President Emanuel Macron emerged from the first round of France’s election yesterday, finishing ahead of Marine Le Pen 28% to 23%. The general expectation is that he will beat Le Pen by a wider margin in the second round, two weeks from Sunday, as he did in the second round two years ago. His lead in the first round four years ago was only 24% to 21%, but in the second round, he ran far, far better, winning by a 32-point margin. Will the result be similar this time? That probably depends partly on the performance of the two candidates in the runoff period. Four years ago, the consensus was that Macron outdebated Le Pen. Obviously, there will be an argument by what we might call establishment voices that, whatever Macron’s shortcomings might be, the purported extremism of Le Pen should be repudiated.
Let me, as a nonprofessional and occasional observer of French electoral politics over the years, make one point that struck me as I picked through the detailed election data provided, just one day after the election, by Le Monde. (Yes, California, there’s really no need to take five to six weeks to tabulate election results.) Macron is by any standard a centrist candidate and incumbent in an era in which centrists have not done so well in electoral politics in America or Europe. He was formerly a Cabinet minister in the government of Socialist President Francois Hollande (whose party’s candidate got just 1.8% of the vote yesterday), who has promised to reinvigorate France’s affluent but not buoyant economy. In this contest, as in 2017, his two strongest opponents were clearly identified with the Right and the Left.
On the right, Le Pen (who has repudiated the seemingly antisemitic stands of her father, who ran years ago) has increased her first-round percentage from 21% then to 24% now. On the Left, not far behind is Jean-Luc Melenchon, who abandoned Hollande’s Socialist Party as too pro-capitalist and got 20% in the first round in 2017 and 22% this year.
To see how Macron is squeezed between these two, and how he or a similarly positioned candidate could be squeezed even harder, divide France into two regions: the metropole (Paris and the seven departments roundabout), which casts about 16% of France’s votes, and the heartland (the remainder, less overseas France, the nation’s departments in the Caribbean and Indian and Pacific Oceans), which casts about 81% of the vote. For each region, the table shows the percentage for Macron, Le Pen, and Melenchon and for Eric Zemmour, whose platform is similar to Le Pen’s, and Valerie Precresse, the candidate of the center-right party of former Presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, who, after the results were in, quickly endorsed Macron.
| FRANCE | PARIS | HEARTLAND | OVERSEAS | |
| Macron | 28 | 29 | 28 | 17 |
| Precresse | 5 | 6 | 5 | 3 |
| Le Pen | 23 | 13 | 24 | 22 |
| Zemmour | 7 | 7 | 7 | 3 |
| Melenchon | 22 | 30 | 20 | 45 |
Observations:
1. In metro Paris, Le Pen’s weakest area (compare Brexit in London or Trump in metro New York, Washington, or San Francisco), Macron ran behind Melenchon. A Macronist candidate is at serious risk of being squeezed out in his opponent’s area by a candidate of the Marxist or woke Left.
2. In the Heartland, 82% of France, Macron only barely led Le Pen 28% to 25%. Adding Precresse’s votes to Macron and Zemmour’s to Le Pen, you have the centrist side at 33% and the rightist side at 32%. Actually, if you take those totals out to tenths of a percentage (something I don’t usually do), the centrist margin is only 0.2 percentage points — not exactly an overwhelming margin.
3. In overseas France, admittedly only 2% of the national vote, Macron is already squeezed out, a poor third.
4. Overall, Macron is close to being no one’s first choice. He is a second choice in the Metropole, alarmingly close to second choice in the Heartland, and an also-ran in the multiracial overseas. A slightly less popular Macron (not impossible to imagine, depending on circumstances), or a Macron-type centrist who lacks Macron’s credentials or is seen as inferior in ability, could easily finish third.
5. That would lead to a runoff between a populist rightist like Pen and a hard-shell socialist like Melenchon — two creeds that I and so many others believed to be discredited lo these many years. The center held this time — but only just barely. What about next time?
