Hacking scrambles chaotic contest
PARIS — France’s presidential election today has already broken all kinds of barriers in a country whose politics seemed frozen for decades. The two candidates are outsiders. The political establishment has been elbowed aside. The tone of the race between the insurgents has shocked many for its anger and insolence.
Then, barely an hour before the official close of campaigning at midnight Friday, the staff of the presumed front-runner, Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old former investment banker, announced that his campaign had been the target of a “massive and coordinated” hacking operation. Internal emails and other documents, some real, some fake, according to the campaign, were posted on 4chan, an online message board favored by white nationalists, in an apparent effort to aid his rival, Marine Le Pen, 48, the far-right leader.
Saturday was a surreal day in France. The dramatic timing of the leaks, coming
just as French law mandated a 44-hour media blackout before and during Sunday’s critical presidential runoff, jolted the final hours of the race.
Government officials warned that there could be charges filed against those who violated the law. The French media largely observed the blackout, offering little about the content of the hacking, which so far appeared to involve mostly mundane exchanges.
Le Monde, the influential daily newspaper, posted a note explaining to readers that it had obtained the leaked documents but would not be publishing any of them before the vote, saying that they had been released “with the clear goal of harming the validity of the ballot.”
But the hacking succeeded in sowing still more confusion in a race that was already among the most unpredictable in memory. Even before the last-minute attempt at sabotage, the election represented a big step into the political unknown for France — the first time in more than 50 years that neither of the establishment parties will be represented in the final round.
Instead, voters will choose one of two starkly different candidates who have each pledged to change the system, though in radically different ways.
Le Pen, a fierce nationalist, wants to take France out of the European Union and restore the franc. Macron, a centrist who formed his own party, En Marche!, wants to push market and labor reforms to make France more competitive and deepen its ties to the European Union.
“The experienced politicians were rejected, and now we have a new category of candidate,” said Dominique Bussereau, a member of the mainstream right party Les Republicains from southwest France.
But for all the turmoil, whether either candidate will be able to muster broad legislative or popular support is in doubt — raising the real possibility that an election intended to shake the status quo could still result in stasis. Can either candidate, as an outsider, really be effective as president?
Neither has ever held national elected office. Each lacks any real base of support in Parliament and will be trying to build one from the ground up. The president of France is powerful only with a majority in Parliament to help push through programs.
That uncertainty may ripple through Europe, which will be watching closely to gauge both the strength of far-right forces in France and the depth of anti-EU sentiment.
The differences between the candidates are so deep that the winner will surely be seen as a harbinger of Europe’s future. Resentment of EU rules and the failure of the bloc to wrestle with immigration and border controls were major issues in the campaign.
Beyond France, the election will be critical in determining Europe’s openness to the world and the fate of its generous social welfare benefits. It is being especially closely watched in Germany, which holds parliamentary elections in September, as well as in Italy, which could also hold elections this year.
In particular, a close eye will be kept on Le Pen’s share of the vote, which will serve as a gauge of the current strength of the populist tide that last year ushered Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and Donald Trump to power in the United States.
In the final polls, Macron was heavily favored to win — by as much as 20 percentage points. Still, the polls come after a long season of staggering electoral upsets around the world and in the face of the last-minute hacking of Macron’s campaign accounts.
Analysts were unsure what the impact of the hacking might be. Thomas Guenole, a political science professor at Sciences Po, one of France’s best universities, said the hacking was part of a larger trend in France toward “an Americanization of French politics,” citing scandals, leaks and fake news, as well as increased focus on the images of the candidates.
But he said that if the attack was meant to benefit Le Pen, it could backfire by putting “a very ugly shadow on the far right.”
No matter who wins, the country will be abandoning a political order that has shaped it for the last 59 years, when it was dominated by the country’s two mainstream parties — the Socialist Party and the center-right Republicans. This election has been shaped by new issues and resulted in an electorate effectively divided into quarters across the political spectrum, including left and right extremes and Macron’s new movement, En Marche! (“On Our Way!”).
“We are changing into a four-party system that has never existed before in France in the Fifth Republic, and that does not exist elsewhere in large European countries,” Bussereau said.
In the first round of the presidential vote, on April 23, the Socialist Party all but collapsed, its candidate receiving just 6.4 percent of the vote. The sitting president, Francois Hollande, a Socialist, is so unpopular that he became the first president in decades not to seek a second mandate. The candidate of the mainstream right, Francois Fillon, an experienced former prime minister, took about 20 percent of the vote in the first round after being tarnished by a nepotism scandal that led to embezzlement charges.
A big question now is where those voters will turn — to the center with Macron or farther to the right with Le Pen. Also in play are the 19 percent of voters who went in the first round with the far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon. Many may abstain, in effect aiding Le Pen.
Both the far left and the far right were animated by their deep resistance to globalization — be that economic, cultural or related to immigration — and it became a clear dividing line in the campaign. The issue has become a new and increasingly important political fissure in France and in Europe more broadly, and is breaking down traditional left-right political divisions. Instead, the political spectrum is being divided among winners and losers.
“It’s a consequence of the social-economic impact of globalization,” Guénolé said. “More and more people are feeling precarious.”
Even if Macron wins handily, as projected, his victory will chiefly reflect voters’ opposition to Le Pen and the National Front. The party remains anathema to large parts of the French electorate, in view of its history of anti-Semitism, racism, and apologias for France’s collaborators with the Nazis.
Yet the lines that now fissure French politics mean that neither of the two candidates facing each other in the runoff Sunday received even a quarter of the votes in the first round. Macron took 24 percent and Le Pen took 21 percent. That suggests that no matter who wins, their overall support will be relatively narrow.
For now, the French electorate seems more divided than at any other time in recent memory. Much will hang on parliamentary elections in June — an electoral one-two punch that gives voters yet another chance to consider the direction of the country, with the potential to either thrust France forward or prolong the ongoing paralysis.