Briefing | The first round

This French election is unprecedented in all sorts of ways

High stakes and a close race

|ANGERS, PARIS AND STRASBOURG

THE local co-ordinator, Bruno Studer, turns up on a bicycle, his front basket stuffed with leaflets. On a tree-lined Strasbourg square he, Georges and Florent—a high-school teacher, a medical student and an auditor—huddle over a printout from Google maps. They tick off the streets already trodden, divide up those still to go, and head out for another evening of door-to-door canvassing. With over 3,000 local members, the team has organised 50 political meetings in the area over the past four months, and distributed 150,000 manifestos and flyers. “We’ve shown we can do a lot with very little,” says Mr Studer.

This cheerful trio is part of the army of enthusiastic local volunteers behind En Marche! (“On the Move!”), the movement founded a year ago by Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old former Socialist economy minister and one-time investment banker. In their T-shirts emblazoned with the movement’s handwritten logo and bearing festive balloons, they have helped, street by street, to achieve something remarkable: turning a rank outsider once dismissed as a traitor, an upstart, or a dreamer, into someone who could quite plausibly soon be the president. Four days before the first round of France’s presidential election on April 23rd, the polls put Mr Macron, who has never been elected to anything, at the head of the field. The race is very close (see chart 1). But if the first round does indeed go well for him, Mr Macron’s chances in the head-to-head second round on May 7th seem pretty good

Since the Fifth Republic was set up by Charles de Gaulle in 1958, no independent candidate without electoral experience has come anything like this close to the French presidency. When Valéry Giscard d’Estaing set up a new party, the Independent Republicans, in 1966, it took him eight more years to become president—by which time he had been in parliament, off and on, for almost two decades. Mr Macron’s experience is limited to two years as a staffer to François Hollande, the incumbent Socialist president, and two years as an appointed minister.

His rise is made all the more extraordinary by the fact that his sunny outlook seems singularly ill-suited to the sullen, angry mood that his main competitors seek to capitalise on. In the 1990s his unapologetically optimistic, market-minded internationalism would have seemed unexceptional; in the 2010s hearing him stir crowds with praise for Europe and openness seems both brave and incongruous.

But if he is more upbeat than his populist competitors on many subjects, Mr Macron shares one crucial bit of ras-le-bol (fed-up-ness) with France’s voters: he has had enough of the established political groupings that have dominated the Fifth Republic. As a minister he spent nearly 200 hours in parliamentary commissions and debates trying to convince deputies of the merits of his draft law to deregulate Sunday trading, the notary profession, coach transport and other protected industries. He came away convinced that centre-leaning deputies from the left and right might have backed his bill, but party machines tied their hands.

Less than a year after a watered-down version of the bill was finally forced through the assembly, Mr Macron launched En Marche! in his home town of Amiens, in the Somme region of northern France. The idea, he declared, was to “unblock” France, build cross-party support for reform among those willing to forego party dogma, and bring fresh faces and new thinking into politics. Few paid much heed; the country has a minor history of liberals and centrists who come to naught. Until September last year, no polling group even investigated his potential as an independent candidate.

But as the campaign heated up the established parties of left and right did their deprecator a big favour. For the first time they both held primaries open to the general public, and both ended up picking a candidate that suited the more radical elements of their respective bases. Benoît Hamon, a Socialist former backbench rebel, sits to the left of his party. François Fillon, a former prime minister, is on the conservative Roman Catholic right of the Republicans. That opened an unusually wide space in the unfashionable political centre for Mr Macron.

Abandoning the centre did not make the established parties popular with the extremes. Those on the hard and far right have stood by Marine Le Pen of the National Front. Those on the left have in the past few weeks rallied to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a fist-clenching admirer of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. Add to this the fact that Mr Hamon has run a campaign too pallid to give him a shot at the second round and Mr Fillon has been damaged by scandal—his use of the parliamentary payroll to remunerate his wife and two of his children is now under judicial investigation—and you have an unprecedented collapse in support for the groupings that have run France over the past 60 years.

Three-quarters of voters are telling pollsters that they may back a candidate from neither of the established parties. Fully half of them say they could vote for Mr Mélenchon, Ms Le Pen, or one of the minor fringe candidates—a cause of deep concern for other European countries, since both Mr Mélenchon and Ms Le Pen want, in effect, to break up the EU.

Ms Le Pen, Mr Macron, Mr Fillon and Mr Mélenchon all have a shot at getting through Sunday’s first round. The Economist has built a model based on polling from this and past years to rate their subsequent chances (see chart 2). It offers good news to the mainstream candidates, bad news to those on the extremes. Mr Macron, if he makes it through, appears a strong favourite; whoever she meets in the second round, Ms Le Pen looks highly likely to lose.

It should be noted, though, that in past elections the main candidates tended to have established parties and the range of views was narrower. This may limit the old data’s predictive value: a lead in the polls that gave, say, a 90% chance of victory in the past may not do so this time round. Jérôme Fourquet of Ifop, a pollster, speaks for many seasoned observers of French politics when he says nothing can be ruled out—even Ms Le Pen v Mr Mélenchon.

Tax inspectors and peasants

With 250,000 members En Marche! is now more than twice the size of the ruling Socialist Party. Mr Macron’s supporters tend to be well educated, metropolitan—the Uber-using classes—and happy. Fully 72% call themselves “optimistic”, next to just 29% of those who back Ms Le Pen, who was consistently ahead in the polls earlier in the campaign. “It’s the first time that a candidate is offering something different, something positive,” says a retired tax inspector at a Macron rally in Angers, a cathedral town in western France. But Mr Macron’s support extends beyond the urban well-to-do. At a dairy farm in nearby Mayenne, where village shops shut at lunchtime and mud clings to his city shoes, he draws curious locals as if to a prize breed. “All the other candidates live off politics,” says Patrick Pervis, who calls himself a paysan (peasant). “But Macron hasn’t been in politics; he knows the world of work.”

Mr Macron sleeps little, reads a lot, lingers with dinner guests until late, and has an uncanny ability to give the person he is speaking to, whether a disgruntled farmer or a visiting entrepreneur, the feeling that he is actually interested in what they have to say. Early in the campaign he used his sense of humour to brush aside a rumour, long circulating in Paris, that he was having a secret gay affair: it must have been his “hologram”, he joked, nodding to a campaign tool used by one of his rivals. He has gathered an eclectic mix of supporters including François Bayrou, a many-time presidential candidate who tried and failed to build popular support for his own centrist politics; Alain Madelin, a liberal ex-finance minister; Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a 1968 rebel-turned-Green politician; and Manuel Valls, a Socialist ex-prime minister who was beaten by Mr Hamon in his party’s primary.

While Mr Macron is trying to mobilise the France that still waves Europe’s flag at rallies, two other candidates are harnessing the howl of rage against it, and the political establishment more generally. Ms Le Pen campaigns against Europe and the euro, as well as immigration and “Islamism”, with the slogan “In the name of the people”. Mr Mélenchon calls Europe “the dictatorship of banks” and campaigns with the slogan “The force of the people”. While not explicitly in favour of “Frexit”, as Ms Le Pen is, he talks of breaking Europe’s rules and taking back power in a way that the EU—and, particularly, Germany—would be unable to stomach, raising the possibility of France being thrown out of the club it founded (“Frejection”?).

Mr Fillon is not as much of a Europhile as Mr Macron. And he sides with Ms Le Pen and Mr Mélenchon in favouring closer ties with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. On Syrian refugees Mr Mélenchon and Mr Macron stand together, urging France to be more welcoming; Mr Fillon and Ms Le Pen would keep the door shut. The two on the right were against the legalisation of gay marriage in 2013, with Mr Macron and Mr Mélenchon in favour. The only two candidates with no position in common are Mr Macron and Ms Le Pen.

In general, though, there are two world views in competition. One is a broadly pro-European, business-friendly approach, embodied by Mr Macron and Mr Fillon. They recognise the need to keep France open and shrink and adapt its state; at the moment public-sector spending is 57% of GDP, higher than any other euro-zone country bar Finland. The other is a protectionist, high-spending, anti-market Euroscepticism, pushed in its left-wing, anti-American version by Mr Mélenchon, and in its xenophobic, anti-immigration brand by Ms Le Pen. Génération Libre, a liberal think-tank, gives Mr Fillon and Mr Macron a 60% “liberal” rating: all the other candidates get less than 34%.

Mr Macron and Mr Fillon agree on a basic premise: that, over the past ten years, France has lost economic ground to Germany that it must regain. Its GDP has grown more slowly. Its unemployment rate, at 10%, is more than twice as high. And its government budget, which Germany balances, has been in deficit since 1975.

To set this right they offer variations on reformist themes, promising to free up enterprise, lighten the weight of the state, encourage job creation, reward risk and improve education. Mr Fillon talks a more ambitious game, especially when it comes to shrinking the state. He vows to end the 35-hour week, slash the 3,000-page labour code to just 150 pages, abolish the annual levy on property and financial assets over €1.3m, cut 500,000 civil-service jobs (about 9% of the total) and reduce public spending by €100 billion over his five-year term.

Mr Macron’s plans are more modest: he proposes to cut 120,000 public-sector jobs and cut €60 billion from annual spending. Rather than removing the 35-hour working week, Mr Macron wants to weaken it by devolving negotiations over working time to firms. Rather than abolishing the wealth tax, he wants to limit its effect by applying it only to property. Overall, Mr Fillon vows to reduce the state’s spending to 50% of GDP by 2022; Mr Macron to 52%.

“What this economy needs is urgent measures, and a clear signal on day one,” argues Henri de Castries, formerly head of AXA, an insurer, and part of Mr Fillon’s inner circle. Mr Macron prefers a progressive approach, based less on the immediate tightening of existing rules than on a longer-term rethink of the state. “A five-year term cannot consist of six months of brutal reform followed by U-turns,” argues Jean Pisani-Ferry, his economic adviser.

A good example of the two candidates’ differences is pension reform. Mr Fillon wants to raise the retirement age from 62 years to 65. Mr Macron would keep it as it is and concentrate on a longer term but, he claims, deeper reform which the Fillon team sees as unrealistic: unifying France’s anemone-like pension system, made up of 35 different public regimes, into a single structure with universal transparent rules. He says providing people with the security they need to move from job to job would give the economy a long-term boost.

Given France’s pesky tendency to resist change, even after voting for it, a key question is whether either candidate would be able to put his plans into practice. The tweedy Mr Fillon, who lives in a grand manor house complete with a chapel and a horse, would be the more polarising figure, likely to provoke strikes and street protests—though his team insists that, if he can resist the popular outrage at the salaries he has paid to his family, he can face down the streets on matters of policy, too. If elected he would stand a decent chance of securing a majority at the parliamentary elections to be held in June.

The same cannot be said for sure about Mr Macron. He claims he can secure a majority, promising that En Marche! will put up candidates in all 577 constituencies; half, he says, will be new recruits to politics—the party has already received some 14,000 applications—and half will be deputies and local councillors who will leave their old parties. In reality he may well need to seek a cross-party coalition in order to govern. This is an idea alien to national French politics, although, as Benjamin Griveaux, a co-founder of En Marche!, points out, it is fairly familiar at other levels. Gérard Collomb, a Macron-supporting Socialist who runs the city of Lyon, for instance, is backed by an alliance reaching from the left to the centre-right.

This election campaign, however, has not been about contrasting rival versions of reformist economic policy and the likelihood of their practical implementation. With 11 candidates it has at times felt more like reality television. Comic one-liners, memorable slogans and clips of blunders have dominated social media. When Mr Fillon argued during a debate that industrial relations should be decentralised to firms, the quick-witted Mr Mélenchon retorted: “I’m not in favour of one labour code per firm, just as I am not in favour of one highway code per road.”

This mood has seemed to play into the hands of those with binary messages, notably Ms Le Pen (no to Europe; yes to France) and Mr Mélenchon (quit NATO; end war on Russia). Mr Macron has found himself the victim of merciless satire over his neither-left-nor-right politics, giving rise to the hashtag #EnMêmeTemps (#AtTheSameTime) as a dig at his perceived ambiguity. “You’ve spoken for seven minutes, and I have no idea what you said,” Ms Le Pen told him during one debate. “Every time you talk, you say a bit of this, a bit of that, and never decide.”

It is the 65-year-old Mr Mélenchon, a former Trotskyist, who has emerged as the campaign’s revelation, using technology to make his old-school socialism hip in a campaign modelled on that of Bernie Sanders in last year’s American primaries. Mr Mélenchon’s YouTube channel has a huge following; the beaming “hologram” through which he addresses rallies from a distance has been a hit with the crowds as well as a source of quips for other candidates. He has also launched a popular online video game, Fiscal Kombat, which features his character shaking down men in suits to empty cash from their pockets.

A former Socialist senator, Mr Mélenchon is in some ways an odd sort of revolutionary. He confesses to a fondness for quinoa salads, and owns a big flat in Paris as well as a country pad. Yet in a country with a romantic fascination for revolutionary talk, his pugnacious style and crowd-pleasing promises carry a nostalgic appeal. As well as promising to bust the EU’s deficit rules by spending an extra €170 billion of public money over five years and to pull France out of NATO, the Communist-backed candidate vows to share work by moving to a four-day week and to bring in a top tax rate of 100% for those earning over €400,000. He has a particular weakness for Latin American dictators, and plans to join the “Bolivarian” alliance, alongside Venezuela and Cuba; “France”, he says, “is not a Western country.”

That he can be a remotely serious contender for the presidency shows the depths of the country’s political disillusion, particularly among the young. Youth unemployment of 25% marks France off from Britain, where younger voters sided with the establishment on Brexit. In France Mr Mélenchon and Ms Le Pen have been the preferred candidates of the under 25s, though polls now show Ms Le Pen losing ground and Mr Macron rising fast.

Battlefield memories

In judging the choices before them, first-time voters have no personal basis for comparison. Those running the mainstream candidates’ campaigns, though, do—and as a result feel a deep sense of historic responsibility. Already the faint possibility of a run-off between Mr Mélenchon and Ms Le Pen has prompted a nervous widening of market spreads between French and German bonds. In the more likely scenarios where one or other of them faces either Mr Macron or Mr Fillon and loses, the victor would have a weakened mandate for reform, owing his victory as much to those voting to keep out a populist alternative as to support for his own policies. Though no recent polls have shown Ms Le Pen beating any of the other candidates in the second round, one has suggested that Mr Mélenchon might beat Mr Fillon.

Back in Strasbourg, where En Marche! volunteers are clambering up stairwells and knocking on doors, the campaigns’ rival aspirations carry particular symbolism. The city lies in Alsace, a borderland scarred—like the Somme—by war between Germany and France; Mr Studer’s grandfathers fought on opposite sides. Pro-European feeling here has deep roots. Yet just 50km away, in the village of Monswiller, over 1,000 locals recently turned out to hear Ms Le Pen, chanting what has become her supporters’ xenophobic battle cry, “On est chez nous” (“This is our home”). It is a chilling reminder that, if Mr Macron wins, he will not only make history. He will also need to heal, and reform, a country that history has deeply divided.

This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "La lutte"

Handle with extreme care

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