France’s next leader will inherit a tinderbox

Victory tonight could be a poisoned chalice, with the French people ready to vent their fury on politicians

WTo many voters, Macron, his clone-like ministers and docile young MPs remain as unfamiliar as aliens

hoever emerges as France’s next president this evening, whether Emmanuel Macron or Marine Le Pen, had better make the most of their victory lap. For awaiting them on Monday will be a country more sharply divided than at any time since 1940 – and a government enjoying the genuine support of, at best, a third of the electorate. Either will face a toxic coalition of citizens united more by their hatred of the winner than any positive sentiment. This leaves France in a bad place.

It used to be reasonably easy to pick your side in a French presidential run-off, because the words “Right” and “Left” still had a meaning. This is no longer the case; and Macron must bear the blame. His shock victory in 2017 – that of an unknown technocrat who’d never stood for elected office (you don’t need to be an MP to be a minister in France) – can be explained by an older French political instinct in times of crisis: Bonapartisme.

A graduate of the École Nationale d’Administration and former finance minister, Macron ticked the competence box. He was young, looked keen, and infuriated the old political warhorses on either side of the aisle. Miraculously, he seemed to offer a safe answer to the “kick the incumbents out” relex that is never entirely absent from French politics. He campaigned as the candidate of a new world, beyond old, tired politics: he called this “En Même Temps” (at the same time). You could be both Left and Right, pick the best from both sides: policies, people, voting blocs. What mattered was “Notre Projet!” (our project; and by the first person plural, he meant “my”). What he really invented was Populism 2.0, and that is what the French got.

France is by nature a top-down, hierarchical country, so it took some time to realise that Macron was a different animal to big beasts such as François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, even Nicolas Sarkozy. He seemed a political cuckoo, tied to no party: plundering both the Socialiste and Républicain ranks for his cabinet, always careful to pick lacklustre politicians who would give him no trouble. The one competent minister he kept on from the Hollande cabinet, Jean-Yves Le Drian, Macron immediately moved from defence to foreign affairs, fearing Le Drian’s closeness to the army chiefs.

Beholden to no one, Emmanuel Macron even disdained to turn his ad hoc movement, En Marche (the Leader’s initials are no coincidence), into a proper party. His short tenure as a Socialist minister instilled a hatred of messy political disagreements. The name became LREM (La République en Marche); it nurtured no grassroots support. This matters because to many voters, Macron, his clone-like ministers and docile young MPs remain as unfamiliar as aliens.

Marine Le Pen, leader of a softened but still hard-Right populist movement, is, like her father, liable to fire anyone expressing independent ideas around her. This is one of the reasons why Eric Zemmour managed to win 7 per cent of the vote and create a real party with 120,000 paid-up members in just 10 months.

Should Le Pen win, she will find assembled against her a hostile coalition of enemies drawn from Left and Right – none more vocal than France’s answer to Jeremy Corbyn, the Marxist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, an admirer of Putin and Castro who came within 400,000 votes of the run-off. Abroad, the EU and the US would brand Le Pen “unacceptable” and France would quickly supplant Britain as the pariah of Western Europe. All of which will validate a new cohort of opponents no doubt led by one very, very angry Emmanuel Macron.

So, whatever happens tonight, we can safely assume the French will follow an even older political tradition – taking to the streets to vent their fury.