Of events that matter in 2022, Covid lockdown fines for our prime minister and chancellor, even the landslide re-election last week of Europe’s arch populist Viktor Orbán, pale into insignificance alongside the French presidential election. Emmanuel Macron’s decisive lead and huge momentum from the first round on Sunday make him the almost certain victor in the second round run-off against the populist Marine Le Pen—a contest with huge ramifications not only for France but for the war in Ukraine, for the containment of populism, and for the future of the European Union as a bastion of liberal democracy and prosperity.
None of this is hyperbole, for the president of France, if a strong leader with a mandate, has always been the pivotal figure in the EU. A re-elected Macron, full of dynamism and charisma, and who has already established himself as the effective leader of Europe and prime interlocutor with Putin on Ukraine, would be the strongest pro-active leader on the continent since Helmut Kohl after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Unlike Angela Merkel, from whom he inherited Europe’s effective leadership last year, Macron is a force for action, not reaction. It’s a crucial distinction which presages a new chapter in Europe’s construction, maybe as significant as the creation of the single European currency which Kohl and François Mitterrand, who was then French president, deliberately put alongside German reunification in the 1990s to make a resurgent Germany “safe” for Europe. The fateful decision of John Major and then Tony Blair to stay out of the Euro marked the effective abdication of Britain from leadership in the EU, long before Brexit.
Why is the French presidency so pivotal, given that Germany is by far the larger country both in population (83m plays 67m), and even more so in wealth ($3.8trn plays $2.6trn in 2020 GDP)? It is partly because the president of France is directly elected, whereas the German chancellor is indirectly elected by the Bundestag. This does not necessarily make the German leader weaker, so long as they are a dominant figure heading the largest party, as with Konrad Adenauer in the 1950s and Kohl in the 1980s and 1990s. But Olaf Scholz is at the other end of the spectrum: a self-effacing figure leading Germany’s first, and visibly precarious, three-party coalition in its postwar history.
The significant point in the relationship between Scholz and Macron is that the former is a centrist social democrat whose agenda—social market economics and pro-western geopolitics, with a strong pro-EU dimension to both—is practically identical to the latter’s. The French leader’s party, however, is personal, and doesn’t even pretend to be a constraining ideology to his pragmatic social-liberal centrism. Its very name, La République En Marche!, is based on his own initials, EM.
There is also important history in play in France. The French president’s autocratic powers were deliberated invested in the office by Charles de Gaulle when he seized control of the French state in a bloodless coup d’etat in 1958, in the midst of the decolonisation crisis in Algeria and just a year after the creation of what is now the European Union. De Gaulle loathed parliamentary machinations and coalitions, which he blamed for French weakness not only in handling Algeria, but in both of the calamitous European wars of the previous half century. He governed for over a decade as an elected monarch. He even gave the presidency a seven-year term, now reduced to five but with no diminution in the powers.
France is a unitary state with no territorial federal division of powers, so the central government led by the president is overwhelmingly dominant. It really is still a case of l’etat, c’est moi, as Louis XIV supposedly said, allowing for power brokers and weak monarchs then as now. By contrast, the chancellor of Germany is a parliamentary leader of a federal state who rules alongside 16 powerful minister presidents, particularly of the larger states including Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony. Tellingly, chancellors are often former leaders of federal states—Scholz was mayor of Hamburg—whereas French presidents are often former ministers or high state officials in Paris, like Macron, who was both at an exceptionally early age.
For France, the coming run-off election is about populism, racism and modernisation. Macron is pushing the anti-populist uniting issue of Europe to the fore. He opened his second-round campaign in Strasbourg, home of the European parliament and bordering Germany, claiming that Le Pen, who has consorted with both Putin and Trump, would herald an effective “Frexit.”
Le Pen denies wanting to pull France out of either the Euro or the EU, and dodges accusations of racism. But the record of her utterances is there on major aspects of Europe, migration and race. Incredibly, close associates of Le Pen overtly subscribe to the so-called great replacement theory, the pet theme of fellow far-right demagogue Éric Zemmour, which incredibly has gripped much of French popular discourse and says that a whole shift of population and culture from Christian to Muslim is underway in France and Europe. This is rallying practically everyone mainstream to Macron’s banner, whoever they voted for in the first round, which saw Macron ahead of Le Pen by 28 to 23 per cent.
Le Pen’s populism remains highly potent, not least because a key policy issue of the election is the French retirement age, which Macron proposes to raise to 65 in line with demography and pension imperatives. Le Pen proposes to keep it at 60/62, as did the Corbynite left populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who polled narrowly behind Le Pen at 22 per cent. The danger for Macron is that Le Pen becomes the candidate of populists both left and right, which is why he is focusing on Europe and even hinting at a referendum on the pension age.
Lurking behind the whole election, more significant than any of this, is Putin and Ukraine. If Le Pen were to win, Europe’s whole geopolitics would obviously fall into turmoil. Macron, by contrast, would obviously hold the existing EU line and herald a long overdue boost to European defence. There could be no more fitting descendant of General de Gaulle.
