The most unpredictable presidential election campaign in the history of the Fifth Republic ended with a suitably surprising outcome: For once, the pollsters and the commentators were right. After the confounding of the experts in last June’s Brexit referendum and last November’s U.S. presidential election, the pollsters redeemed their profession by predicting correctly that Emmanuel Macron would defeat Marine Le Pen in Sunday’s second round of voting for the French presidency.
Then again, as psephological challenges go, this result was not hard to predict. The French system is designed to prevent candidates like Le Pen from winning. The first round reduces a wide field to a knockout. In the second round, le front republicain, the “republican front” against electing an extremist, gave Macron the presidency. The polls consistently predicted that strategic voting would give Macron a victory of 60 percent to 40 precent or more. By late Sunday afternoon, an exit poll gave Macron 65.1 percent to Le Pen’s 35.9 percent.
Yet Macron’s win is more clear than comprehensive. He is a politician with a party that exists in his name only. En Marche!, or “On the March” shares his initials, and its positions are nothing more than his electoral slogans. He has five weeks, until the French legislative elections, in which to assemble a list of candidates and create a parliamentary presence.
It is highly likely that the legislative elections will lead to a cohabitation government, in which a president tries to advance policies while handicapped by his party being a weak member of a coalition. This will oblige Macron to rely upon the support of the Socialists—the party that he repudiated when he launched En Marche!, the party that he ostensibly campaigned against in the presidential election.
Nor should the scale of opposition to Macron be underestimated. The first round showed that Macron was the first choice of only a quarter of French voters—about the same number as Le Pen. Until François Fillon self-destructed in February amid accusations that he improperly employed his family members as assistants, Macron was stuck in third place and looked set to be eliminated. In the second round, more than a third of voters stuck with Le Pen even when it was clear that she was going to lose. They wanted to register a protest—not just against the failed Socialist government of François Hollande, but also against the drift of French society and politics in recent decade.
When Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, tested le front republicain in the second round of the 2002 election, 82 percent of voters preferred Jacques Chirac. Only 18 percent were prepared to risk the stigma of voting for a neofascist. On Sunday, Marine Le Pen took 36 percent, despite her campaign having featured more dog whistles than the Bois de Boulogne on a weekend afternoon. The front republicain held, but Marine Le Pen has opened sizable gaps: the ranks of France’s les deplorables have doubled.
Some of Le Pen’s success is Le Pen’s alone, notably her strategy of dediabolisation, “de-diabolizing” the National Front by distancing herself from her father and his candid racism. But the expanded legitimacy of the National Front also reflects hopelessness about the capacity of the French system to respond to the problems of globalization.
That hopelessness also showed in the low turnout. The numbers are still coming in, but as many as 30 percent of voters either stayed at home or spoiled their ballots. This turnout might be healthy in an American election, but the last time it was this low for a French presidential election was in 1969, following the riots of 1968.
The reduced turnout and le front republicain have given Macron a mandate not to be Marine Le Pen. Naturally, he will interpret this as a mandate to impose his policies. “From tomorrow,” he said on Sunday, “will will modernize politics, recognize pluralism, and revitalize democracy.” This mean very little, and may mean less if he cannot master the legislature after June’s election. It will mean nothing at all if his ambitions to deregulate the economy and the labor market depend on the parliamentary support of the left-wing parties. The French public will see this as a volte-face.
Le Pen has emphasized Macron’s establishment background and globaliste past, as an énarque (a graduate of the elite École nationale d’administration), an ex-Socialist, and an ex-employee of Rothschild’s bank. Macron must act quickly, and he cannot afford to make mistakes.
Nor can Macron afford another victory like this one. Marine Le Pen knows that, too. On Sunday, she announced that the National Front must “deeply renew itself in order to rise to the historic opportunity and meet the French people’s expectations.” Le Pen, who formally left the Front National before the second round in the hope of scooping up votes, wants this “deep transformation” to be total.
Le Pen wants to complete the National Front’s metamorphosis from the fascist fringe to the acceptable mainstream—to create “a new political force.” This year, the National Front was young voters’ first choice. If Macron fails to face down the unions, cut red tape, and resuscitate the French economy, he will find himself highly vulnerable to Le Pen’s attacks. And with the French party system in general disarray, she is likely to become the leading voice of opposition.
In 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy won the presidency with a promise of systemic economic reform that reminded Anglophone observers of Margaret Thatcher. His presidency stalled from a mixture of incompetence and institutional resistance. A decade later, Emmanuel Macron has won the presidency with a promise of systemic economic reform that reminded Anglophone observers of Tony Blair.
The institutional resistance remains as strong as it was in 2007, but Macron lacks the party machine that Sarkozy had. The scale of the political challenge has only grown in the last decade—heightened terrorism at home, and the manifold crises of the European Union abroad.
Macron was an unpredicted president. He will face predictable problems, as well as the unpredictable ones that are sure to arise. Judging from her response on Sunday afternoon, Marine Le Pen is making a prediction of her own for the 2022 election.
