The first round of the French presidential elections has sent two different kinds of political outsiders to the second round, which will be held on May 7.
With 23.86% of the vote, Centrist and independent candidate Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old former banker and finance minister in the incumbent government stood first. He is the youngest candidate to ever qualify for a second round of a presidential election in France.
Macron is closely followed by Marine Le Pen, leader of the French far Right party, National Front, who trailed with 21.43% of the votes. Le Pen improved by four percentage points her 2012 performance as well as the performance of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had also qualified for the second round of a presidential election, in 2001.
This result is, above all, an indictment of mainstream parties. The socialist candidate, Benoit Hamon, representing the incumbent socialist party, was pulverised, getting only 6.35% of the votes. In his concession speech, he indirectly blamed the sitting President François Hollande for his defeat. “I have failed to avert a disaster,” he declared, “that has been in the making for many months, if not years.”
The Republican candidate, former Prime Minister Francois Fillon, whose campaign was marked by a series of personal scandals, scored a paltry 19.94% a near historic low for the party inheritor of the Gaullist tradition.
One of the biggest surprises of the evening was the score of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a charismatic Left-branded candidate, leader of a one-man political movement. With 19.62% cent of the votes, he stands neck and neck with the Republican candidate and incarnates a movement more clearly and solidly anchored to the Left than the Centrist socialist party that has governed France since 2012.
These results indicate that the traditional Left-Right political cleavage, that has shaped French politics since the 1958 constitutional revision that instituted the fifth Republic, has exploded. Including the handful of micro-candidates who also contested, a majority of French voters cast their ballot in favor of candidates who do not lead or belong to established political parties. If one adds to this the score of Marine Le Pen, the space of mainstream parties has reduced to barely a fourth of the votes.
The victory of Macron constitutes a surprise, considering that most polls had consistently placed Le Pen way ahead of her opponents. Besides, both Macron and Le Pen have seen their appeal weaken during the last weeks of the campaign, as Mélenchon surged, offering an alternative to the far Right for those wishing to register a protest vote.
A turnout higher than expected (77.3%) also explains the relatively low performance of Le Pen, as she was expected to gain from the relative demobilisation of mainstream parties’ voters.
Second round expectations
Most polls already predict an easy win for Macron, as most candidates and party leaders have already called their supporters to oppose Le Pen in the second round. “There isn’t any alternative to opposing the far Right,” Fillon declared. Hamon also called his supporters to block Le Pen, making “a clear distinction between a political adversary and an enemy of the Republic”. Other candidates reserved their choice for a later date but early polls already indicate that most voters from the Left and from the Right will transfer their vote to Macron in the second round.
In his post-election speech, Macron declared that the movement that he has led had in one year “changed the face of political life in France”. He presented his victory as the “victory of the energy for collective politics, beyond traditional divisions”.
Le Pen presented her presence in the second round as a chance for French voters to “defend the nation, our culture, and our values”. She presented herself as “the real choice of alternation, not one that can be incarnated by the Inheritor of Francois Hollande”, and spoke of herself as “the candidate of the people”, adding emphatically that “it is the survival of France that is at stake”.
The future
Completely unknown to the public just three years ago, Macron will be confronted by a series of new challenges. In all probability, France is going to have a president who does not (yet) have a party and who will owe his election to an anti-Le Pen front rather than to the adhesion to his political agenda. This casts a cloud of uncertainty on the kind of majority with which he will govern, and therefore questions the legitimacy of his future policy choices.
There will be a reshuffling of France’s political landscape, with elements of the mainstream Left, Right and Centre defecting towards Macron’s movement. But Macron will be torn between the imperative to make space for these defectors in order to further weaken parties and the necessity to field fresh faces, with candidates notably drawn from civil society, to give flesh to his claim of political renewal. Should he succeed to obtain a majority, it will be necessarily a composite and divided one. The president will be forced to engage in a permanent bargain and negotiation between contradicting political forces within his own majority.
Given the French majority electoral system, mainstream parties can also be expected to perform better in a general election than in the presidential one. At this stage, the actual death of the Left-Right ideological divide remains an incantation. If anything, the strong performance of Mélenchon indicates that the Left “isn’t dead”, as noted the socialist candidate, Hamon.
Beyond the contest of personalities and the forging of future parliamentary majorities, the main takeaway from this election is that the candidate who incarnates the wave of populism, xenophobia and nationalism that has marked so many important elections in the past years stands second, with little scope of broadening her support base.
The second round of the French political elections will be a confrontation between two visions of France – one open, optimistic, pro-Europe and geared towards the future; another closed, declinist, resolutely veered towards the past, cultivating a nostalgia of loneliness, and based on a narrow and exclusionist vision of what constitutes national identity.
If the chances of Le Pen of winning the second round seem very low at this point, the risk that an optimistic, catch-all and, by default, winner of the French presidential election stays disconnected from the forces of resentment that fuelled the electorate’s anger against mainstream politics remains quite high.
Gilles Verniers is assistant professor at Ashoka University and co-director of the Trivedi Centre for Political Data. Views expressed are personal.
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