With Britain swept up in its own election, it easy to miss the equally momentous one taking place across the Channel.
After his party was mauled in the Euro elections, President Macron gambled, hoping that by calling an election he would catch both the Right and Left off guard: to an aide, he called it, self-congratulatingly, “throwing a live grenade among the pretenders”. But the opposite has happened: Le Pen’s party, the National Rally, which he so often chose as his favourite, unelectable opponent, has now seized the momentum, as was on display in the important debate yesterday.
Pitted against Emmanuel Macron’s Wunderkind PM Gabriel Attal, and the pugnacious outgoing Left-wing France Unbowed MP Manuel Bompard, the 28-year-old National Rally president, Jordan Bardella – fluent and self-assured – stood his ground easily.
In his sights – increasingly realistically if you look at recent polls – is the PM job, leading a “cohabitation” government led by Bardella representing a Rally majority in the National Assembly, while Emmanuel Macron, bunkering down at the Elysée Palace, would be officially reduced to his constitutional presidential prerogatives: foreign and defence policy.
This is no longer fanciful. Polls are now more reliable – it took time to take into account the names and local situations of 4011 actual candidates in 577 constituencies, published only six days ago. Most now give the Rally (with its dissident Républicains allies) a 36 to 38 per cent share of the vote, while the Left-wing alliance hovers around 30 per cent and the Macronistes lag just below 20 per cent.
This, the grand old pollster Jérôme Jaffré said today, reaches the tilting point where the majority system favours the larger bloc, just as when General de Gaulle or François Mitterrand called snap elections that gave them massive majorities each.
It’s a bleak prospect for the mercurial, not-so-young president who, seven years ago, took to calling himself “Jupiter”, and notoriously treated his Cabinet ministers like subordinates and his MPs like employees. He would find himself nearly powerless over a banlieues-born second-tier business school dropout whom he, and his supercilious Elysée SpAds, dismissed for months as a “lightweight”. They called Bardella the “selfie candidate”, because he never refuses one when mobbed at each of his walkabouts; noting that his narrow smart suits copied, in less expensive makes, Macron’s own. (In recent weeks, Bardella has taken to less fashionable three-piece ones, more in the Jacques Chirac style).
Yet, yesterday, Bardella sounded an increasingly serious contender, even when faced with Gabriel Attal’s far more precise facts and figures. Attal (and Bompard) both accused him of walking back from most of the Rally’s manifesto policies – on reversing Macron’s pensions reform, on taxes, on forbidding civil service jobs to bi-nationals – sometimes “so fast, he blurred”. But to swing voters in the audience, this was more a feature than a bug: the capacity of the new and improved Rally to be realistic, faced with economic reality.
This is the ‘GiorgiaMelonisation’ of Bardella: like an increasing number of populist leaders in Europe, he has been watching Italy’s PM admiringly – and enviously. Far from Marine Le Pen’s equivocations about Ukraine, Bardella talks of “Russian aggression” and the need to help fight it. He has dropped an earlier RN promise that France would leave Nato’s integrated command, disappointing that fraction of the Rally that, like the old French Right, is obsessively anti-American.
What remains of the economic platform in the National Rally manifesto seems designed to reassure bourgeois voters still hesitating to make the decisive step and vote for the Rally. The wealth tax on property would be abolished, to be replaced, not by a financial wealth tax, but by taxation of financial transactions, a measure that can easily be tweaked to minimise hurt, and that does not stigmatise “the rich” (a very French passion; with both the Catholic and Marxist traditions so strong in our history, defiance against wealth is baked into the national psyche) as compulsory wealth declarations do.
Bardella appeals to the young with a higher emphasis on a non-punitive Green transition, and to the rest of the country with his championing of nuclear energy, as both decarbonated and a creation of French science at its national best. The young, too, appreciate his plan to cancel income tax for anyone under 30, “to encourage the most productive young people to stay in France”. What he is intent on projecting, mainly, is “Fear not! We’re not the irresponsible thugs the people you already hate say we are”.
Sunday’s first round, especially the proportion of voters who decide to cast their vote directly for the Rally (instead of waiting for a dispiriting reduced choice in next Sunday’s second round) will tell Macron whether he still has a slim hope to lead the country, or will be sentenced to three years as an impotent lame duck in the prettiest prison in France, the gilded and manicured Elysée Palace, with regular sorties in international circles.
One has to ask: can he stand this, or will he once again throw his toys out in a huff and resign, calling upon us yet another election, in which he cannot run? Faced with hung parliament or a Le Pen-led majority, this is highly plausible.
He even might think, if he resigns, that five years from now – when he probably can stand again in constitutional law – he will appear a better choice than today. He can, after all, hardly look worse.
The next week or so will prove critical for our nations on both sides of the Channel.