A Le Pen win could be West’s biggest shock
Dissatisfied French voters abstaining from election could help defeat Macron
Forget Britain’s vote for Brexit. Forget U.S. President Donald Trump’s November win. If Marine Le Pen somehow defeats Emmanuel Macron in France’s presidential runoff vote on Sunday, it may be the biggest electoral shock in the West so far this century.
Awin by the leader of the French far right would see a leading European nation select a president emphatically opposed to globalization and integration, friendly to authoritarian Russia and tethered to a party, the National Front, that is steeped in a history of neo-fascism, extremism and bigotry.
It could prefigure the dissolution of the European Union, trigger new economic chaos and hammer home the last nail in the coffin of an already ailing liberal order.
A Le Pen victory “means the collapse of the EU, because the EU without France doesn’t make any sense,” Gerard Araud, France’s ambassador in Washington, said in a conversation with the Washington Post earlier this year. “And it means the collapse of the euro and a financial crisis, which will have consequences throughout the world.”
It’s still an unlikely outcome. Polls place Macron ahead of Le Pen by roughly 20 points with just a few days to go. Most observers thought he was the clear victor in an ill-tempered Wednesday night debate. But Macron’s supporters have good reason to feel jittery.
Reports suggest that many disaffected French voters across the political spectrum may abstain. Those voters already rejected France’s traditional conservative and centre-left parties amid a wave of public dissatisfaction. Macron’s boosters see his independent movement — known by its slogan “En Marche,” or “Onward” — as an opportunity to rejuvenate the country with a new “radical centrism.” His critics, principally Le Pen, but also some on the left, cast the former banker as an out-oftouch member of the financial elite beholden to tired neo-liberal dogma.
This disillusionment is most apparent in the rhetoric of leftist presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who won close to 20 per cent of the first-round vote. While denouncing Le Pen, he has refused to endorse Macron, who served briefly in the Socialist government of President François Hollande and implemented reforms criticized by the left. A poll this week found that some 65 per cent of Mélenchon voters would not vote for the centrist candidate, preferring to spoil their ballots or not turn up at all. But even if Le Pen charts a narrow path to victory, her battle will only really begin the day after the election.
Based on conversations with senior politicians and advisers to France’s major parties, including the National Front, Politico Europe’s Nicholas Vinocur imagined what Le Pen’s first 100 days would look like. It would begin likely with riots in some of the country’s alienated minority suburbs, as well as chaos in the markets and a potential banking crisis. And then things could really get crazy.
Le Pen, in a bid to appeal to a broader swath of the country, would fill her cabinet with officials from various conservative factions. But that may not help her in France’s legislative elections in June. The prospect of “cohabitation” — when the president and the prime minister, who heads the government, represent two different parties — would be all the more likely.
Le Pen, writes Vinocur, could be “condemned to kibitzing the government while signing executive decrees” on matters ranging from immigration to the process of quitting the European Union. “But decrees would be open to legal challenges from lower courts,” he notes. “Le Pen would spend much of her first 100 days locked in legal disputes, imposing executive will whenever possible.” (Where have we seen this before?)
The more dire scenarios, according to Vinocur, could see Le Pen dissolve Parliament or even invoke an article in the constitution that allows the president full control at a moment when the nation is deemed to be under extreme existential threat. But that, Macron and others in Europe could argue, is what Le Pen already represents.