Une Nation en Marche – A Nation on the Move
An Overview of French Presidential Candidates
This year, five years on from the previous French Presidential election, we will see old and new faces alike battling for the ultimate political position in l’Hexagone. 2022 has seen household names jockeying for position in the final run-up to the election, the first round of which is set to take place on 10th April, in just under a month’s time. If no candidate wins an outright majority in the first round, which is commonly the case, the second round of voting on 24th April will pit the two most popular contenders against one another. There are several potential combinations but the three most likely to make it to the second round in a run-off against President Emmanuel Macron are Marine Le Pen, Valérie Pécresse and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Although unlikely to win, Éric Zemmour has been included in this overview owing to his strategic importance in splitting the right-wing vote.
Emmanuel Macron – First and foremost, we have the incumbent presidential candidate Emanuel Macron, leader of his party La République En Marche!, which was newly constituted before the last election. In 2017 he was elected on his first attempt and is highly likely to win again. According to The Economist, he has a 97% chance of doing so. Late to announce his candidacy, Macron is using the political kudos from his role as current president to springboard his campaign. Mentioning telephone calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin and President of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping offhandedly is reinforcing his image as a president in control on the international stage. For the first time in two decades, the European political scene is now operating without Angela Merkel. Macron is positioning himself as the new key leader among Europeans, while the world waits to see what tack the new Chancellor of Germany Olaf Scholz will take. As such, the war in Ukraine has solidified his position in the race.
Marine Le Pen –The notorious leader of her party the National Rally (better known by its previous name the National Front) was Macron’s key opponent in the 2017 election. Despite this, he defeated her squarely and after two previous attempts at winning the presidency, it is not widely believed that the third time will do the trick for her. A wealthy lawyer who grew up outside Paris, the daughter of former politician Jean-Marie Le Pen is running her campaign on traditional values, French nationalism and Islamophobic rhetoric. Meanwhile she is trying to portray herself as a woman of the people, who knows what it is to struggle against hardship and to face adversity.
Valérie Pécresse - As a second right-wing candidate, Pécresse describes herself as two thirds Merkel, one third Thatcher. While her campaign had a promising start, its momentum has slowed. Fiscally, her key aim is to curb spending, which has soared under Macron in response to the pandemic but her continued condemnation of the current government’s fiscal policies has driven some support away because economy has in fact been growing at its fastest for 50 years. Unlike Marine Le Pen, Pécresse does not bring quite the same historical reputation with her, which can be seen as both a blessing and a curse. Le Pen’s profile has been much more prominent but she remains a divisive figure, in a way that Pécresse does not.
Éric Zemmour – As an imitator of Donald Trump, Zemmour is a well-known columnist who is now running on a far-right manifesto of idealistic populism. He is currently vying with Le Pen and Pécresse to proceed to the second round, which is splitting the right-wing vote, thereby increasing the possibility for surprising outcomes once the polls open. While Le Pen was considered dangerously right-wing in the last election, Zemmour’s intensity is making Le Pen look less and less radical and some supporters would say that she has in fact gone soft, which is part of Zemmour’s strategy to attract voters away from her campaign. No poll suggests he could win outright but nevertheless he ought not to be overlooked as a candidate. He has watched, observed and learned from political operators over the last ten years, simplifying complicated subjects with a mixture of erudition and populism to ramp up his support.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon – On a divided left, Mélenchon is the only candidate polling in the double digits. As we can see from the other key contenders for the election, the right-wing is still enjoying a favourable position in France, as it is in other European countries. Mélenchon is the only left-wing candidate to exceed the 10% mark in the polls. The left-wing progressives who have thrown their hats into the ring - among others Anne Hidalgo, current mayor of Paris and Yannick Jadot, an environmentalist MEP - have succeeded in nothing other than dividing the left-wing vote, all but ensuring that none of them will make it to the second round. For those who remember the French political climate in 2012, it is quite the volte-face. At that time, when François Hollande was elected to the presidency, the Parti socialiste held both houses of the parliament and a considerable number of the regional administrations. Now, however, in a post-austerity world, the working-class voters have deserted the left, flocking instead to President Macron’s centrist party.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
