The result of the first round of French elections looked to Emmanuel Macron’s supporters like a vindication of his strategy. The French president, who stayed aloof from any actual campaigning in the weeks leading up to the vote, managed to come in four points ahead of Marine Le Pen. But now that he has properly hit the campaign trail, alarm bells are ringing – because he is terrible at it.
His visits to remote villages, his embarrassingly personal interviews and his habit of abandoning, on the fly, major planks of his platform, have reminded swing voters why they didn’t like him in the first place. The Macron Way of Triangulating may one day be studied in political science classes as the best illustration of how not to do it.
No, you shouldn’t, in the heart of a Marine Le Pen stronghold, reply to people complaining that they cannot make ends meet with arcane quotes from long-forgotten philosophers.
No, having pushed laïcité (the French brand of hardcore secularism) to breaking point for your entire term, you shouldn’t indulge in a cynical photo op with a girl wearing a headscarf, exclaiming that she symbolises the New France, unless you want to come across as opportunistic and dishonest.
No, having vowed that you’d reduce France’s humongous debt (120 per cent of GDP), you shouldn’t announce, as an aside, that you would, after all, drop your key reform of raising the retirement age to 65.
No, it’s probably not a good idea to send out your official spokesman to boast that France, led by you, did the most to support Ukraine – at the exact time that Ukrainian Twitter invents a new word, Makronizm, meaning “to promise results again and again and again, and not deliver”.
Trying to woo voters at both ends of the spectrum is hard. But there is now a feeling that Macron is flailing desperately as he tosses out seemingly unprepared new measures at anybody he thinks might possibly listen.
The last of those, as of yesterday, was the proposed amendment to the French Constitution to restore the renewable seven-year presidential term, dating back to the Third Republic and abolished by Jacques Chirac (in an almost similar pitch out of left field) in 2003. As it happens, the French don’t like the five-year term; but from a president who is facing a difficult re-election, it looked like a trick to secure permanent residency in the Elysée Palace.
Against this whirlwind of contradictory, half-baked new initiatives, Le Pen has kept pushing her culturally reactionary and socially progressive agenda. She wants more benefits for the French, almost none for foreigners; fewer taxes; aid for young people starting out in life; and nativist campaigns with hefty tax reductions for families, à la Viktor Orbán.
She no longer wants out of the EU or even of the Euro, because it’s not a vote winner. She suggests France will be able to rely on Russia, but “only when the Ukraine conflict is over”. She doesn’t say what this should look like – complete defeat for Putin or a destroyed and partitioned Ukraine; and not enough people ask her. What she means is that fuel and gas bills will then come down, which resonates with her core voters.
It is a miserable choice that the French are facing on April 24, but a momentous one – and Macron could lose his bet, because for all his posturing, his second round bid looks fatally unserious.
