Lessons Learned in France
Terry H. Schwadron
April 26, 2022
Usually, or at least when Donald Trump is not a candidate, the easy part of elections, including Sunday’s presidential election in France that returned Emmanuel Macron, is determining the winner.
But even if the result is relatively to be expected through polling and wide numbers of voter interviews, figuring out what it means may be more complicated.
In the end, the rejection of the far-right alternative, Marine LePen by 17 percentage points not only made the outcome seem a handy win for Macron. But it obscured two far more important observations for us in the United States.
There is an obvious parallel between the French election and our own pending contests in November: In both, rising tide of anti-establishment anger about everything from what it means to be French these days to mask-wearing and covid, concern about high prices above all else, and campaigning against immigrants’ influence on changing the country’s values.
The second was the number who chose not to vote at all. This was a race in which the French found fault with both candidates, and the low turnout challenged previous records.
Plus, in a very recognizable refrain, many preferring Macron said they were voting against LePen as a yet worse alternative.
Those parallels sound extremely familiar.
The Results
Indeed, 41 percent of voters casting a ballot for LePen’s clear anti-NATO support for Russia amidst a war raging in Europe in which you would imagine that maintaining an international alliance would take on a higher profile. Her win would have broken NATO unanimity on supplying Ukraine with weapons to defend itself against Russian aggression.
As a Washington Post column by French journalist and filmmaker Rokhaya Diallo noted about an election campaign that grew increasingly ugly about Muslim immigrants, the result showed that “The far right has succeeded in normalizing its ideology — and that should worry us all.”
Despite LePen’s advocacy of laws to favor natives over immigration in a wide swath of social programs, the columnist concluded that France no longer sees LePen as a far-right threat divorced from reality.
LePen herself declared that she had “won” simply by increasing her share of the vote over previous attempts and focused on the summer parliamentary elections. She has managed to sanitize a political history that includes consistently warm words for Vladimir Putin and Russian banks that have backed her and her desire for far broader policing powers and anti-immigrant fervor.
Macron’s team owned up that the messages in the election will require changing policies to focus more on inflation and prices to attack a perceived erosion in purchasing power and living standards that has fueled resentment and public protest.
That might take the form of measures to increase pensions, raise social subsidies for households and tax breaks to encourage companies to give hefty cost-of-living bonuses. It likely also means extending caps on oil and gas prices rising as in the United States as after Russian oil sanctions, oil market moves and the effects of covid.
Lessons Learned?
It takes little special review to see a similar divisiveness in France as we see in our own country.
In France, as in the United States, slogans and easy answers dipped heavily in the sauce of “populism” are spreading to preserve traditional values, shun the foreigner, however needy, and to insist on a me-orientated society.
Some issues are unique to France, of course, where the labor force is far more protected than in the United States, and workweeks, pensions, pay, and everyday finance is more under government control. Still, both business and labor unions praised the Macron victory, while suggesting that he must work harder at bridging division — another familiar note.
Obviously, France has taken a leading role in the international coalition to face down Russia, and the potential for a rift with LePen could have proved fatal to Ukraine.
Among LePen supporters, the post-election message sounded a lot like what we hear from MAGA. The vows to keep pressing the government over a sense of being left behind were exactly what we hear at Donald Trump’s rallies.
From a broader perspective, we hear much the same rumblings across Europe’s right-learning parties from Hungary to Germany, where right-wing activity is way up.
California Rep. Kevin D. McCarthy went to the U.S. southern border on Monday to stir the Immigration pot in opposition to the Joe Biden administration. That he did so to take the heat off a brewing scandal of an audiotape that showed him lying about Trump and Jan. 6 is almost beside the point.
It’s the same playbook as France: Upset over prices, blame immigrants.
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