My family and I are nearing the end of a gap year in France. One highlight of this adventure was watching the French presidential election in April in which Emanual Macron beat Marine Le Pen by a 17-point margin. As an American, it was refreshing to see how a democracy runs a presidential election without spending billions of dollars.
By law, major presidential candidates in France may not spend more than 22.5 million Euros (about $25 million) on their campaigns. We in the United States have no such limits.
Joe Biden spent $1.6 billion to win the 2020 presidential election. That is 70 times more than Macron spent on his bid, yet the U.S. population is just five times larger than France’s. There is no end in sight to the amount of money in American politics. Biden spent three times more than Hilary Clinton did in 2016. One could argue that the high stakes in the 2020 election justified big spending, but that argument applies equally to France in 2022 when there is a war raging on two NATO borders to its east. The only reason France spends orders of magnitude less than the United States in its elections is because the French have limits.
