President Emmanuel Macron was run close by his nationalist rival Marine Le Pen in the first round of the French election on Sunday. The runoff vote on April 24 will reprise their 2017 contest, with serious consequences for Europe.
The two candidates represent very different visions, but they collectively represent a challenge from France’s old establishment parties of the right and left, which took a shellacking on Sunday.
In a Twitter Spaces conversation, Bloomberg Opinion’s Paris-based columnist Lionel Laurent and London-based Therese Raphael unpacked the first round — and teed up the second — with Bobby Ghosh. This is an edited transcript.
Ghosh: In the first round of voting, turnout was low and the results were a little closer for comfort than many people would have expected.
Laurent: That's right. To set the scene a bit, we have a two-round election in France: for the presidency and, straight after, for Parliament. This sets the course for the next five years. Often, whoever wins the presidency also wins a majority in Parliament. That’s what happened to Macron in 2017.
This time around, it's a lot less certain. He led in this first round with a slightly better score than in 2017. He’s going to face Marine le Pen in the runoff once again, just as in 2017. But the question is whether he can buck the trend where presidents have not won re-election. The last time a president was re-elected was in 2002.
There had been an expectation that he would walk it, but that faded in recent weeks. Now, heading toward a second round, it seems a lot tighter, with opinion polls putting his lead at around 5%, which is a much lower margin than in 2017.
The likelihood is still that he will win. But there is a non-negligible possibility that he might not, or that the margin will be very small, which raises questions down the line about political stability and political risk, if that translates into parliamentary coalitions and gridlocks.
So the first round delivered an expected result, but with a lot of uncertainty around the runoff.
Ghosh: What is Le Pen’s path to victory? What does she have to do to get past Macron in the runoff?
Laurent: Le Pen might be disappointed with the score she got in the first round: It’s hard to come in second with a four- or five-point lag and then regain momentum. But it is still remarkable, given her ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin. And in third place, right behind her, there’s another anti-establishment candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon, who is on the far left.
She now has to look below her on the list to find the votes she needs. Of course, there are the natural votes on the far right that will go her way. But I think she will do her best to court those who voted for Melenchon, as strange as that seems. She will present her program as being anti-elite, for the blue-collar voter who is fed up with Macron's program.
Remember that Le Pen has changed her policies a great deal. She no longer says explicitly that she wants France to leave the European Union or the euro. She’s positioned herself in this campaign as the candidate focused on purchasing power. She's offering budget giveaways and spending proposals far more than anything Macron has promised.
A combination of protectionism and anti-elite rhetoric: That's going to be her path. Bizarrely, for someone who has taken such extreme positions in the past, polls show she has a better image than Macron on key questions around the economy and household purchasing power.
Ghosh: And what is Macron's path to victory?
Laurent: He too will have some natural votes from the left and center coming his way. But what makes it hard for him is that the establishment parties that would normally have been the sources of those votes have been decimated.
So already in his speeches, he’s taking a more protective economic stance. He's talking up his environmental policies to attract green voters. He's talking up the support for people to get back into work. He’s emphasizing his own budget giveaways.
And finally — and this is going to make the campaign quite vicious over the next two weeks — he has to paint Le Pen as an extremist from the far right, as a Putin sympathizer. Obviously he has to be careful, because this is someone who attracted 23% of the vote and has other sympathizers below. He can't spend two weeks accusing her voters as being racist. But he has to remind voters who are tempted to spoil their ballots, or to vote for an anti-Macron candidate, that this is not your normal election choice, where you turn out the incumbent for somebody new.
Ghosh: What do the first-round results and the runoff lineup look like for the rest of Europe?
Raphael: There are probably two reactions: relief and a bit of alarm. Relief, because Macron did better than some expected in the first round. Le Pen, even though she's moderated some of her views, has more in common with the autocratic leaders of Hungary and Poland than with the traditional Franco-German axis in the heart of Europe.
But there is also a sense that Macron’s grand vision of Europe has taken a hit. He defined France's mission as restoring Europe as a great, singular civilization, with a leadership role for France. He wanted a security doctrine that built Europe's ability to balance other powers and gain strategic autonomy.
This is quite important in the context of the current war in Ukraine. We've seen that vision challenged by the war, and much of it has crumbled. His courting of Putin initially may have seemed wise, but over the course of the buildup to the war, it looked increasingly dubious. Putin was never going to listen to him.
From a European point of view, Macon is a far better option than Le Pen, but there has to be some concern about France’s place in Europe in light of a possible backlash against Macron. It may stem from domestic considerations — the cost of living, frustration with Covid — and not a rebuke of Macron’s European strategy, but nonetheless the election will have an impact on France’s position in Europe and its ability to influence European policy.
Ghosh: Does foreign policy move the needle in French elections?
Laurent: Traditionally, no. Macron’s going to have to make it move the needle somehow, because so much of his legacy is about Europe and French influence. During the pandemic, he was able, along with Germany, to devise a $1 trillion rebuilding plan: He needs to make the link between the spending that's happening in France with more European integration.
He’s going to try to paint Le Pen as likely to cause five years of gridlock and chaos in Europe and a backward step for France. She may have taken “Frexit” off the menu, but she does promote favoritism for French goods, more protectionism, less free markets. She has an idea of putting the nation-state above Brussels, which portends five years of infighting there. She keeps threatening to bring money back from Brussels, a very Brexit-type slogan.
In terms of relations with Russia and NATO, she has said in the past that she would pursue the Gaullist line and leave NATO's integrated command. And she has criticized sanctions against Russia. She would take French policy in a very different direction from Macron.
So even if foreign policy doesn’t usually move the needle, I think European officials and diplomats are watching very nervously, and Macron's going to have to make it count somehow if he wants to distance himself from Le Pen over the next two weeks.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Bobby Ghosh is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering foreign affairs. A former editor in chief of the Hindustan Times, he was managing editor of Quartz and Time magazine’s international editor.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
