06 April 2017
It’s the Debates which will win it.
But for who?
by Richard Pooley
That the French love to discuss and pontificate is hardly news. Nor is it a stereotype. To see how important arguing the toss is to the French you only have to look at the timing and length of the first two televised debates of their presidential campaign. The first was held on Monday 21 March. It was between the five candidates who are regarded by the media and pollsters as the main ones – Marine Le Pen, François Fillon, Emmanuel Macron, Benoît Hamon and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. It started at 21.00 and finished 3 ½ hours later at 00.30. Yes, you read that correctly: at half-past midnight. And the average audience? 9.8 million, with a peak of 10.2 million. Compare this to the televised debates for the UK general elections of 2010 and 2015. The three leaders’ debates in 2010 – between Cameron, Brown and Clegg – were 1 ½ hours long and finished in time for News at Ten. Viewing figures were 9.4 million, 4 million and 8.6 million. In 2015 the seven party leaders had a 2-hour debate, again finishing well before most people would normally head for bed. An average of 7 million people watched that debate.
The French have learned to debate from an early age at home and at school. To climb to the top of French society one generally needs to have attended a grande école such as the Polytechnique (also known simply as ‘X’), Ecole Normale d’Administration (ENA), Ecole des Mines, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Sciences Po, Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC), or Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires (INSEAD). To get into a grande école a young French person has to spend two extra years at one of the lycées which prepare people for the entrance examinations to the grande écoles. Much of the time is spent preparing and doing colles – or khôlles – oral examinations in a wide range of subjects. Small groups of students answer a professor’s questions and debate with him or her and each other. A colle will also involve giving a short presentation, using the standard French structure of thesis, counter-thesis and synthesis. How you argue your case is just as important as the argument itself. Eloquence is much admired. All of this prepares the future French politician or business leader for the final concours, a mix of written and oral examinations. The latter are often done in front of a panel of professors with the other candidates watching and listening.
One of the many fascinating anomalies of this French presidential election is the fact that only one of the five main candidates attended a grande école – Emmanuel Macron. However, he partially makes up for his rivals’ shortcomings in this area; he went to three of them, as did his former mentor, the current president, François Hollande. If one of Macron’s main rivals were to win the election, he or she would be the first president in modern times not to have attended a grande école. Many commentators before the first debate said that Macron could be vulnerable because of his lack of experience of electoral debates. After all, he has never stood for electoral office before. They appear to have forgotten that he had honed the necessary skills in his late teens and early twenties.
Macron was reckoned to have come out best from the first debate. Certainly, his poll ratings rose well above those of Fillon, who was spotted by Le Pen and many viewers to be reading and sending texts on his phone while the debate was going on. But the real winner has proved to be Mélenchon, the de-facto Communist party candidate standing under the Unsubmissive France banner. He is a born orator and his performance – amusing, assured, punchy – pushed him up the polls past the official Socialist Party candidate, Hamon, and not far short of Fillon.
I listened to the second debate on Tuesday night. It wasn’t easy to do. I was in rural Gloucestershire where broadband signals are much weaker than my part of rural Lotshire. However, I was grateful to the UK for being an hour behind France. The debate between all eleven candidates started at 20.40 French time and finished nearly four hours later at 00.35 yesterday morning. The average audience was down on the first one but still stands at an impressive 6.3 million. And who was judged “most convincing” by various groups of typical voters, presumably still awake at one o’clock in the morning? Mélenchon, by a long way.
None of this means that Mélenchon will win even the first round, let alone the second. He will take votes from his closest rival, Hamon, and perhaps Le Pen, whose loathing of the Brussels Eurocracy still does not match his hatred of the EU and its institutions (only two of the eleven candidates – Fillon and Macron – can be said to be Europhiles). Neither Hamon or Le Pen performed particularly well. Fillon – minus his phone – and Macron – more animated and less verbose – probably did enough to keep Mélenchon at bay. Even so I have seen several commentators reckon that he could overtake Fillon.
One instant poll in particular made an impression on me: 33.9% of those asked said that this week’s debate had made them change their vote. Put this finding together with the growing evidence that many French are going to abstain from voting and it is little wonder that nobody is at all confident in their predictions. What do I think? Le Pen will be one of the two winners of the first round. Macron will not do as well as currently thought – his support is still soft. Fillon could catch him – his base is firm. But let’s wait and see what happens in the third and final debate. That will decide it. Could the outstanding debater in the first two, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, convince yet more French people that he has the gravitas and debating skills to be considered seriously as their next president? Probably not…but who knows? Just over two weeks to go before the first round and nobody knows.
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Richard Pooley
April 5, 2017
