On Saturday, Emmanuel Macron and his wife strolled along the beach in Le Touquet, the English Channel resort town where the couple own a villa that has been in Brigitte Macron’s family for decades. Dressed in jeans and a hoodie, Macron appeared to be taking advantage of a 24-hour ban on campaigning ahead of Sunday’s final round of France’s presidential election to get some fresh air and show off his trademark self-confidence over the result. .
If Macron’s re-election wasn’t quite the most anticipated walk in the park a couple of months ago, his comfortable victory validates the two-pronged electoral strategy he had meticulously telegraphed from the start. The first part involved overseeing the elimination of his main centre-right and centre-left rivals in the first ballot on April 10, ensuring that he would face his far-right nemesis, the leader of the National Rally, in the second ballot. Marine Le Pen, just as she had in 2017.
That way, Macron knew he would be assured of victory simply by being the least objectionable candidate on the ballot for the majority of French voters.
To be sure, the strategy that worked wonders in 2017 was much riskier this time around. The far right had made significant strides since 2017 in exploiting antipathy towards elitism and Macron’s liberal economic reforms. He had fed off Islamic terror attacks within France to fan the flames of xenophobia. Political debate in the months leading up to the campaign was dominated by far-right agitator Éric Zemmour, who advocated even more radical policies than Ms Le Pen.
Then there were signs that supporters of far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, most of whom voted for Macron in the second ballot in 2017, would refuse to do so this time to show their discontent with his economic and social policies. .
In the end, enough French voters who had chosen neither Macron nor Le Pen in the first round answered the call of most of the other candidates in the first ballot, two former French presidents, several former prime ministers, and a host of civil society, business and trade union leaders and artists to prevent Ms. Le Pen, anti-Europe and anti-NATO, from approaching the Elysée Palace.
In a Friday op-ed in Le Monde, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa said French voters had to “choose between a democratic candidate, who believes that France is more strong in a powerful and autonomous European Union, and a candidate from the extreme right, who openly sides with those who attack our freedom and democracy, which are the fundamental values that we inherit directly from the French Enlightenment.”
Ms. Le Pen, who had spent years tweaking her tougher edges, was forced to go on the defensive regarding her relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “You are talking to your banker when you talk to Russia,” Macron joked during Wednesday’s televised debate, referring to a Russian bank loan arranged by Le Pen’s party in 2017, and still paying off.
That line was almost as devastating as Macron’s attack on Le Pen’s promise to ban women from wearing the Muslim headscarf in public. “You are going to create a civil war with that,” Macron warned in the debate, adding that Le Pen’s proposal to hold a referendum on curtailing immigration and deporting illegal immigrants and foreign-born criminals was unconstitutional.
Ms Le Pen had tried to distract from her more xenophobic policies by emphasizing her promise to restore the purchasing power of inflation-hit French households. She promised to remove France’s 20 percent value-added tax on a basket of 100 essential products and reduce VAT to 5 percent on energy bills. Similarly, her signing of her promise to lower the retirement age to 60, from the current 62, was aimed at winning over some of Mélenchon’s voters. But few took the bait.
Macron had promised to raise the retirement age to 65 by 2031, in a bid to eliminate the huge deficit in France’s public pension system. But he has admitted in recent days that he is willing to compromise at least some elements of his plan.
In fact, the fate of Macron’s pension reform proposals now depends on the outcome of June’s legislative elections, in which Macron’s La République en Marche (LREM) will need to maintain its majority in the National Assembly to implement much of your schedule.
With France’s traditional centre-right and centre-left parties relegated to the fringes by LREM, Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (Untamed France) will emerge as the main opposition to LREM in the June vote. The National Rally and Zemmour’s Reconquête party risk splitting the far-right vote between them.
Still, France’s far-right has dramatically increased its share of the popular vote in every election since 2012. Together, Le Pen, Zemmour and another far-right candidate won nearly a third of the vote in the first ballot. Ms Le Pen’s final score in the second vote of around 42 percent testifies to the deepening divisions within French society since Mr Macron took power.
That risks making Macron’s second term difficult.
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Reference-www.theglobeandmail.com