French Presidential Elections: A history of the recent present
The first round of the French Presidential Elections take place on Sunday with the incumbent Macron looking to head off another significant challenge from the far right to fascist Le Pen. Ideally anyone on the left would want either of them and a left challenger Melenchon again only just failed to get second place. In 2017 he narrowly failed to make the second round in favour of Le Pen.
The traditional parties of the French right, and the left the socialist and communists are not challenging. Macron presents himself as what in the UK would be called a ‘centrist’ or centre politician. His record underlines just what they can mean in practice. Below is a piece I wrote in 2019 about protests of the Gilets Jaunes. Politically a mixed grouping, the motor for the protest was the Macron’s policies were hitting the poor hardest while he did well himself.
The same remains true now. He is proposing a raising the pension age (a long standing issue in France- and here) and demanding that those who seek unemployment benefit must anyway work for some hours a week
Both Le Pen and Melenchon have campaigned around this successfully although the former has bee helped by a candidate even more unpleasantly right-wing than she is, Zemmour- an apologist for wartime Vichy- who has declined in the polls.
The point being that the policies of Macron have allowed space for Le Pen, while the left isn’t able to capitalise to the same extent.
One can of course argue, prudently, for anyone but Le Pen, but the Macron issue is only underwriting yet more potential for the far right in future. This is not an unfamiliar conundrum broken really only by continued organisation and protests from below
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