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2022 FRENCH PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Macron warns of Brexit-like shock in French election rally

French president Emmanuel Macron dangled the possibility of a Brexit-like debacle in his campaign rally on Saturday, ahead of the first round of presidential election voting.

Published: 3 April 2022 11:26 CEST
Macron warns of Brexit-like shock in French election rally
French President and liberal party La Republique en Marche (LREM) candidate for re-election Emmanuel Macron greets his supporters during his first campaign meeting at the Paris La Defense Arena, in Nanterre, on the outskirts of Paris, on April 2, 2022. (Photo by Thomas COEX / AFP)

With just a week to go until the first round of elections on April 10th, Macron and his team pulled out all the stops to rouse voters and boost his bid to remain as France’s president in what’s been described as a ‘rockstar’ campaign rally by international media.

Arriving to fireworks and fist-bumps, Macron addressed a crowd of around 30,000 in Paris’s La Défense Arena – a vast venue that usually hosts top-level rugby and rock concerts.

“Look at what happened with Brexit, and so many other elections: what looked improbable actually happened,” Macron told supporters. “Nothing is impossible.”

“The danger of extremism has reached new heights because, in recent months and years, hatred, alternative truths have been normalised. We have got used to see on TV shows antisemitic and racist authors,” he added.

Macron worked to pull back a share of voters in what was his first rally on Saturday, late in the campaign due to being distracted by the war in Ukraine.

In the meantime, far-right Marine LePen has been gaining ground and making a comeback in the polls, tightening the race and threatening to take what was believed to be Macron’s unassailable lead.

READ ALSO: OPINION Growing apathy in France could yet produce a shock election result

The latest Elabe poll published Saturday showed Le Pen garnering 47 percent of the vote in a second-round run-off against Macron, who was projected to win 53 percent.

Allowing for a margin of error in the poll, this could put Le Pen in the zone to snatch victory.

Although Macron is still just about in the lead, he’s lost some ground in the polls due to his late campaign efforts and his policies on increasing the state pension age to 65.

In his two-hour rally speech on Saturday, Macron touched on topics such as job creation in the healthcare system in a bid to attract centre-left voters, who the polls have suggested may abstain from voting.

And he confirmed his plans to raise the retirement age: “I am not hiding the fact that we will have to work more,” according to a Reuters report.

Referring to opponents such as LePen and far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, he said, “Don’t believe those who say they will cut the retirement age to 60 or 62 and that everything will be alright. That’s not true.”

However, he did promise to raise the minimum pension to around €1,100 per month if you worked full time, up from around €700 now.

Other campaign promises included a tax-free bonus worth €6,000 for employees to mitigate against the surging cost of food and energy bills due to war in Ukraine.

Macron supporters chanted for the current President’s re-election, waiving the French tricolour flag while shouting, “Macron, president! One, two, five more years!”

But will it be enough to maintain his narrow lead in the polls?

“Of course Marine Le Pen can win,” Macron’s former prime minister Edouard Philippe warned in an interview with the Le Parisien daily posted online Thursday.

READ ALSO: VIDEO: The 12 French presidential candidates’ campaign films

Philippe, who is backing Macron, added that “if she wins, believe me, things will be seriously different for the country… Her programme is dangerous.”

Le Pen, who lost to Macron in the 2017 polls run-off, has sought to moderate her image in the last half decade in a process helped by the emergence of Eric Zemmour as a fellow candidate in the far-right.

Meanwhile, the left’s main hope is the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon who most polls project coming in third place but believes he has a chance of making a run-off.

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FRENCH ELECTIONS

French election breakdown: TV clash, polling latest and ‘poo’ Le Pen

From the polls latest to the first big TV election clash, via a lot of questions about the French Constitution and the president's future - here's the situation 17 days on from Emmanuel Macron's shock election announcement.

Published: 26 June 2024 08:15 CEST
French election breakdown: TV clash, polling latest and 'poo' Le Pen

During the election period we will be publishing a bi-weekly ‘election breakdown’ to help you keep up with the latest developments. You can receive these as an email by going to the newsletter section here and selecting subscribe to ‘breaking news alerts’.

It’s now been 17 days since Macron’s surprise call for snap parliamentary elections, and four days until the first round of voting.

TV debates

The hotly-anticipated first TV debate of the election on Tuesday night turned out to be an ill-tempered affair with a lot of interruptions and men talking over each other.

The line of the night went to the left representative Manuel Bompard – who otherwise struggled to make much of an impact – when he told far-right leader Jordan Bardella (whose Italian ancestors migrated to France several generations back): “When your personal ancestors arrived in France, your political ancestors said exactly the same thing to them. I find that tragic.”

But perhaps the biggest question of all is whether any of this matters? The presidential election debate between Macron and Marine Le Pen back in 2017 is widely credited with influencing the campaign as Macron exposed her contradictory policies and economic illiteracy.

However a debate ahead of the European elections last month between Bardella and prime minister Gabriel Attal was widely agreed to have been ‘won’ by Attal, who also managed to expose flaws and contradictions in the far right party’s policies. Nevertheless, the far-right went on to convincingly beat the Macronists at the polls.

Has the political scene simply moved on so that Bardella’s brief and fact-light TikTok videos convince more people than a two-hour prime-time TV debate?

You can hear the team from The Local discussing all the election latest on the Talking France podcast – listen here or on the link below

Road to chaos

Just over two weeks ago when Macron called this election, he intended to call the bluff of the French electorate – did they really want a government made up of Marine Len Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party?

Well, latest polling suggests that a large portion of French people want exactly that, and significantly fewer people want to continue with a Macron government.

With the caveat that pollsters themselves say this is is a difficult election to call, current polling suggests RN would take 35 percent of the vote, the leftist alliance Nouveau Front Populaire 30 percent and Macron’s centrists 20 percent.

This is potentially bad news for everyone, as those figures would give no party an overall majority in parliament and would instead likely usher in an era of political chaos.

The questions discussed in French conversation and media have now moved on from ‘who will win the election?’ to distinctly more technical concerns like – what exactly does the Constitution say about the powers of a president without a government? Can France have a ‘caretaker government’ in the long term? Is it time for a 6th republic?.

The most over-used phrase in French political discourse this week? Sans précédent (unprecedented).

Démission

From sans précédent to sans président – if this election leads to total chaos, will Macron resign? It’s certainly being discussed, but he says he will not.

For citizens of many European parliamentary democracies it seems virtually automatic that the president would resign if he cannot form a government, but the French system is very different and several French presidents have continued in post despite being obliged to appoint an opponent as prime minister.

READ ALSO Will Macron resign in case of an election disaster?

The only president of the Fifth Republic to resign early was Charles de Gaulle – the trigger was the failure of a referendum on local government, but it may be that he was simply fed up; he was 78 years old and had already been through an attempted coup and the May 1968 general strike which paralysed the country. He died a year after leaving office.

Caca craft

She might be riding high in the polls, but not everyone is enamoured of Le Pen, it seems, especially not in ‘lefty’ eastern Paris – as seen by this rather neatly crafted Marine Le Pen flag stuck into a lump of dog poo left on the pavement.

Thanks to spotter Helen Massy-Beresford, who saw this in Paris’s 20th arrondissement.

You can find all the latest election news HERE, or sign up to receive these election breakdowns as an email by going to the newsletter section here and selecting subscribe to ‘breaking news alerts’.

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