Once the excitement of the exit polls had subsided, the harsh figures emerged. Emmanuel Macron, who was re-elected to the presidency with 59 per cent of the vote, had won the support of only 38.5 per cent of the electorate. The rate of abstentions in yesterday’s second round actually rose from 26 per cent in the first round, to a record 28 per cent. In his post-electoral declaration, the hard-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who missed beating Le Pen in the second round by fewer than 450,000 votes (1.3 per cent), said Macron is the worst elected president the Fifth Republic has ever had.
Yesterday, over three million voters took the trouble to turn up and spoil their ballots or cast blank votes, while a further 13m stayed at home. The ill-feeling is explained by the disintegration of the left/right party system in France, which meant that for the second time running, candidates from the two traditional parties of government, the Socialists and the Republicans, failed to qualify for the runoff.
Last night on French television their representatives joined in an embittered chorus. Ségolène Royal, the defeated Socialist candidate of 2007, said: “Voters had no choice, the election was won by the ‘vote barrage’” (the numbers who only voted for Macron to block Le Pen). And Christian Jacob, president of the centre-right Republican party, said: “Macron did everything he could to make sure that in the second round he would be up against Le Pen. He is the man responsible for the desperation of the millions who had no candidate from left or right to fight for.” In consequence, Macron’s 19m voters no more represented support for his manifesto than Le Pen’s 13m represented the “extreme right.”
Previous presidents elected to lead the Fifth Republic, from Charles de Gaulle in 1965 to François Hollande in 2012, have been supported in the ensuing legislative elections with a working majority. When Macron broke the mould in 2017, coming from nowhere to humiliate the two main parties, he too won a comfortable majority. But it may be very different this time round. Neither the right (split between the nationalist supporters of Le Pen and Éric Zemmour and the mainstream Republicans) nor the left (divided between the Socialists, the Communists, the Greens and Mélenchon’s movement “France Unbowed”) will necessarily succeed in uniting before the June legislative election. But the danger for Macron is that his working majority in the National Assembly will nonetheless evaporate, and cripple his government for the next five years. His programme, based on reform of public spending, the battle against global warming and protecting household budgets using tax cuts, will be unachievable, and the ranks of those who feel excluded will swell.
In order to achieve his aims, Macron’s choice of his next prime minister, which will probably be announced next week, will be critical. In 2017 he chose Édouard Philippe, a defector from the Republicans. This—together with his abolition of the wealth tax shortly after coming to power—ensured that he was dubbed “the president of the rich”—a tag he has been unable to live down.
This time he could choose a prime minister from the left, who might win a centre-left majority in parliament. But plausible candidates for this task are hard to discern—although Mélenchon, with typical bravado, has demanded the job already. Macron is more likely to favour another centre-right leader who would be more in tune with his programme. He has already started to woo potential defectors from the Republican Party, seeking out those who want to block Marine Le Pen’s stated plan to make a coalition of her own National Rally and the Republicans into the future champions of the right.
Although she has failed for the third time to win the presidency, Marine Le Pen cannot be written off. She won 2.7m more voters than in 2017. The old and many of the young shunned her, but she was heavily supported by the working population. Support for the nationalist cause, which was once concentrated in a strip along the Côte d’Azur from Marseilles to Nice and in the north along the Belgian border and around Calais, has now spread right across France. Overseas Territories such as Guadeloupe and Martinique also support her, despite the “racist” tag opponents have routinely pinned on her party. In fact, there is some evidence that the racist tag is viewed with less and less concern in France. Last night one right-wing commentator described as “absurd” any suggestion that Le Pen voters had “put the Republic in danger.” He pointed out that whenever “a multi-cultural elite of sports personalities, rock stars and celebrities” demand barricades against the “extreme right,” they insult all those who voted for Le Pen and undermine the electoral system.
What is already clear is that this election has left a very large proportion of French voters with the conviction that the game is not yet over. Nothing has yet been decided for the 16m who failed to vote yesterday. For them, the legislative elections in June will be “the third round.” Both Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen produced this argument, and this phrase, last night.
