16 February 2017
Sans lui, le déluge?
Who will stop le Pen?
by Richard Pooley
For the past fifty-five years the French have had it easy when choosing their presidents. The presidential election has two rounds. In the first round you voted for whoever you liked most, safe in the knowledge that there would be just two candidates in the second round a fortnight later and one of them would be from la Gauche (always a Socialist) and one from la Droite (usually a Gaullist). If you accept what one authority[i] on French culture says, this fits perfectly with the French love of “binary opposition.” Granted there was one year – 2002 – when Jean-Marie Le Pen of the extreme right-wing National Front came second in the first round, pushing the champion of la Gauche, Lionel Jospin, into third place. But the people gave a collective Gallic shrug and accepted the advice of the left-wing demonstrators who urged them to “Vote with a clothes peg on your nose” in the second round. The candidate of la Droite, the incumbent president Jacques Chirac, won with 82% of the vote. “Better a crook than a fascist” was another slogan which the voters appeared to have agreed with. Even this exception proved the rule: in the first round you vote for the person you like; in the second you vote against the person you hate.
Not this time. Both la Droite (the Republican Party) and la Gauche (the Socialist Party) chose their candidates in a two-round primary. The favourites in both contests lost. The Republicans plumped for François Fillon, who stands on a policy platform not much to the left of Marine Le Pen of the National Front. The Socialists chose Benoît Hamon, whose platform abuts that of the extreme left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, a man who has the support of the Communist Party. Hamon has been labelled both the French Bernie Sanders and the French Jeremy Corbyn. And then there is Emmanuel Macron, the ex-Socialist Government minister and ex-banker, who says he is neither Left, Right nor Centre but nevertheless is being called France’s Tony Blair. Whereas in the past Fillon and Hamon would have expected to be ahead of everyone else in the polls at this stage, with the National Front’s candidate probably in third place, Marine Le Pen has been in front for the past year. There is no doubt now that Marine Le Pen will win the first round, probably with close to 30% of the vote. So, if you fear a Le Pen presidency (and every poll shows that a shrinking majority of French people still do), who do you vote for in the first round?
François Fillon, of course, is saying that only he can see off Le Pen. Until three weeks ago he was in second place in the polls of first-round voting intentions. It looked as though the French would have a re-run of the Chirac-Le Pen père contest of 2002 but this time supporters of la Gauche would not have to hold their noses when voting for Fillon. He might be saying some nasty things about immigrants but at least he was not lining his pockets as Chirac had done. But then he was accused of letting his Welsh wife, Penelope, be paid hundreds of thousands of euros by French taxpayers for a job – his parliamentary assistant – which she said in a recorded interview with a British journalist she had never done. The total amount she is supposed to have received for this and other jobs has kept mounting and is now not far short of a million euros. And then it was revealed that two of Fillon’s five children had also done paid work for him of a legal nature even though at the time they had not qualified as lawyers. He is being accused of doing the same thing as Chirac – creating fake jobs (although not on the industrial scale that Chirac did).
Fillon’s furious response to the accusations, and the official enquiry which has been launched to investigate them, has been so incoherent that many French must wonder if he is really up to the job of being their president anyway. He has accused the French media of conducting a witch-hunt and the judicial inquiry of being politicised. His supporters have hinted that his Republican Party rival, ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, is the one who leaked the fake job story to Le Canard Enchainé. Surely if Fillon could have proved in the last three weeks that his wife really was his assistant, he would have done so. Instead he has told the French exactly how much money he has, right down to the amount in each savings account. The voters, even those who are his natural supporters, are not impressed. In a poll published on 10 February, 79% of those interviewed said they were not convinced by Fillon’s explanations. The day before, in an interview in Le Monde, Fillon took several swipes at Macron, the person who is now in second place behind Le Pen (though the most recent poll shows him flat lining). “Do you really think that Macron will [get the votes of my supporters] if I cannot be a candidate? No way. My supporters will move across to Le Pen.” He went further, trying to suggest that Macron was somehow guilty of financial shenanigans. “No-one asks him the names of his clients [i.e. his main financial backers]. Next to him, I am a small impoverished plodder[ii]. I will publish the list of my clients if Macron publishes his.” He concluded enigmatically: “Macron will have problems. He has too much money mania.” I fear there is a whiff of anti-Semitism about that remark. Macron is not Jewish but he didn’t work for any old bank; he worked for Rothschild & Co.
One French commentator described Fillon’s new message as “Without me, the Flood”, a rephrasing of “Après moi, le deluge,” attributed to King Louis XV but probably said by his mistress, Madame de Pompadour. She was predicting the Revolution of 1789. Fillon is trying to persuade the French that only he can protect them from the Revolution of 2017 which will be ushered in by a Le Pen Presidency. I doubt if he will persuade them that he is the man to stop her. But if not him, who will? And who will be the standard bearer of la Droite should Fillon be forced to step down? And are Le Pen and the National Front really as radical and racist as their opponents claim? Those are the questions which the French voters are still pondering.
[i] Sudhir Hazareesingh, author of How the French Think.
[ii] « un petit besogneux »
Stop Press: Strong rumours that Francois Baroin, mayor of Troyes and protege of Chirac no less, could become the Republicans’ candidate should Francois Fillon pull out. He is currently having lunch at Nicolas Sarkozy’s office along with Francois Fillon. Baroin has admitted that he would have been Sarkozy’s PM had Sarko won.
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