Macron admits he left declaration too late
French president claims war in Ukraine delayed his entry to the race as rival Le Pen drives up the polls
Emmanuel Macron has admitted he may have entered the French presidential race too late, after announcing his candidacy the day before the deadline. He enjoyed a comfortable early lead, but the gap has narrowed and the latest Ifop poll gives him a four-point lead over Marine Le Pen in the second run-off phase of the election. Rivals have criticised Mr Macron for waiting to declare his intention to run until the 11th hour and for refusing to enter into TV debates.
EMMANUEL MACRON has admitted he may have entered the French presidential race too late, after failing to announce his candidacy until the day before the deadline closed.
Mr Macron has faced criticism from rivals for waiting to declare his intention to run until the eleventh hour. The incumbent’s opponents have also complained about his refusal to take part in debates during the campaign.
Mr Macron enjoyed a comfortable lead early on in the race, but the gap has narrowed in recent weeks with the latest Ifop poll showing a 52-48 split between him and Marine Le Pen in the second runoff of the election.
Analysts credit Ms Le Pen’s rise to her softened image and focus on national issues such as purchasing power, a top concern for voters as inflation rises.
Mr Macron admitted regret for pushing back the start of his official campaign, which he said was delayed because of the war in Ukraine.
“Who could have understood six weeks ago that all of a sudden I would start political rallies, that I would focus on domestic issues when the war started in Ukraine?” Mr Macron said on French radio RTL yesterday morning.
“So it is a fact that I entered [the campaign] even later than I wished,” he said, adding he retained a “spirit of conquest rather than of defeat”.
Mr Macron claimed Ms Le Pen was relying on Russian money as he accused her of “racist lying”.
“Her fundamentals have not changed,” he told Le Parisien. “It is a racist programme, of which the goal is to split society in the most brutal way.”
Mr Macron’s comments come a day after Ms Le Pen argued any woman wearing an Islamic headscarf in public in France should be fined.
Mr Macron also said Ms Le Pen was “financially dependent” on Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, claiming she had “always showed complacency towards him”.
Ms Le Pen visited Mr Putin in 2017, and her party is repaying a €9million (£7.5million) loan from a Russian bank, used to finance her last presidential campaign.
Mr Macron also accused her of lying about some of the fundamentals of her campaign, including a promise to raise pensions. “When she says ‘I’m going to raise pensions and you’re all going to sleep better as a result’, it’s not true. She is lying to the people because she won’t do it.”
The 44-year-old, self-described centrist, who served as the economy minister under François Hollande, the former Socialist president, also criticised Ms Le Pen’s fiscal policy, which he says would dissuade international investment.
“Her programme will create massive unemployment because it will drive international investors away, and it will not hold up budget-wise,” he said.
Jean-luc Melenchon, currently in third place, has also enjoyed a small boost in the polls recently, and is forecast to take 17.5 per cent of votes in the first round tomorrow. Ms Le Pen is predicted to take 24 per cent and Mr Macron is expected to take 26.5 per cent. Valérie Pécresse, the centre-right candidate, is in fourth place with 9 per cent, while Eric Zemmour, the far-right Reconquest Party leader, is forecast to take 8.5 per cent.
Yesterday, Christiana Taubira, the former centre-left candidate and exjustice minister, said she would vote for Mr Melenchon in the first round “to block the far-right”. She called on the entire Left of the electorate to follow suit, arguing Mr Melenchon was the only candidate in a position to help them.
“The accession of the far-right to power is a risk we can not resolve,” she wrote in a statement.
Concerns about voter abstention remain high, with the latest Ipsos poll suggesting roughly a third of voters were not sure if they would vote. Potential abstention is higher amongst young voters, with only 53 per cent of people aged 18 to 24 saying they plan to vote.
TLe Pen is too easy a figure to run against. If you are Macron, there can be no better challenger in the final round
he French are going to the polls again. And once again I get to make my traditional prediction for the results. Which is that whoever wins, the results will always be the same. The French public will once again vote for revolution. And having so voted they will then spend the ensuing years resisting all change.
That was certainly the case both during and after the last presidential election in 2017. On that occasion a starry newcomer arrived on the French political scene. The major parties of Left and Right had all mired themselves in trouble. The main candidate of the centre-right – François Fillon – had fallen into a murkily revealed scandal. And with the whole political centre in disarray, Emmanuel Macron came through the middle to charm everyone.
All sides were able to perceive in him at least something of what they liked. Some of the French Left could imagine him as one of their own, with his occasionally “progressive” vision for the country. Some of the French Right could imagine that the economy would be in safe hands with this former investment banker at the helm.
Macron did not really have a party when he ran, or even after he won. For En Marche to move at all, it had to be cobbled together, with candidates joining to form a body in the French parliament after the president had been elected.
But Macron had many things going for him when he ran in 2017. Not only was he a breath of almost fresh air, he was also not a member of the Le Pen family. And Macron benefited, as Jacques Chirac did in 2002, from being in the final run-off against a member of the most divisive dynasty in modern France.
Marine Le Pen is not her father, and has indeed done much to distance herself from his Vichyite politics. But still the presence of Le Pen was the best possible way for Macron to reach power.
In the end, despite the excitement of the Anglophone press, Macron triumphed over his opponent by almost two thirds of the vote to Le Pen’s one third. There was a sigh of relief. And then the usual expectation of change.
And once again, as so often in French politics, nothing much happened. As president of the Republic, Macron spent the following five years trying to find a role for himself on the world stage. And it was little wonder that he tried there, because his record at home was almost wildly lacklustre.
There turned out to be nothing, or very nearly nothing, that Macron could do to kickstart the staid French economy. He arrived into office promising to free “the spirit of enterprise” but he managed not a thing even close to it.
While some of the rich in France managed to get richer, as those with assets all around the developed world have, for the working classes the situation flatlined. The gilets jaunes (yellow vest) protests burst out, during which low-visibility people wore high-visibility jackets in order to try to alert the government to the concerns of ordinary working people. But they were treated with disdain by the government and sometimes disgraceful brutality by the French police.
The problem simmered. Macron’s supporters point to a 1.6 per cent increase in the standard of living over the past five years as a whole. But they fail to take into account not just the fall in purchasing power among the country’s poorest households, but the fact that what looks good on paper is not remotely good in practice.
For instance, Macron’s fans are busily pointing to the fact that last year saw a 7 per cent increase in the size of the French economy. But that is only because the year before, during the pandemic of 2020, the same economy saw a historic dip of 8 per cent. What exactly is there to boast about there?
No wonder Macron is trying to bestride the world stage. But the word “trying” is the important one there. For the aspiration and the reality have been very different things. While the Five Eyes Anglosphere intelligence network foresaw the Russian invasion of Ukraine, French intelligence seems to have underestimated Vladimir Putin’s likelihood of attacking his neighbour.
This was not only an intelligence failure by the French intelligence community – a community which has never been low on self-regard. It also led Macron into a flurry of officious and utterly pointless jetting around the world, notably to the Kremlin, under the belief that Putin might be dissuaded from his intentions by the charms of the French president.
Nothing of the sort happened. And that has become the leitmotif of the Macron years.
When he ran for the presidency, France had suffered a series of bloody and appalling Islamist attacks. Macron was one of the many candidates who claimed that he – and only he – could get a grip on France’s endemic problems of immigration, integration and radicalisation. Nothing has been sorted out during his tenure. Islamist attacks continue.
Only weeks ago another French Jew was murdered. The attack was almost covered over, most likely in part because the authorities knew that it could only assist the arguments of Marine Le Pen and her own challenger from the Right, the writer Eric Zemmour.
Zemmour himself had a good start to the campaign, coming out of the starting blocks with enormous energy and excitement all around him. For a time it looked as though he might even be able to dislodge Le Pen from her family’s traditional and lamentable position as the challenger from the Right. Any such challenger who was not a Le Pen could some day have a genuine chance at the presidency, unencumbered as they would be from the sinister dynasticism that exists in that political fiefdom.
But for a range of reasons, Zemmour seems to have slipped in the polls and it looks likely that after the first round Macron will once again find himself in the position he most desires: a run-off against Marine Le Pen.
As is also traditional, there is once again a certain degree of excitement about this prospect. For in recent days Le Pen has been closing in on Macron in the polls. Even those who do not support her can often feel a certain relish at the idea of the whole static system being upset at least a little for once.
But Le Pen is simply too easy a figure to run against. If you are Macron there can be no better challenger in the final round. It is what François Mitterrand realised 40 years ago when he allowed Le Pen senior into the television debates and thus, having let him out of his cage, managed to divide the French Right and return himself to office despite his own weak electoral showing.
As it was then, so it is likely to be now. There will be promises galore from Le Pen. There will be promises galore from Macron. Both will talk tough.
Macron will pretend that he and only he can take France to the next stage: the stage he has failed to take it to in the past five years. But then, at the final analysis, he will glide back into the Élysée on the simple fact that things could have been worse. He could have been Le Pen.
And so the disillusionment of French voters will continue.
There are countries where the political class are a hostage of their voters. In France it is the other way around. The voters are hostages of their political class. A political class that forever promises so much and delivers so little. But at some point you have to accept that perhaps that is what the nation wants. Both all and nothing.