Le vote confusion

French society has never felt more divided than today, on the eve of the final round of the presidential elections on Sunday May 7. Family dinners are rife with disputes about blank votes, Facebook feeds have become battlegrounds where the modalities of political engagement are being opposed, where friends are shaming each other over their political opinions. And I’m not even talking about fights with your crazy conservative uncle who professes a love for authoritarian regimes or with anonymous trolls online. Anger has penetrated the safest, most trusted, most intimate circles to an extent which even the French, used to debating and complaining as they are, find exhausting and frightening.

Eleven candidates vied for 37 million votes in the first round of the elections on April 23. François Fillon, a former Prime Minister, was the conservative candidate and appeared as the favourite to succeed François Hollande, whose approval ratings have been nosediving for months. But in January 2017, the press revealed a succession of corruption scandals that marred the whole campaign and eventually rendered Fillon’s candidacy untenable. Emmanuel Macron was the new favourite, according to opinion polls. On April 23, this young, handsome and relatively inexperienced politician, who enjoys unprecedented support among industrial and media elites, won the first round. Or rather, he was only a few points ahead of his contender Marine Le Pen (with less than a million votes between them). The voters will now have to decide who among the two will be France’s next president.

The President of France is virtually a monarch with a hold on all executive branches (and, informally, often on the judiciary as well). This election will therefore largely determine the future of the country and Europe.

Let us look at the two contenders.

Macron, a 39-year-old social-liberal, is poised to win against Le Pen, who inherited the leadership of the extreme-Right Front National (FN) from her father, Jean-Marie. Macron is Hollande’s former finance minister, before which was a banker for four years. Having studied at Henri IV and then the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), he is the epitome of the French elite schooling system. Last year, he lent his name to a law, the loi Macron, which is construed as a first step towards the rewriting and downgrading of many hard-fought and protective labour laws. Macron presents himself as the face of the future: young, global, English-speaking, pro-European. He is somehow reminiscent of Tony Blair and fares unsurprisingly well with globalised urban yuppies. Unsurprisingly too, a large portion of the electorate, from the extreme Right to the extreme Left, finds him unpalatable. He’s frequently referred to as “the banker” and “Hollande’s heir” by Le Pen’s supporters and the extreme Left voters alike.

Le Pen is a populist, a revisionist who denies the responsibility of the French government in the deportation of hundreds of Jews during World War II. A couple of days ago, she back stepped on her intention to have a Frexit (French Brexit ) referendum, and to abandon the Euro currency and go back to the franc. Le Pen disguises her isolationism as sovereignism, claims she is not a misogynist because she is a woman, or a homophobe, because prominent figures in her party are openly gay. The fact is she would like to go back on the right to abortion, the equal marriage act that enables LGBT people to marry and would like to reinstate the death penalty. She is also viewed as deeply racist and Islamophobic, and would like to curb migration and deny several fundamental rights to foreigners living in France.

So this is not the case of a conservative candidate versus a progressive candidate. This is more complex, and yet, simpler. And this is precisely why the atmosphere in France is so tense. Over 60 per cent of the total number voters chose neither candidate in the first round, and 83.7 per cent of the total French population did not vote for either Macron or Le Pen (either by choice or because they were not entitled to vote).

As a matter of fact, a third character emerged as a crucial player. His name is Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his far-Left movement, La France Insoumise (The Indomitable France) has managed to garner 19.5 per cent — seven million — of the votes in the first round. And while he repeatedly asked his followers to not vote for Le Pen, he didn’t explicitly ask them to choose Macron, whom he sees as a rogue capitalist. All the other candidates with a sizeable vote share appealed to their electorate in favour of Macron. In 2002, when Le Pen’s father reached the second round of the presidential election, Mélenchon did not hesitate to ask his supporters to rally around his opponent. His 2017 stance is a stark departure from his principled 2002 appeal. Consequently, the professed intention of many of his followers to abstain from voting on May 7 has caused deep divisions within the Left and among all liberals. Fillon’s loss in the first round initiated a real crisis for the Right. Mélenchon’s stance deepened the crisis for the Left.

Some liberals argue that the choice on May 7 is simple: regardless of his politics, Macron will safeguard the French Constitution and institutions, whereas Le Pen represents a real danger and a departure from the values of “liberty, equality, fraternity”. Another argument is that being an opponent will be much easier under Macron than under Le Pen. Indeed Le Pen invokes nightmares of a full-blown dictatorship. The advocates of ‘le vote utile’, the useful vote as opposed to the ‘vote from the heart’, are pitted against those who claim they will abstain because they refuse to choose between two evils.

“Neither the plague nor the cholera” — Macron being the plague and Le Pen the cholera — say some other progressives on social media, while others repeat “better a banker than a fascist”. The lines have been drawn since the evening of April 23. Many progressists write on Facebook that they are “disgusted” by “this shameful position”, while others claim they are being blackmailed into voting for Macron. Intellectuals such as Emmanuel Todd and Alain Finkielkraut defended the right to abstain. On the other hand, prominent scientists wrote a column in favour of Macron. And several journalists and commentators whose grandparents escaped the Nazi death camps have exhorted people to vote for Macron “so that history does not repeat itself”.

Charlotte Thomas, a French political scientist, is among the very many who have repeatedly written on Facebook in favour of Macron in the second round, not because she supports his agenda but as a last resort to prevent Le Pen’s accession to power. This has led to fierce debates with her friends on and off Facebook. She wrote on her wall: “I am desperate and very worried by what I have been reading”, alluding to her friends’ posts in favour of abstaining.

Abstention will decidedly favour Le Pen even though six million voters are still undecided about their choice. The absentionists and the undecideds could very well tip the elections and are thus both being courted and touted. As a result, Facebook friends are being unfriended. Doors are being slammed. Meals with colleagues are being cut short. Family gatherings are being disrupted.

If one had to explain this anger, this rage even, in two words, those would be: normalisation and representation. Let’s start with normalisation: the FN has managed to revamp its image to make it look less evil, more acceptable. In 2002, Chirac refused to have a TV debate with Jean-Marie before the second round of the elections, and journalists were commended for not inviting the latter and refusing to give his views any visibility. Fifteen years later, the party’s ideas have entered the mainstream. In 2002, all political parties formed a “republican front” and asked their electorates to vote for Jean-Marie’s opponent. In 2017, no such “republican front” is possible. On May 3, Macron debated with Le Pen on TV. There was no question that he would refuse. A few days earlier, a prominent TV journalist was suspended for having signed, as a private citizen, a petition exposing the FN’s policies on women. This normalisation stems from a deep-seated angst about globalisation, migrants and French citizens of North-African descent constructed as the Other, as well as Islam. It stems from fear and fuels fear.

But the general sense of anger, within the Left and the French society, also comes from a crisis of representation, which is ironic at the time of a large democratic exercise. An increasing number of French citizens feel disenfranchised. Their purchasing power has shrunk since the introduction of the euro, the European treaty was adopted despite the majority voting against it in 2005, and they look with bewilderment at political leaders who seem to get away with corruption and nepotism. Both Macron and Le Pen claim that they are “the candidate of the people”, which is far from the truth.

So does Le Pen stand a chance? Will she win? Probably, or rather hopefully, not. All polls suggest that she will lose. But they also all agree that she is likely to get twice the number of vote-shares than her father in 2002. She will undoubtedly derive a great amount of legitimacy from having from 10 to 15 million votes in a country that has 47 million voters and a population of 68 million. And so even if she loses, she wins.

The irresistibly funny J Mathrubootham wrote in The Hindu a couple of days ago: “I wish to commend the French people on coming up with a completely confusing election process. Personally, I am very much in favour of making elections as complicated as possible.”

Writing these lines from Paris, it gives me some joy to know that these elections are making Mathrubootham happy. He might be the only one.

Ingrid Therwath is a Paris-based journalist working with the news weekly Courrier International

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