France on the brink
Voters in France go to the polls today at the start of the country’s tightest presidential race in decades. Marine Le Pen, above, the Front National leader, is expected to make it through to the second round of voting in two weeks’ time. But the race is so close that experts say the final outcome cannot be forecast.
Surrounded by farms producing goat’s cheese and foie gras, the medieval town of Donzy in deepest Burgundy is, in many ways, textbook “la France profonde”. With a population of 1,660, it boasts a church, two doctors, a butcher, two bakers, three cafes, three schools and a retirement home. There are two factories making drinking straws and umbrellas on the outskirts, and a football pitch.
But Donzy is not just another picturesque rural town. It is France’s electoral equivalent of Basildon, seen as a political bellwether, having voted for the winning party at each general election since it became a constituency in 1974.
Donzy has reflected the national vote in seven presidential elections, with sometimes pinpoint accuracy. In 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the then Front National candidate, won 16.86 per cent of the first-round vote in Donzy and 16.87 per cent nationwide.
There was a wobble in round one in 2012, but it was back on track in the run-off, plumping for François Hollande, the socialist winner.
Yet with today’s first-round vote looming, Donzy’s political weather vane was in a spin, as no fewer than four candidates stood a chance of reaching the run-off. Latest polls showed the Front National’s Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron, the independent centrist, only slightly ahead of François Fillon, the conservative, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-Left hopeful.
Terrorism is hardly a pressing daily concern in the sleepy town, but Thursday’s Islamist murder of a policeman in the Champs-Elysées was on many people’s lips.
Even before the attack, the consensus of locals was that the Le Pen vote would be very high. Mickael, 30, an agricultural worker, made no bones about backing the anti-EU, anti-immigration contender who promises to make “forgotten France” her priority.
“I want radical change. I choose Marine Le Pen,” he said. “I juggle with two jobs to get by. I don’t take my kids on holiday. I am the France that works, that people don’t look at or listen to.”
Sitting in a bar, Frédérique Charpin, 31, an accountant at the local retirement home, was also tilting towards the FN candidate. “People have had enough of the way the French political system is organised. Why not change everything with Marine Le Pen?” she asked.
But she held out little hope Ms Le Pen would win the run-off. “In the first round, it will be Le Pen-Macron but after that, Macron will win as the French are scaredy cats. The Le Pens never win. But I’d like it to be her turn.”
At the counter, Vincent Chavouet, 33, a care worker, was mulling backing the other extreme in Mr Mélenchon, an admirer of Fidel Castro, who he felt had interesting ideas on ecology and was not as extreme as some claim.
Preparing ballot boxes in his town hall, Jean-Paul Jacob, Donzy’s independent Right-wing mayor, envisaged a big protest vote.
Thursday’s attack would only increase that trend, he believed. “I’m convinced it will boost Le Pen. It may not radically change things, but given that the runners are all so close, it won’t take much for the running order to change,” he said.
Mr Jacob, a rotund notary, who is plumping for Mr Fillon, brushed aside charges that he illicitly paid his British wife a fortune in public funds for a “fake job”, calling it a Left-wing plot.
As for Mr Macron, “he’s cuckoo who has made his nest in the Left and the Right but doesn’t have his own,” he scoffed.
Preparing the fattened livers of geese culled that morning at his foie gras farm, Frédéric Coudray, 49, insisted that was precisely why he backed Mr Macron. “It’s good to bring together the best ideas of the Right and Left,” he said.
People mock him for sitting on the fence, he said. “But it’s good to question, to have doubts, to weigh up the for and against,” he said.
Fretting about the impact of the Champs-Elysées attack, he recalled the story of Paul Voise, a pensioner attacked and robbed by youths who then set fire to his home in Orléans in 2002. It received huge media coverage and a wave of public anger over crime.
Two days later, Jean-Marie Le Pen confounded pollsters by finishing second in the first round of the presidential election.
Sitting in their stone house on Donzy’s outskirts, Gill and Jon Sibley, 58 and 66 respectively, are the town’s only two Britons eligible to vote, having dual nationality. The committed ecologists have chosen the same candidate, the Socialist Benoît Hamon, whom they see as the only “forwardlooking” contender who prioritises green issues. Mr Hamon is languishing on around 8.5 per cent in polls.
Both are unequivocal that Ms Le Pen will reach the run-off but are divided on who will be her final opponent. For Mrs Sibley, Mr Macron will win out. “I think he has a very good chance because he represents no change whatsoever, and I think the French don’t particularly like change,” she said. Mr Sibley felt that Mr Fillon would win in Donzy, as the town’s ageing population would go for a safe pair of hands.
Mr Coudray too felt there was a significant “hidden Fillon vote” and that he would finish “ahead of Macron” in Donzy.
Summing up the mist of indecision shrouding France, where a third of voters are still undecided, he said: “I see many people who don’t know who to vote for… I even imagine some will get as far as placing their ballot in the box and then pulling it out again, saying, ‘I’ve changed my mind’. That’s the state of play.”