.
Le Pen has also deftly changed her way of campaigning since 2017. She has left behind the image of the vituperating opposition head honcho, leaving others to try and embody it. Zemmour, Pécresse and Mélenchon have thus tried, with various degrees of success, to drum up French resentment against the Parisian elite and President Macron - all the while, Le Pen has played the “togetherness” card, the unity after a two-year pandemic, rising inflation, and a month of brutal conflict in Ukraine.
“She has gone soft and has led a kind of therapeutic campaign”, says French political scientist Raphaël Llorca, one that focuses on “soothing people’s fears and anxieties.” Le Pen has promised rural France to cut taxes on motor fuel and ease the cost of living, astutely leaving ranting about immigration to Zemmour.
Still, while her tone has changed, a careful look at her manifesto will do nothing to soothe anxieties. Among her first measures as President would be a referendum to change the Constitution in order to make it far more difficult for immigrants and their children to settle in France and obtain French nationality even if born in France, creating in effect and by law two classes of citizens.
Macron only declared he would run again in March - by leaving it late, he probably made a mistake. However, the presidency of the European Union (it rotates between member states every six months, and France is currently in charge), and the war in Ukraine made it very difficult for him to declare any earlier. His team and sympathisers thought, wrongly and arrogantly perhaps, that his aura and overall good management of the pandemic and of the energy crisis (France has capped energy prices rise to 4% by law) would carry him easily through to the finishing line. Too straightforward perhaps, Macron has also been a little abrupt about his desire to push reforms further, such as the reform of pensions - not exactly a popular message to convey to traditionally reform-phobic French people. He has promised to raise the pension age from 62 years to 65 - which has proved a gift to the hard-left Mélenchon who is now campaigning as the only tactical vote for the divided Left. He snapped back: “Retirement at 65 with Macron, 60 with me.”
Macron has another one big problem: the young ambitious President may be admired but he is not loved. The dislike goes even deeper. There is an aversion, if not irrational hatred, of Macron in certain parts of France’s electorate, usually found at both extremes but also on the mainstream Left and Right. Centrist Macron is a constant irritant in a country who thrives on confrontation and which prefers ideological certainty to a pragmatic social democrat who picks his ideas both on the Left and on the Right. He is also a symbol of something many French regard with both suspicion and dread: the face of the highly educated and technology savvy urbanite, a demographic which at least half of France, if not more, dislike and cannot relate to. In the last five years, especially during the Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) movement, Macron catalysed French anger. The endemic struggle of people living on the periphery of towns or in rural areas, with rising bills, stagnating salaries, and the menace of debt, has not gone away and could flare up again.
If Macron faces Le Pen in the final round runoff on 24 April, the result is predicted to be much closer than when he won five years ago with 66%, with one poll this week putting Macron at 51.5% to Le Pen’s 48.5%. In an interview just after Christmas, Emmanuel Macron declared that “he had learnt to better love the French”. What about them? Will they like him just enough to give him a second mandate?
