He still has the advantage over Marine Le Pen in the run-off
FOR THE third time in the past 20 years a candidate of the hard right has made it through to the run-off round of France’s presidential election, a development that has caused much anxiety in liberal circles across Europe and beyond. The panic is overdone. The French do not much like their presidents, often relishing elections as an opportunity to give an incumbent a good kick in the teeth. Only two have been re-elected since 1965.
Just as in 2017, Mr Macron will face Marine Le Pen in the run-off. Ms Le Pen has done a good job of rebranding herself and her party. She focused her campaign on bread-and-butter issues like energy prices rather than only on toxic ones like immigration. After her previous defeat she changed the name of her party from the National Front, which she had inherited from her overtly racist father, to the more mainstream-sounding National Rally.
From here it is much easier to see a path to a second term for Mr Macron than an upset by Ms Le Pen. The president should pick up most of the votes of the eliminated mainstream candidates; Ms Le Pen will grab those of the far-right Eric Zemmour. So the election will be determined by a scrabble for the votes of the perennial firebrand, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who got an astonishing 22%, thanks partly to tactical voting on the left.
French voters should be in no doubt: a Le Pen presidency would be a disaster for France and for Europe. Ms Le Pen has in the past expressed open admiration for Mr Trump and Vladimir Putin and still supports Hungary’s autocratic Viktor Orban. She wants to pull France out of NATO’s integrated command structure, and to ban the Muslim headscarf .
Whatever transpires in the second round, the fact that on April 10th a record 58% voted for the extremes of right and left is a sign that France is divided and unhappy. In presidential politics the two mainstream parties of left and right that supplied almost all its governments since 1958 have been vaporised—their candidates got less than 7% between them.
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