Less than three months before the first round of the presidential election, French politics is undergoing its greatest upheaval since the foundation of the Fifth Republic in 1958.
For six decades, there were two parties of government: successive iterations of conservative Gaullists and the socialist party (PS) forged by François Mitterrand.
Now, in the midst of what Le Monde calls “a campaign as bizarre as it is unpredictable,” both establishment parties could for the first time be excluded from the second round of the presidential election on May 7th.
There are no longer two main political groupings in France, but four. In approximate order of strength they are: the Front National (FN); the conservative Les Républicains (LR); and two wings of the PS, split between the far left and social-democratic reformers.
Marine Le Pen’s FN encompasses the poor, working-class electorate that once joined the communist party, as well as the extreme right wing that was galvanised by her father Jean-Marie.
A Kantar, Sofres-OnePoint poll published yesterday shows Le Pen winning the highest score, 25 per cent, in the first round on April 23rd.
Her popularity has been the most stable element in this highly volatile campaign.
The same poll shows Emmanuel Macron, the youngest candidate at age 39, coming in third at 21 per cent.
Macron’s political movement, “En marche!” is less than a year old. He is now only one percentage point behind the LR candidate François Fillon.
Financial scandal
While Macron’s ascent continues, Fillon has been falling, especially since a financial scandal involving his Welsh wife Penelope broke on January 25th.
Mr and Mrs Fillon were yesterday questioned separately by the “financial pole” of the Paris tribunal, which is investigating possible misappropriation of public funds.
The Canard enchaîné weekly, which published the report detailing €600,000 in payments to Mrs Fillon for what appear to have been phoney jobs, is expected to divulge further details tomorrow.
And the silence of Marc Joulaud, the MEP and mayor of the Fillons’ home town, Sablé-sur-Sarthe, is becoming awkward.
As Fillon’s replacement in the National Assembly, Joulaud continued to “employ” Mrs Fillon for five years at a salary of up to €7,900 a month.
"I have the impression he would rather remain silent than not tell the truth," a source in the Sarthe department told Le Parisien.
The PS is even more fragile than LR. Though both parties are riven by personal enmities, there are no deep ideological difference among conservatives.
The socialists gave Benoit Hamon, who was one of the main inquisitors of President François Hollande’s administration, their nomination by a margin of nearly 18 percentage points on Sunday night.
Hamon wants to dramatically increase social spending and abrogate the labour reform that former prime minister Manuel Valls passed by decree.
Hamon defeated Valls for the nomination, and Valls has refused to attend Hamon’s investiture as the socialist candidate next Sunday.
Discord over Hollande
The perception of Hollande’s five-year term is a point of discord between socialists. Prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who is loyal to Hollande and Valls, lectured Hamon when he received him yesterday, saying: “The left cannot win unless it is proud of itself.”
The greatest challenge facing Hamon is to avoid a mass emigration of socialist voters – the 41 per cent who voted for Valls in the primary – to Macron’s camp. Macron never joined the socialist party and refused to participate in its primary.
Valls has scheduled a meeting of "reformers" this evening. Le Monde reports that 15 socialist reformers have signed a petition calling on parliamentarians to vote for Macron rather than the PS candidate, Hamon.
With Macron, Hamon and another far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, dividing the socialist vote three ways, the latter two are sure to be eliminated in the first round. Macron stands a chance only because he appeals to a much broader electorate.
The poll published yesterday shows Hamon at 15 per cent and Mélenchon at 10 per cent. Hamon intends to ask the ecologist candidate Yannick Jadot and Mélenchon “to think only of the interest of the French, beyond our persons” and drop out of the race.
In every surprise of the campaign so far, voters have awarded a premium to novelty. The ideological debate between Hamon and Valls goes back at least a quarter century. Fillon on Sunday repeated themes espoused by Nicolas Sarkozy a decade ago.
Macron’s adversaries portray him as the continuation of the Hollande-Valls tandem. If he is to stand a chance against Le Pen and Fillon, Macron must address French concerns over globalisation and prove his ideas are new and different.
Le Pen offers isolation, protectionism, withdrawal from the European Union and alignment with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
Distasteful as those policies may be to many voters, she is the only candidate offering France something it has not tried already.
