Macron’s ‘piss them off’ strategy claims the initiative

It's a counter-intuitive electoral gambit, telling 10 per cent of voters your aim is to make their life hell. "There is a tiny minority of people who are resistant," Emmanuel Macron said of the unvaccinated in an interview with readers of Le Parisien on Tuesday. "We can reduce that, I'm sorry to say, by pissing them off even more. I am not here to piss off the French… but the unvaccinated, I really want to piss them off."

Fans applauded the French president’s straight talk, opponents feigned outrage, while English-language outlets debated how to translate the remark – the imperfect “piss off” doesn’t do justice to the scatological register of the verb emmerder. But one thing at least was clear: it’s election season in Paris. Almost everything Macron says over the next 100 days will be calculated in one way or another to shore up his vote.

Though he has yet formally to declare, Macron has in recent weeks been positioning himself as a unifying force, offering himself as the only candidate who can bring France’s warring tribes together. The reunion that really interests him is that of the diverse but long since fractured coalition of voters, from left and right, that he built on his unlikely journey to the Élysée Palace in 2017.

Just over three months out from the first round of voting, opinion polls show Macron with a solid but fragile advantage over Valérie Pécresse of the centre-right Les Républicains, with the two far-right candidates – Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour – completing the leading pack.

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If Macron’s attention-grabbing remarks this week were an attempt to claim the initiative, the plan worked. The left is struggling to be heard, its six confirmed or potential candidates still fighting among themselves for internal supremacy, so the campaign to date has been fought on the far-right’s favourite themes: security, immigration and national identity.

Covid management

Macron is keen to shift debate to his management of the Covid-19 crisis, which he reportedly sees as one of his strongest cards. He takes credit for having persuaded and prodded French people, after a slow start, to get their jabs, with the result that 90 per cent of the country’s adults are now fully vaccinated. His remarks this week are only what most people are saying privately, he may believe, and few among the hold-outs are likely to be Macron voters anyway.

The real tactical benefit for Macron is that taking a swipe at the unvaccinated exposes divisions to his right. Opinion polls show that about half of potential extreme-right voters are either “hostile” towards or “do not understand” anti-vaxxers or opponents of the Covid pass, while six out of 10 say the public health crisis will be a factor in deciding how they vote in April. If Macron was setting a trap for Le Pen and Zemmour, they duly fell into it by rushing to the defence of the small unvaccinated minority.

It is also awkward terrain for Pécresse, whose party was divided over Macron's proposal to extend the Covid pass by requiring anyone over 12 to prove their vaccination status to enter restaurants, bars and cultural venues or to use some forms of public transport (a negative PCR test result would no longer suffice). The Bill passed through the National Assembly this week, but Les Républicains vacillated over whether to support or oppose it.

Difficult opponent

Pécresse is a more difficult opponent for Macron than any of the rivals she outflanked in her surprise victory in the centre-right primary. Smart, capable, pro-European and business-friendly, there is little to separate her from Macron ideologically other than Pécresse’s social conservatism (she opposed the Bill that introduced same-sex marriage in 2013). But Pécresse has a delicate balancing act of her own to perform, having to lure back the centre-right voters who opted for Macron five years ago while at the same time staunching the flow of support towards the far-right.

The ensuing contortions are costing her campaign coherence. Just this week, she said it was time to "get the Kärcher out of the basement", echoing a notorious remark by her former party leader and president Nicolas Sarkozy, who said in 2005 it was time to take a Kärcher power-hose to the crime-ridden suburbs of France. In her eagerness to avoid a split and include all centre-right factions in her campaign, Pécresse published a list of "policy advisers" that consisted exclusively of middle-aged white men.

After five years as president, Macron is vulnerable. The insurgent who smashed the old left-right duopoly in 2017 is now a familiar figure. He struggles to reach 25 per cent in opinion polls and his party has failed to establish an identity beyond that of its figurehead. It is not hard to imagine him suffering the fate of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, another moderniser who was thrown out after one term. But with the opposition to his left and right divided, the French economy growing strongly and unemployment in decline – two trends few recent presidents have been in a position to report – few would bet against Macron winning. How that would piss off the anti-vaxxers.