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ELECTION

OPINION: The déja vu of the European election polls masks a dangerous game in French democracy

The opinion polls for the European parliament have a strangely familiar look about then - John Lichfield asks what this means for the election, and for position of the far right in France.

Published: 29 April 2019 16:07 CEST
OPINION: The déja vu of the European election polls masks a dangerous game in French democracy
Pro-European Emmanuel Macron. Photo: AFP

Despite five months of French political and social crisis, the opinion polls ahead of next month’s European elections have a Monty Python look about them.

It is déjà vu all over again –  “that strange feeling we sometimes get that we’ve lived through something before”.

In the multi-candidate first round of the Presidential election in April 2017, the top two finishers were Emmanuel Macron with 24.01 per cent; and Marine Le Pen with 21.3 per cent.

In a string of opinion polls before the 26 May European election, Macron’s centrist party and its allies are predicted to take 22.5 to 24 per cent of the vote. Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National is attracting between 21 and 22.5 per cent.

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Emmanuel Macron will face off against Marine Le Pen in the European elections. Photo: AFP

In other words, despite the Gilets Jaunes rebellion, despite his poor personal ratings, Macron is on course to take almost exactly the same share of the popular vote that he did in the first round of the presidential poll in 2017. He may be detested in working class France, right-wing-France, left wing France, rural France and outer suburban France but his centrist, pro-European, urban base is intact.

Marine Le Pen, despite the anti-Macron mood in large parts of the electorate, is forecast to do only marginally better than she did in the first round in 2017 – and fail to emulate the 25 per cent she scored in the last European elections in 2014. Despite the Gilets Jaunes social rebellion, whose demography and geography overlaps with her own electoral heartland, Ms Le Pen’s popularity has scarcely risen.

Depending on your political viewpoint, you might find these figures to be baffling or reassuring. The political crisis in France cannot, it seems, be so critical as all that.

Look, however, at the rest of the predicted scores for the European Elections in France. They contain a stark warning about the future of French democracy.

Former President François Hollande was widely quoted as saying last month that the Far Right would rule France one day. He was somewhat misquoted.

What he actually said was the post-2017 French political battleground – the Centre versus the Extremes – was ultimately dangerous.

France is a country that loves to kick its leaders and kick out  incumbents. There has been a change of power in almost every election in the last 40 years. If the only game is the Centre v the Extremes, the only recourse will eventually be the Extremes.

Hollande said that the traditional political forces of centre-left and centre-right, scattered and humiliated in 2017, must find a way back into the game. “They must become once again credible alternatives capable of mobilising people, otherwise the head-to-head between the present centrist government and the far right could one day finish badly.”

Now look again at the polls before the European elections.

Centre-right and centre-left, the political forces which dominated French politics for 70 years after the 1939-45 war, are nowhere. They have yet to recover from their 2017 implosion.

The old “parliamentary” Left has split into three fragments  – the hard, the traditional and would-be inventive.

READ ALSO Macronsplaining marathon won't unify France, but it might have swung a Euro elections win


Months of 'yellow vest' protests appear not to have affected Macron's poll ratings. Photo: AFP

Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (the hard fragment) has struggled up to 9 per cent of the vote and was once down at 7 per cent. The rump of the Socialist Party – the party of François Mitterrand and François Hollande – is marooned on about 5 per cent (the lowest possible score to qualify for a handful of seats in the European Parliament). 

 Generation-s, the inventive breakaway led by Benoît Hamon, the Socialist candidate in 2017, is stuck on 3 per cent.

On the centre-right, things are a little better but not much. Les Républicains, the party created by Jacques Chirac and renamed by Nicolas Sarkozy, is delighted to have seen its score rise in recent weeks to 15 per cent.

The leader of its list, a young Catholic-traditionalist philosophy teacher called François-Xavier Bellamy, has fought a good campaign but he appeals only to the socially conservative, bourgeois element of the centre-right. He has nothing to say to the hard-scrabble outer suburbs or rural towns which spawned the Gilets Jaunes.

Much can happen in a month before the vote on 26 May. The predicted turn-out is only 44 per cent. This compares to 45 per cent at the last European election and 77 per cent in the presidential election in 2017.

A small upward shift in participation could push either Macron’s La République en Marche or Le Pen’s Rassemblement National into a decisive lead.

Topping the poll makes no practical difference in domestic politics. It would, however, give a significant psychological victory to either Macron or Le Pen before their likely second face-off in the next presidential elections.

As things stand, despite his mistakes and despite his unpopularity, Macron must be favourite to be re-elected in 2022.  Marine Le Pen has never fully recovered from her woeful performance in the second round presidential debate two years ago.

Given Macron’s horrible half-year since last October, Marine should be cruising in the European polls. The fact that she is treading water says more about Ms Le Pen than it does about President Macron.

All the same, ex-President Hollande is right. A two-way political contest between Centre and Extreme is ultimately a dangerous game for a democracy.

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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

OPINION: Why Germans’ famed efficiency makes the country less efficient

Germans are famous for their love of efficiency - and impatience that comes with it. But this desire for getting things done as quickly as possible can backfire, whether at the supermarket or in national politics, writes Brian Melican.

Published: 24 May 2023 10:38 CEST
OPINION: Why Germans' famed efficiency makes the country less efficient

A story about a new wave of “check-outs for chatting” caught my eye recently. In a country whose no-nonsense, “Move it or lose it, lady!” approach to supermarket till-staffing can reduce the uninitiated to tears, the idea of introducing a slow lane with a cashier who won’t sigh aggressively or bark at you for trying to strike up conversation is somewhere between quietly subversive and positively revolutionary – and got me thinking.

Why is it that German supermarket check-outs are so hectic in the first place?

READ ALSO: German supermarkets fight loneliness with slower check outs for chatting

If you talk to people here about it – other Germans, long-term foreign residents, and keen observers on shorter visits – you’ll hear a few theories.

One is that Germans tend to shop daily on the way home from work, and so place a higher premium on brisk service than countries where a weekly shop is more common; and it is indeed a well-researched fact that German supermarket shopping patterns are higher-frequency than in many comparable countries.

Bavarian supermarket

A sign at a now-famous supermarket in Bavaria advertises a special counter saying “Here you can have a chat”. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Karl-Josef Hildenbrand

Another theory is that, in many parts of the country (such as Bavaria), supermarket opening hours are so short that there is no other way for everyone to get their shopping done than to keep things ticking along at a good old clip.

The most simple (and immediately plausible) explanation, of course, is that supermarkets like to keep both staffing and queuing to a minimum: short-staffing means lower costs, while shorter queues make for fewer abandoned trolleys.

German love of efficiency

Those in the know say that most store chains do indeed set average numbers of articles per minute which their cashiers are required to scan – and that this number is higher at certain discounters notorious for their hard-nosed attitude.

Beyond businesses’ penny-pinching, fast-lane tills are a demonstration of the broader German love of efficiency: after all, customers wouldn’t put up with being given the bum’s rush if there weren’t a cultural premium placed on smooth and speedy operations.

Then again, as many observers not yet blind to the oddness of Germany’s daily ‘Supermarket Sweep’ immediately notice, the race to get purchases over the till at the highest possible rate is wholly counter-productive: once scanned, the items pile up faster than even the best-organised couple can stow away, leaving an embarrassing, sweat-inducing lull – and then, while people in the queue roll their eyes and huff, a race to pay (usually in cash, natch’).

In a way, it’s similar to Germany’s famed autobahns, on which there is theoretically no speed limit and on which some drivers do indeed race ahead – into traffic jams often caused by excessive velocity.

Yes, it is a classic case of more haste, less speed. We think we’re doing something faster, but actually our impatience is proving counterproductive.

German impatience

This is, in my view, the crux of the issue: Germans are a hasty bunch. Indeed, research shows that we have less patience than comparable European populations – especially in retail situations. Yes, impatience is one of our defining national characteristics – and, as I pointed out during last summer’s rail meltdown, it is one of our enduring national tragedies that we are at once impatient and badly organised.

As well as at the tills and on the roads, you can observe German impatience in any queue (which we try to jump) and generally any other situation in which we are expected to wait.

Think back to early 2021, for instance, when the three-month UK-EU vaccine gap caused something approaching a national breakdown here, and the Health Minister was pressured into buying extra doses outside of the European framework.

This infuriated our neighbours and deprived developing countries of much-needed jabs – which, predictably, ended up arriving after the scheduled ones, leaving us with a glut of vaccines which, that very autumn, had to be destroyed.

A health worker prepares a syringe with the Comirnaty Covid-19 vaccine by Biontech-Pfizer. Photo: John MACDOUGALL / AFP

Now, you can see the same phenomenon with heating legislation: frustrated by the slow pace of change, Minister for Energy and the Economy Robert Habeck intended to force property owners to switch their heating systems to low-carbon alternatives within the next few years.

The fact that the supply of said alternatives is nowhere near sufficient – and that there are too few heating engineers to fit them – got lost in the haste…

The positive side of impatience

This example does, however, reveal one strongly positive side of our national impatience: if well- directed, it can create a sense of urgency about tackling thorny issues. Habeck is wrong to force the switch on an arbitrary timescale – but he is right to try and get things moving.

In most advanced economies, buildings are responsible for anything up to 40 percent of carbon emissions and, while major industrials have actually been cutting their CO2 output for decades now, the built environment has hardly seen any real improvements.

Ideally, a sensible compromise will be reached which sets out an ambitious direction of travel – and gets companies to start expanding capacity accordingly, upping output and increasing the number of systems which can be replaced later down the line. Less haste now, more speed later.

The same is true of our defence policy, which – after several directionless decades – is now being remodelled with impressive single-mindedness by a visibly impatient Boris Pistorius.

As for the check-outs for chatting, I’m not sure they’ll catch on. However counterproductive speed at the till may be, I just don’t see a large number of us being happy to sacrifice the illusion of rapidity so that a lonely old biddy can have a chinwag. Not that we are the heartless automatons that makes us sound like: Germany is actually a very chatty country.

It’s just that there’s a time and a place for it: at the weekly farmer’s markets, for instance, or at the bus stop. The latter is the ideal place to get Germans talking, by the way: just start with “About bloody time the bus got here, eh?” So langsam könnte der Bus ja kommen, wie ich finde…

READ ALSO: 7 places where you can actually make small talk with Germans

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