As the official campaigns for the 2022 French presidential elections kicked off this week, we continue our examination of the personalities and platforms being proposed by the contenders for the Elysée Palace, and the key issues dominating the debates on the hustings.
In the second of our two-part special edition on the French Presidential Elections 2022, RFI English presents the following six of the 12 candidates, and a selection of some of the *key elements in their political manifestos, continuing in alphabetical order.
Emmanuel Macron:
Five years after exploding onto the atrophied French campaign trail in 2017, the political ingénue shook the country’s political landscape to its foundations when he was elected the eighth president of the Fifth Republic with his new-born La République en Marche party. The 44-year-old incumbent is now battling to stay ahead of the game to secure a second term in office.
To date, Macron has played a political long game, only officially announcing his candidacy in a “Letter to the French” on 3 March, giving him less than 40 days to keep the French electorate on side.
During his short campaign, however, Macron has multiple roles to play while also fighting off his detractors on a national level: French President, European "president", head of the army in times of war, and campaigning candidate.
In order to be as consensual and inclusive as possible, Macron has named his re-election project "Avec Vous", or With You.
Here are some of the key policies that Macron presented on 17 March:
- Reinvest in a "complete army model", doubling the number of army reservists
- Create 200 gendarmerie brigades
- Strengthen agricultural independence
- Develop nuclear, wind and solar power
- Raise the legal retirement age to 65
- €15 billion in tax cuts, €15 billion in savings on the operating costs of local authorities.
- Abolish the television licence fee
- Better pay for teachers, with more “freedom” for schools and increased autonomy for universities
- More support for single-parent families and "women's health”
- Fight against cyberbullying and bullying in schools
- Recruit "1,500 cyber patrol people"
- Hire 8,500 magistrates and judicial staff
- Reduce the complexity of asylum applications
- Asylum rejection will result in an "obligation to leave French territory
From the outset, Macron has maintained a significant lead over his nearest rivals, Marine Le Pen and Valérie Pécresse. However, his advantage has been eroded of late as his La République En Marche party walks the centrist tightrope, seeking to appease both the left and right wings of the French electorate.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon:
A committed far-left socialist and veteran of the May 1968 protests that stunned the De Gaulle administration and resonated across the globe, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is an old-hand firebrand making his third – and likely final – bid for the French presidency.
No stranger to controversy and willing to attack in the name of his convictions, the former Socialist minister and MEP is running under the colours of his own party La France Insoumise (France Unbowed).
In 2017, he came in 4th place but with a significantly high score, just 2 percent behind the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.
Having declared his intention to run for the Elysée Palace as far back as November 2020, Mélenchon hopes to turn much of the discontent displayed by the Yellow Vest protest movement to his political advantage.
Below are some of the main points of Mélenchon’s election manifesto:
- Convene a constituent assembly in order to create a Sixth Republic
- Proposal for a concerted break with current EU treaties
- Withdrawal from the integrated command of NATO
- Legalise and regulate the consumption, production and sale of cannabis through a state monopoly
- Enshrine in the Constitution the principle of the "green rule", according to which no more is taken from nature than it is able to replenish
- €200 billion of ecological and social investments
- Renationalise the SNCF, refuse to open up transport lines to competition, reopen small train lines
- Renationalise the motorways
- Adopt a sixth week of paid holidays and retirement at 60, and introduce 32-hour working week for arduous and night jobs
- Raise the monthly minimum wage to €1400 after tax
- Reinstate the wealth tax
- Requisition all permanently empty housing to house the homeless
- Reimburse health expenses in full
Among the disparate and fractured left of French politics, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has consistently topped the polls amongst France’s socialist and communist electorate ahead of April’s elections.
In the unlikely event that he improves on the 19.58 percent he garnered in 2017 and makes it to the run-off on 24 April, Mélenchon would still have the herculean task of uniting the fragmented left to carry him to the presidency.
Valérie Pécresse:
As the right-wing president of France’s Ile-de-France region surrounding Paris since 2015, this is Valérie Pécresse’s first run for the presidency.
Better known nationally as being at loggerheads with Paris Mayor and Socialist Party candidate Anne Hidalgo, Pécresse has smashed the glass ceiling of centre-right politics by becoming the first female presidential candidate to run for the Gaullist Les Républicains (The Republicans).
After beating the more right-of-centre contender Eric Ciotti in December, Pécresse had a rocky start to her campaign, caught between the more extreme voters tempted by Eric Zemmour and the more centrist electorate who are perfectly compatible with Macron.
Described as hard-working and methodical, here is a breakdown of some of her main policies:
- Constitutional law to introduce selected immigration with quotas according to profession and country
- Generalise the accelerated asylum procedure and place all asylum seekers in dedicated centres while their application is being examined
- Control the conditions for the family reunification of immigrants
- Abolish social aid for illegal immigrants and refocus state medical aid on emergency medicine
- Expel from the country any illegal immigrant who poses a serious threat unless he or she is prosecuted
- Link the granting of residence permits to the mastery of the French language
- Two more hours of French per week and an extra hour of maths in primary school
- A national statute for municipal police forces, with compulsory arming in municipalities with more than 5,000 inhabitants
- Establish a national day for French heroes
- Recruit 25,000 carers for hospitals and cut of red-tape within hospital administrations.
Politically, Pécresse is portrayed as a liberal right-winger on both economic and social issues. However, it has been widely remarked that her campaign has taken a significant swing further to the right of centre as she tries to woo voters gravitating towards Le Pen or Zemmour.
Having twice been a government minister and with significant political acumen to her advantage, Pécresse has polled neck-and-neck with Marine Le Pen – joint second behind Macron – and represents the greatest threat to the incumbent’s return to office if she makes it through to the second-round run-off.
- French Presidential Elections 2022 - The candidates and the policies - Part 1
- French presidential campaign hots up two weeks from first round polls
Philippe Poutou:
One could say that Philippe Poutou is the true embodiment of a socialist worker agitator. Becoming a machine tool operator with Ford in France’s south-west Gironde region in 1996, Poutou quickly became one of the trade union leaders fighting for workers’ rights and jobs at the factory.
After moving through various far-left movements from the Lutte Ouvrière (Workers' Struggle) to the Revolutionary Communist League, Poutou is standing for the French presidency for a third time, representing the NPA (New Anti-Capitalist Party).
Although in 2012 Poutou claimed "this is my first candidacy, and it will be my last!" he has proven that he’s up for a good fight and made his mark during the 2017 presidential debates by openly mocking the other candidates.
This is a summary of what’s on Poutou’s agenda:
- Four-day working week – 32 hours of work without loss of pay – and a sixth week of paid holidays
- Full pension at 60 years of age, and 55 years of age for arduous work
- Free access to housing, transport, food, heating, health care, education.
- End nuclear power in 10 years, develop renewable energies and stop polluting industries
- Repeal the "security laws" and the state of emergency
- Disarm the police, including units in contact with the population
- Freedom of movement and installation, regularisation of all undocumented migrants
- Repeal of all "racist and Islamophobic laws
- Right to vote for foreigners residing in France
- Break with the European treaties
- End of Françafrique, immediate withdrawal of military troops
- Dismantling the military-industrial complex and stopping French arms exports
As Poutou struggled to collect the requisite 500 municipal signatures of support needed to stand for the presidency this year, his candidature is of little importance to France’s political mainstream.
His engagement, however quixotic, is commendable as he refuses to be silenced, underlining his democratic right to engage with the “big players” and berating the French media for treating him like “de la merde”, or shit.
Fabien Roussel:
Having stayed away from the last two presidential elections in favour of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Communist Party is back in 2022, with Fabien Roussel as their poster boy promising “happy days” will return.
Named after the communist resistance fighter Colonel Fabien, Roussel was born into communist activism and maintains: "I'm angry. I want to carry that anger I feel and give it a political perspective".
A member of parliament since 2017, Roussel was previously a journalist with the communist daily L'Humanité and has been commanding quite a flamboyant campaign.
Here are some of the main elements of his 2022 agenda:
- General increase in wages, minimum wage to €1,500 net
- No pension below €1,200 net and retirement at 60
- Reduce working time to 32-hour week
- Student income of a minimum of €850 per month
- Nuclear and renewable energy mix with nationalisation of EDF and Engie energy utilities
- Construct 200,000 social housing units/year and energy renovation of 700,000 units/year.
- Right to abortion in the Constitution as a fundamental right
- Tripling of the wealth tax
- Introduce proportional representation
- Open negotiations to break with the neo-liberal European treaties and propose a €900 billion pact for the climate and social emergency.
- Dignified reception of migrants and respect for the right to asylum through coordination on a European scale
- Challenge the free trade treaties, exit NATO and sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (CTBT)
Roussel has frightened a part of the radical left with his new generation of communism but remains to be seen whether this “third way” will manage to make any ripples.
The last communist presidential candidate – Marie-Georges Buffet – scored only a meagre 1.93 percent in the first round in 2007.
Eric Zemmour:
And last, but not least on RFI English’s profile and platforms of France’s presidential hopefuls in 2022 is Eric Zemmour.
A prolific author, journalist and dauntless self-publicist, Zemmour has been ubiquitous in the French media well before the much-anticipated declaration of his first bid for the Elysée Palace.
At best provocative, at worst bigoted and racist, Zemmour has stolen a lot of the limelight from his competitors. Yet despite his extreme right anti-establishment rhetoric, the polls suggest that the fervour that follows him will not be transformed in his favour at the ballot box.
He has created his own party Reconquête, Reconquest, but remains outside the main political circles.
Since his declaration of candidacy – in a grandiloquent and much-decried video in which he staged himself in the posture of General De Gaulle – Zemmour has maintained that his presidential project is to make the French "feel at home again". Ring any bells?
Here are some of Zemmour's proposals for the 2022 elections:
- Introduce minimum sentences for each crime and offence, and reinstate the real-life sentence
- Deprive multi-recidivist criminals and delinquents with dual nationality of their French nationality, then deport them
- Build 10,000 more prison places, expel imprisoned foreign offenders and systematically deport all foreigners who may pose a threat
- Prohibit the regularisation of any foreigner who has entered the country illegally and send back illegal foreigners present on French soil
- Limit the right to asylum to a handful of individuals per year and make it compulsory to file asylum applications abroad and end family reunification for immigrants
- Abolish the right to land, social assistance and state medical aid for non-European foreigners
- Ban the wearing of the Islamic veil in public places, the construction of minarets and large mosques
- Give French precedence to any new national law over existing European law
- Put an end to Turkey's EU accession process
- Reduce production taxes by €30 billion and oblige public procurement to give preference to French products
Convicted twice for provoking racial hatred, Zemmour maintains he is running to save a France that is "in the process of disappearing”, with the country’s future doomed to Islamification.
He has however stolen much of Marine Le Pen’s thunder in the race for the presidency and has been a thorn in the side for all the established candidates to the right of France’s political spectrum.
Yet in recent weeks, he has also been pinned down for his pro-Russian sympathies and previous remarks favourable to Vladimir Putin which, for now, have put a spanner in his campaign’s machinery.
*Key elements: Due to the varying length of the agendas being presented by the presidential candidates, the elements presented in this article refer to the general points of the contenders' manifestos.
Coverage over the coming weeks of campaigning and the elections themselves will feature regularly on RFI English here.
