On the campaign trail in Denain, one of France’s poorest cities, Emmanuel Macron approached a crowd of voters to “take the pulse of the nation” and a woman stepped forward to sum up the mood. “We live in misery,” she said. Others shouted: “This country does not work” and “Enough is enough”. When a father described how he couldn’t make ends meet, Macron said: “That’s what I’m fighting for.” The man replied: “That is not the impression I have.”
Macron, a young ex-banker who had relaxed labor laws and promised the biggest reform of the French welfare state since the war, was praised internationally for making France a “star economic actor” of the pandemic era: growth recovered faster than expected from the Covid crisis, unemployment was at its lowest level for more than a decade, and Government caps on gas and electricity prices kept French prices up. to grow as fast as those of our European neighbours.
But as Macron reached out to voters in France’s town squares over the past two weeks, keen to offset a persistent image of being haughty and insulated from everyday concerns, he realized that the cost of housing crisis people’s very real lives and fears of making ends meet would play a bigger role than he had anticipated in the campaign. His economic statistics on paper did not match everyone’s felt experience on the ground. Six months earlier, far-right Marine Le Pen had anticipated low- and middle-income workers feeling unheard and ununderstood. She called herself “the candidate of a France that suffers” and she went unnoticed through the field to listen to them.
In the final two weeks of the campaign, Macron tried to catch up by shaking hands and explaining his economic record, arguing that this was the first election in decades in which France’s mass unemployment was not the central issue, because it had fueled job creation. But he found, by his own admission, “people who feel disregarded, who feel resentful… who feel humiliated or belittled.” He said, “I try to listen in an objective way.” He accepted that to win re-election you have to make things “simpler, more direct.” He said: “We have to reconcile the working class with the politicians.”
During the campaign, Macron admitted that if the French far-right had reached its highest levels in the first presidential round, with Le Pen and newcomer TV pundit Éric Zemmour taking more than 30%, it was because he himself had “failed to to calm some anger.
That anger will undoubtedly be one of the main challenges in the next five-year presidential term. The yellow vests The 2018 and 2019 anti-government protests demonstrated that people’s sense of injustice could spontaneously erupt into a long-lasting, large-scale protest movement that was neither contained by traditional unions nor defined by political voting patterns, but that pushed people to demonstrate every Saturday. for months in a row.
Some in the Macron government had initially felt that this year’s elections would proceed along the lines of moderation, “reason” and science against the “hate and division” of the populists.
But it became clear in the final weeks of the presidential campaign that “rationality” was not enough: there had to be an emotional connection to people’s everyday lives. Le Pen attacked Macron as “power without empathy.” His brilliance in number crunching and his professorial explanations of the efficiency of his policies were seen by some as technocratic abstraction. Macron accepted in the last days of the campaign that it would only work to level the lived experience and emotional sentiment of the French. “I am very aware of the precariousness, the fragility, that you can lose everything,” he said of the people who were struggling.
Macron said he had detected signs of “trauma” in a society where more than 140,000 lives have been lost to covid and where voters’ main concerns were making ends meet, followed by the war in Ukraine and concerns about poverty. climate crisis. “This is the first time that even children have stopped me in crowds to ask me about the war in Ukraine,” he said, shocked, in the last days before the vote.
A 72-year-old former elected official from a village in the Oise, where the majority voted for Le Pen, said: “The mood of the people can be summed up in one word: uncertainty. Uncertainty about health, about part-time work contracts, about how much you will be overdrawn at the end of the month. Uncertainty about the prospect of a nuclear war and the planet in flames”.
In this context of doubts towards the political class, Macron accepted that the country was fractured and divided. The immediate challenge is how a sense of unity can be rewoven and what form the parliament will take in June.
Analysts now divide French politics into three blocks. Macron is holding together a broad centrist bloc, which five years ago shifted from left Social Democrat voters to centre-right, and this time moved further to the right to take voters from Nicolas Sarkozy’s former ruling party. Then there is a far-right bloc, including not just Le Pen, but newcomer Zemmour, whose inflammatory anti-immigration rhetoric and warnings of a society at war have left a lasting mark on the political debate. Finally, there is a more radical left-wing bloc, headed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, which is increasingly tapping into concerns about ecology and the environment.
But signs of disillusionment with politics persist, including the millions of voters who did not go to the polls. Analysis of academics William Genieys and Said Darviche found that more than 61% of French voters chose candidates in the first round whose message was “anti-elite”, including Le Pen and Mélenchon, and many smaller figures, who had argued that traditional political elites were impeding equality and hindering real democracy. .
Macron argued that he could unite France “in important moments”, such as the Covid crisis. He promised a new method of politics to take into account broader points of view. On the last day of the campaign he promised to “find the way and the reasons to make us live as a united nation.” His political opponents said they would force him to accept the challenge.
Reference-www.theguardian.com