The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Even if he wins today, Macron faces division
ST. REMY-SUR-AVRE, FRANCE » Eternal France, its villages gathered around church spires, its fields etched in a bright patchwork of green and rapeseed yellow, unfolds as if to offer reassurance in troubled times that some things do not change. But the presidential election today, an earthquake whatever its outcome, suggests otherwise.
France has changed. It has eviscerated the centerleft and center-right parties that were the chief vehicles of its postwar politics. It has split into three blocs: the hard left, an amorphous center gathered around President Emmanuel Macron and the extreme right of Marine Le Pen.
Above all, with Le Pen likely to get some 45% of the vote, it has buried a tenacious taboo. In a country that for four wartime years lived under the racist Nazipuppet Vichy government, no xenophobic, nationalist leader would be allowed into the political mainstream, let alone be able to claim the highest office in the land.
Unlikely to win, but well within the zone of a potential surprise, Le Pen has shattered all of that. She is no outlier. She is the new French normal. If Macron does edge to victory, as polls suggest, he will face a restive, fractured country, where hatred of him is not uncommon. The old nostrum that France is ungovernable may be tested again.
St. Remy-sur-avre, a small town of some 4,000 inhabitants about 60 miles west of Paris, is Le Pen territory. In the Maryland cafe, named for a cigarette brand that is no more, the prevailing view is that something has to give in a France that has lost its way under a president too privileged and remote to know anything of the burden of struggle.
Customers buy lottery tickets, or bet on the harness racing on television, in the hope of unlikely relief from hardship. A kir, white wine with a little black currant liqueur, is a popular morning drink. The streets are deserted; most stores have disappeared, crushed by the hypermarkets out on the highway. In this town, Le Pen took 37.2% of the vote in the first round of the election April 10, pushing Macron into a distant second with 23.6%.
Jean-michel Gerard, 66, one of the kir drinkers, worked in the meat business from age 15, as a butcher, in slaughterhouses or as a trucker hauling beef carcasses. But he had to stop at 60, when his knees gave out from regularly carrying several tons of meat a day on his back, the record being a single 465-pound rear of a bull.
“Now we have a generation of slackers,” he said. “When I was young, if you did not work, you did not eat.”
The old France of solidarity and fraternity had disappeared, he lamented, gone like the horse butchers where he started work and replaced by a new France of individualism, jealousy and indulgence.
The fraught relationship between France and Islam — in the country with the largest Muslim population in Western Europe and a recent history of terrorist attacks — has been one of the themes of the election campaign. Macron has called Le Pen’s program racist for wanting to make headscarves illegal on the grounds that they constitute a threatening “Islamist uniform” — on the face of it, an extraordinary claim, given that an overwhelming majority of Muslims in France just want to live peacefully.
“If women are wearing them just for their religion, OK,” Gerard said, “but I think in general it’s a provocation.”
The view of Macron in this town was of near-universal disdain.