Visibility Zero
At this moment the fog outside is so thick I barely see the fence on the other side of my little garden. The garbage men come for the bins are laughing figures in hi-vis stripes moving in a creamy mist, chattering as they disappear down the hill. So it is inside, too, as I try to make sense of piles of newspapers, websites and handwritten notes on the now-launched presidential campaign.
From here on, every move politicos make, every action and statement, must be viewed through the lens of the upcoming election, the first round on April 10th and the second on the 24th, the first being decisive, weeding out pretenders from contenders. The first shot was fired in the last days of December when France, in the person of Emmanuel Macron, ascended to the presidency of the European Union and the French tricolor was replaced by the EU flag at the Arc de Triomphe. Free advertising for Manu that was greeted with howls of protest. Sly dog, he doesn’t miss a trick to stick it to his rightwing competitors. Only temporary, his aides assured the media. The point was made. Marine Le Pen applied her talents at origami, turning the event inside out, hinting darkly that the EU was taking over France.
The French are not accustomed to all politics all the time. Holidays are no longer precisely sacred but citizens expect a break at the end of the year, yet politics more and more follows the relentless American style. The dogs of war must be fed daily !
The first national poll ranking the candidates is in. If you believe that polls are the result of the questions being asked and the way they are framed, you’ll take the following with a grain of salt. 1,500 respondents responded on 6th and 7th January. How old are they ? Where do they live ? Do they watch television ? I asked Ipsos, who ran the poll. (No answers yet.) 30% of those asked were undecided lurkers, hanging around waiting to see who others went for.
What If Everything’s Wrong With This Picture ?
(Divided in two, the right side represents undeclared candidate Christiane Taubira, former Minister of Justice, in the race at 3%. She received just over 2% in 2002.)
As you can see, President Macron finds himself surrounded not by the left in this ostensibly socialist country but by the perennial Marine le Pen, running the family firm founded by her father Jean (Rassemblement Nationale), Valérie Pécresse of the Sarkozyite right (Les Républicains) and Eric Zemmour, commentator turned candidate with the aid of non-stop television coverage. His ad-hoc party is named Réconquete !, as in taking the country back from the infidels.
The problem for the rightwing is the visceral divide between candidates : Le Pen’s 17% doesn’t automatically troop over to Pécresse if the former loses in the first round. Pécresse the charmless blonde herald of modern technocrats, may edge out le Pen but neither of them can count on Zemmour’s followers, wild-eyed enthusiasts who hear Moslems under the bed reciting the Koran.
The left, whatever’s left of it, troops behind in this poll, with the unable-to-agree-on- anything crew of Jean-Luc Mélenchon at 9 %, ecologist Jadot at 8 %, and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo at a very generous 4.5 %. They should find out if there’s any data on that silent 30%.
On the left, only Mélenchon has built a national party (La France Insoumise) but everyone says he’ll never repeat his 2017 performance, coming within a hair’s breath of the second round. What holds him back ? He has television exposure, he’s cutting and witty in debates, unlike Jadot and Hidalgo he has a program and an actual voting block in the National Assembly and European parliament. Is it because he waves his arms so much ? From Mélenchon on down the list the nine candidates are on the left of the spectrum, with a Royalist thrown in for good measure. Forget the Communist and the vanity candidates for now. The media dallies with Zemmour for entertainment value. The magnates who own most of the French press despise Mélenchon because he continually advocates taxing them to the hilt : whether they live in France or domicile elsewhere (“Wherever you are, in heaven or hell, I’ll come for the money you owe”), plus an inheritance tax that seizes everything above 12 million Euros, mere play money for autocrats these days. Not enough to pay for a new jet so they can visit their house in Moustique.
Macron continues to float above the fray, moving his pieces around the board like a man accustomed to winning at Monopoly. The European flag flying on the Champs Elysées, the ban on food consumption on all but luxury trains, the midnight convocation in the National Assembly to vote the Passe Sanitaire through until June, safely after presidential elections, all testify to a man projecting the certainty he believes France craves. The midnight votation before a largely empty Assembly is a trick he’s used before. Isn’t that the issue of the day, something the whole country wants to debate ? 100,000+ people demonstrated against it in miserable weather this weekend. The president doesn’t care. Macron has no real allies outside his party, only job seekers. He knows the math : if any one of the three rightwing candidates gets through to the second round, the country grumbles and votes for him. Which is either an entirely false assumption or at least one that gives the lie to the supposition, an article of faith among media elites, that the country is continually moving right. That’s their narrative, and they’re sticking to it.
The independent force at this moment is COVID. It’s the joker in the deck. Suppose Omicron punks out by early spring, and everyone is fed up with social restrictions, passports within their own country; they never want to hear the word vaccination again and don’t feel like voting for the sitting president who imposed all of the above ? That silent 30% may be open to persuasion by April 10th.
The Travel Passport is the fast route to making vaccination obligatory by force, by restriction. American liberals reading this are probably ready to throw me into a boiling pot with the Libertarians but too bad, coercion isn’t a good model. The cartoonist at Canard got it, pouncing on Minister of Health Veran’s slip.
The two-step election (‘first past the post’) is inherently unfair, excluding everyone else, handing the election to the top two vote-getters. So it goes. Mélenchon is intriguing in a way Poitou the Earnest, Montebourg the beekeeper and Hidalgo the tree-killer will never be. He’s been a minister in the national government, he takes an interest in the rest of the world (recent travels took him to the French Caribbean and Cuba), he’s built a national organization. It should be his election to lose. Is he, like Zemmour, simply unable to tone it down enough to get over the first hump ? His debate with Zemmour was a mouthy draw, with Mélenchon accusing Z of being a racist. Well, duh. That’s not the point, just as it wasn’t during the Trump-Clinton debacle. Like 2016, many of Zemmour’s voters are soft, and might find themselves marching with Gilets Jaunes or Anti-Vaxxers without knowing where they stand on the political spectrum. They are politically homeless. Mock them at your own risk.
(For what it’s worth to American readers, Mélenchon and Zemmour, the two gadflys, candidates who dare to say what normal politicos won’t, are both foreign-born, Mélenchon in Morocco, Zemmour in Algeria. Impossible in the U.S., but the campaign here would be deadly dull without them. Zemmour is Jewish, and defends the Vichy regime’s record of deportations to the Nazi camps.)
Three months to the day before the first round, here’s unasked for advice from an unpaid advisor to Mélenchon’s campaign.
Women are the most underrated and overlooked voters of all time. Granted, they don’t vote as a block but their participation decides elections. I would start by distributing the photo below far and wide, just to remind women that there were men who went out on a limb for abortion rights back in the day. Mélenchon’s on the left, with the long hair and the cig. He’s one of the few who hasn’t mellowed into a comfortable, moderate centrist.
And for youth, that other block who have a hand in if they can manage to tear themselves away from their phones long enough to vote, I present you with Jean-Luc the rapper, who has a message that just might resonate. Readers can work on their vocab. French is easy.
La liberté est la meilleure des protections
I stop there, lest you think I’m biased in favor of what all the smart suits are calling a hopeless cause. (Of course, it’s hopeless. You can’t save anyone from themselves, it’s doomed.) But really, some paid staff worker on Mélenchu’s campaign should get him to stop waving his arms so much, he looks like he’s applying for status as an alternate energy device. You’re 70 now, act presidential. Show a little charme amid the combativeness. “First you defeat your opponent, then you go into battle,” said Sun Tzu, who’s not around to collect consulting fees.
Enough of the American makeover. Kudos to Khalid Freak for the vid.
Here’s an image from the current expo at Espace Niemeyer, located in the HQ of the French Communist Party. The cartoon is the work of the Czech artist Adolf Hoffmeister, who passed through France many times on his way to forced exile elsewhere. That’s You-Know-Who reading Canard Enchainé, the only paper in town with a sense of humor and without ads. More on everything soon.
14:57 10 janvier 2022