Why Macron may have lost
And why it is good for France, Europe and the wider world.
Is Macron a goner ? May look like it. Key to winning the second round of the French presidential election is '“vote reserve’” i.e. voters who will likely transfer their vote to a final candidate from their initial choice.
The projection above is flawed. Marine Lepen can count on Eric Zemmour (7%) and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan’s voters (2%), and most likely on Jean Lassale’s (3,3%) even if he did not give any recommendation. That is +/- 12% of the electorate. Notwithstanding +/-30% of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s (22%), the left-wing populist. Their motto is #ToutSaufMacron - anyone but Macron. They voted for Mélenchon with a view to disqualify Macron at the first round. They will vote for Marine Lepen to get rid of Macron at the second.
Further reading : Voter suppression through vaccination
Despite the traditional call to contain the “far-right” - now inoperative - Emmanuel Macron has little to show for himself. Macron electorate is old. Boomers already retired or soon-to-do-so, aware that the best insurance to maintain their pensions is the later retirement of the wider majority at work. Inter-generational solidarity, they said? Macron leads only among voter older than 60. Even if elder citizens exhibit a higher participation, it may just not cut it.
Critical is the age class 35 to 60. This is where the bulk of the working and middle-class voters resides. The ones that are not benefiting from globalization. The ones, a majority, who have seen a sizeable decrease in their standards of living and have kids to raise. The ones that are suffocated by France’s insane fiscal pressure. The ones that cannot afford to buy a new car and who will be barred from driving into cities, as a result from France’s insane environmental policies, tantamount to class segregation. These are the 63 % that do not want Macron to be re-elected. At any cost. That’s the “yellow vests” once supported by 70% the population.
Further reading: Homeland stupidity
Macron’s election in 2017 was a coup. A legal and institutional coup orchestrated by the “elites”, high-ranking civil servants, the judicial system and the medias, owned by oligarchs. Not a conspiracy theory. Never in French history was a investigation conducted as diligently as the one targeting then center-right candidate Francois Fillon, who otherwise would have won.
A Senate investigation unraveled a month ago “The McKinseygate”, a corruption scandal involving large consulting firms - McKinsey, Accenture, Cap Gemini, Roland Berger, BCG etc. - dubiously contracted for more than € 1 bn in 2021 only. It has resulted - under public opinion pressure - in a farce of a tax fraud investigation, whereas McKinsey was instrumental to founding Macron’s party En Marche! and a battaillon of its consultants worked for its 2017 campaign… That much for judicial neutrality and independence.
The panic is real. In Paris, in Brussels, in Berlin, in Washington. Marine Lepen’s victory is not an unrealistic outlook. She is likely to win, no matter what internet panel-based polls are showing. The overwhelming majority of the French are fed up with Macron. They have had it with a ruling class that for the past 50 years has been playing the same tune, the same broken record, has been making the same promises never-to-be-held, has been literally butchering France’s economy and its industry for its own profit. The bill being now footed is rooted in the disregard for the outcome of the 2005 referendum on the EU Constitutional Treaty, rejected by 56% of the French, only to be imposed on them through Parliament in 2008 as the Lisbon Treaty.
Further reading : The smell of napalm in the morning (in the streets of France)
This elite always underestimates the intelligence of the larger crowd. Many left wing and right wing voters will have no qualm casting a ballot for Marine Lepen, as a mean to re-balance institutions corrupted to the point where separation of powers no longer exists.
France is in a very bad place. With a sizeable yet minority ruling class - 28% - now gathered in a single ruling party led by Emmanuel Macron who commands neither legitimacy nor credibility but a lot a resentment, opportunities to reach out either left or right to generate a majoritarian consensus are scarce, as both the Left and the Right cannot reconcile with the single ruling party. Concomitantly, a largely depoliticized working and middle-class is sounding the charge against the single ruling party that maintains its power, its standards and its wealth by depriving and disenfranchising them. This is where decades of absurd and short-sighted neo-liberal policies inevitably lead.
Recipe for a disaster. Recipe for insurrection. Recipe for a civil war. Recipe for an unmanageable country. Recipe for a coup.
The gambit of a lot of voters is that Mrs. Lepen once President will not obtain any parliamentary majority and thus will have to constantly negotiate, and walk the referendum path for policies critical to her program.
What the French are striving for is to neutralize the Republic’s presidency that has been for the past 20 years governing way beyond what the Constitution allows - the Prime Minister and his government govern, not the president - and did so by undermining separation of powers and check-and-balances, almost nonexistent in today’s France.
What French voters are aiming at is a presidency that focuses on its actual executive prerogatives to put back on the right track an EU gone astray and to curtail toxic US influence. As well as handle the key issues of immigration and crime. And performs the long overdue clean-up of the institutions, the civil service and a politicized judicial system.
Forcing the debate and putting it back where it belongs - in Parliament, not among presidential and ministerial staffers, lobbyists and pundits- will significantly alleviate the heavy and daunting tensions scarring the French society. Resorting to referendum on key policies - immigration, NATO membership etc. - as well as on key societal issues, will ensure that no active minority will shunt the democratic decision process to its own narrow benefit.
The batshit crazy, non-elected, US sponsored EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen believes she is the President of the EU, a head of state. Since in office, her blatant disregard of the intergovernmental nature of the EU has caused significant troubles with some member states and has put her (the EU) in very bad spots - be it with the Covid or with the insane management of the crisis in Ukraine. She sorely needs to be put back at her rightful place, the one of a dignified civil servant with no decision power - in the EU it lays with the head of states and head of governments, i.e the EU Council. Only France is powerful enough to do so. If not led by Emmanuel Macron.
The United States of America have gone mad, as exhibits the Biden administration will to weaken Russia by using the corrupted Ukrainian regime to fight a proxy war, and imposing sanctions that turned what is in essence an easy to resolve, purely regional conflict into the worst global food, energy and economic crisis since 1929. The US ruling single foreign policy party is today the gravest threat to global stability. How stupid can one be to antagonize a great power and possible ally against China? Only France can stand-up to the US like it did in 1966. If not led by Emmanuel Macron.
If Emmanuel Macron is re-elected, civil unrest and fully-fledged insurrections will be on-going and far more violent than the already impressive “Yellow Vests”. With a severe recession looming globally, the outlook is grim.
We’re way passed moralistic considerations. We’re way passed demonizing the alleged far-left and far-right. This is about not descending into the Abyss. This about riding the maelstrom to a safe haven. And Emmanuel Macron, who spent 5 years insulting his fellow citizens, is not fit for it.
Between to evils, the lesser. That’s what sits in the mind of many French. And that’s what’s scaring the bejesus out of the ruling single party, 28% of France’s population.