The Future of Europe Hinges on a Face-Off in France
For many French voters, the Presidential race has offered no good choices.CreditPhotograph by Oscar B. Castillo for The New Yorker
On the evening of April 20th, nearly a quarter of France’s television-watching public was tuned in to a special called “15 Minutes pour Convaincre.” Its format was simple: each of eleven Presidential candidates would appear and speak for fifteen minutes, making a final pitch to the electorate—a full third of whom, according to analysts, remained undecided, just days before the first of two rounds of voting. The hosts asked each candidate to present an object that, if elected, he’d keep in his office at the Élysée. Jean-Luc Mélenchon (who had created his own far-left movement, La France Insoumise) chose an alarm clock, “to tell me that it’s time to redistribute the wealth.” Nathalie Arthaud (Lutte Ouvrière) brandished a photograph of Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising gloved fists at the 1968 Olympics. Marine Le Pen (representing the extreme-right Front National) came with a key, saying that she wanted to give French people their house back. Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (Debout la France) brought a wire sculpture that a handicapped child had given him, and then whipped out his cell phone and began reading a series of text messages from a “big media boss” who, he said, had tried to bully him into dropping out of the race.
It was around this time that viewers, fiddling with their own devices, began to receive notifications about some sort of shooting on the Champs-Élysées. One of the hosts interrupted the broadcast to announce that a possible terrorist attack had taken place. Then he introduced Philippe Poutou (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste), a trade unionist who’d made an impression at the previous debate by showing up in a long-sleeved T-shirt and mercilessly dinging his better-known opponents. Without saying a word about the attack, Poutou launched into his show-and-tell session. “This is green for the richness of the soil of the Amazon forest,” he said, unfurling a miniature flag—an homage, he said, to French Guiana, where crowds had been in the streets for weeks protesting mistreatment by the mainland government.
When Emmanuel Macron (the founder of the centrist movement En Marche!) came out, he said he’d picked his childhood grammar book but had left it in the greenroom, given the gravity of the moment. “The first duty of the President is to protect,” he asserted. Later, François Fillon (the candidate of the center-right Les Républicains), declaring that he wasn’t “a fetishist,” dodged the whole exercise, and, not to be outdone by Macron, announced that he was cancelling the next day’s campaign events.
By late April, French Presidential campaigns have usually settled into a simple duel between the two main parties, the Socialists and the Republicans, but this race was a free-for-all. According to polls, four candidates—Mélenchon, Macron, Fillon, and Le Pen—all had a viable shot at progressing to the two-person runoff, to be held on May 7th. Mélenchon wanted a nationalist economy but a globalist identity, Macron wanted a globalist economy and a globalist identity, Fillon wanted a globalist economy but a nationalist identity, and Le Pen wanted a nationalist economy and a nationalist identity. The world was looking to the French election as either a ratification or a rejection of the populist surge that had led to Brexit and Trump. The balance of power among America, Europe, and Russia was also at stake. With four candidates hovering somewhere in the vicinity of twenty per cent, the permutations of possible matchups and outcomes were almost too complicated to contemplate.
This was clearly a “change election”—or, to hear it from French voters, a race in which they’d been presented with a dog’s dinner of choices, leaving them so enraged that they could hardly see straight, much less render their vote a coherent expression of their fears and aspirations. No matter how they leaned, their first words, when asked to comment on la présidentielle, were more often than not “J’en ai marre,” or “I’m fed up.” The political analyst Brice Teinturier believed that the disappointing administrations of the two previous Presidents had led to the rise of a powerful group of voters, whom he christened the PRAF Party. The acronym stood for “plus rien à faire, plus rien à foutre”—nothing more to do, nothing more to give a damn about. One day, I got to talking with the proprietor of an antique shop, who said, “You want to start another French Revolution of 1789 and cut off all their heads.”
In January, a story in Le Monde had likened the contest to something out of a Quentin Tarantino film, “one of those B-movie pastiches where each character who seems designated to be the hero finds himself ‘smoked’ by a Magnum to the head.” At that point, Fillon (a former Prime Minister) had vanquished Nicolas Sarkozy (a former President), winning the Républicains’ primary in a surprise landslide. Macron had committed a “patricide” of his former mentor, the sitting President François Hollande, by quitting as Minister of the Economy and setting up En Marche!, at the age of thirty-eight. Hollande, with an approval rating of four per cent and an unemployment rate of ten, had declined to seek reëlection, an unprecedented surrender. His Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, sought the Socialist nomination, but was unexpectedly trounced in the primary by Benoît Hamon, a former Minister of Education, whose platform included a universal basic income and a tax on robots. This was all before prosecutors put Fillon under formal investigation for misuse of public funds (according to allegations, he paid his wife and children parliamentary salaries for work they never did) and arrested several close associates of Le Pen (who ignored a summons to testify about a fake-jobs scandal of her own). Then Mélenchon, an ex-Trotskyist who wanted to tax earnings of more than four hundred thousand euros at a hundred per cent, began soaring in the polls.
“15 Minutes pour Convaincre” didn’t end until nearly eleven o’clock. In the following hours, the specifics of the attack emerged. Karim Cheurfi, a French citizen and ex-convict, had opened fire on a parked police cruiser, killing Xavier Jugelé—a proudly gay policeman who was a first responder at the Bataclan massacre—and injuring three others. Police shot Cheurfi as he tried to escape on foot. According to prosecutors, a note praising ISIS was found near his body. Jugelé was the two hundred and thirty-ninth person since the beginning of 2015 to lose his life in a terrorist attack on French soil. French people kept their composure; they didn’t need a tweet from Donald Trump (“Will have a big effect on presidential election!”) to tell them that the news had thrown the race, which commentators kept describing as “totalement inédit” (completely unheard of), into even greater chaos. Three days later, Macron and Le Pen progressed to the second round, garnering 24.01 and 21.3 per cent, respectively, of the vote.
The last time a French Presidential election was anywhere near this wild was in 2002. Jacques Chirac, the center-right President, was supposed to face Lionel Jospin, the center-left Prime Minister. (The two men had been sharing power in a “cohabitation” government.) The extreme-right candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen—Marine’s father, an eyepatch-wearing former paratrooper and gleeful racist, who famously called the Holocaust a “detail” of history—had been polling a weak fourth. But in the first round of voting, he came in second, propelling him to a runoff against Chirac, who was embroiled in a corruption scandal. “Le choc Le Pen” galvanized both the political establishment and the public. An array of parties that had previously had no common interest banded together to repel Le Pen. More than a million citizens took to the streets, some bearing signs that read, “Vote for the Crook, Not the Fascist.” Ultimately, Chirac received more than eighty-two per cent of the vote, the most decisive victory in French history.
The 2002 election was inédit because Jean-Marie Le Pen, considered so unthinkable that the French national soccer team issued a statement condemning his racism, made it to the second round of voting. This year’s election is inédit not only because Marine Le Pen, considered so thinkable that both Brigitte Bardot and the President of the United States have praised her, is within reach of the Presidency but also because Macron, who has never held elected office, has become the front-runner a year after putting together a party from scratch. As soon as the results of the first round were announced, a parade of establishment figures declared their support for Macron, in an attempt to form a “barricade” like the one that had thwarted Jean-Marie Le Pen. The Prime Minister addressed the nation on live television, urging citizens “to fight the Front National and doom its catastrophic projects.”
Marine, the youngest of three Le Pen daughters, was born in 1968. After the family’s Paris apartment was bombed, in 1976—Marine woke up to a blown-away bedroom wall—they moved to a Second Empire mansion in the Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud, which an elderly industrialist had bequeathed to Jean-Marie. (The estate “smells of death,” one of her sisters told a journalist, but Marine continued to live there until 2014.) According to Marine’s autobiography, both of her parents were spectacularly inattentive. When Marine was sixteen, her mother, Pierrette, left Jean-Marie for his biographer. Jean-Marie banished her from the family, saying, “If you want money, go clean houses.” She posed for Playboy scrubbing the floor.
Without any particular encouragement, except the feeling that she’d been blocked from society on account of her name, Marine gravitated toward her father’s milieu. By 2002, she was coming into her own in the F.N. A criminal lawyer, she’d joined the Party’s executive committee. After a string of defeats—running for the national legislature, she blamed the Socialist Party for five hundred thousand HIV infections—she’d finally won a seat on a regional council. She’d recently divorced her husband, an F.N. operative and the father of her three children. Soon, she married another Party activist, and again divorced. (Her current companion, Louis Aliot, is the F.N.’s vice-president.) Defending her father on television, she launched her reputation as a rivetingly aggressive interlocutor, banging the table and taking her arguments, delivered in a commanding smoker’s voice, past their logical ends. “She had an assertiveness, a glibness, and a prodigious bad faith that promised a fine career in the media,” a journalist later said.
Meanwhile, Macron was training at the École Nationale d’Administration, France’s élite civil-service school. The son of doctors from Amiens, he’d arrived in Paris in 1997. He’d been sent there, alone, to finish high school after falling in love with Brigitte Trogneux, a member of a prominent family of local chocolatiers. She was married, the mother of three children, and his drama teacher. (Macron and Trogneux wed in 2007, when he was twenty-nine and she was fifty-four.) As an undergraduate, Macron studied philosophy. Then, at Sciences Po, he earned a master’s in public affairs. He was a prodigy, serving as an assistant to the phenomenologist Paul Ricœur, and an enigma, taking the train to Amiens every Friday to see Trogneux. Aurélien Lechevallier, a friend and adviser, remembers him dressing in “an East Coast Ivy League jacket” when his peers were wearing T-shirts. Lechevallier told me, “I think when we met he had no real experience of living lightly with friends—just making jokes, having a couple of beers at the bar.”
Macron went back to Amiens to announce the launch of En Marche! in April, 2016. “This isn’t a movement to have an umpteenth candidate in the Presidential election,” he said. Very few people thought he’d succeed. “I would be sorry if Emmanuel Macron wanted to escape, to undertake some sort of personal adventure,” François Hollande confided to a journalist. “Not because it would be a betrayal but because it would be hopeless. It would be a waste.” He added, “The system is voracious, it would crush him.”
Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA), a region that occupies the eastern half of France’s Mediterranean coastline, has one of the highest rates of immigration in the country. It is a Front National stronghold: twenty-eight per cent of its residents—the second-highest rate in France—voted for Marine Le Pen in the first round. Le Pen’s platform calls for, among other things, outlawing dual citizenship with most countries, banning foreign languages in schools, and exiting the European Union. (Many observers fear that her election would mean the end of the E.U.) Just before the first round of voting, she announced a plan to implement a moratorium on legal immigration, “to stop this delirium.” So far, the F.N. has been unable to win more than a handful of seats in France’s legislature. But, in the 2014 municipal elections, the Party clinched eleven mayoralties, seven of them in PACA. An opposition party for almost half a century, the F.N. is trying to prove that it can govern in places like Le Luc en Provence (pop. 10,621).
In February, when I visited Le Luc, the mimosa trees were exploding with blooms. To a foreign eye, Le Luc looked like a picturesque village out of a Provençal fantasy, all golden light and chalky pastel façades. A tourist might have happily assumed that the preponderance of shuttered storefronts indicated the persistence of some charming southern siesta tradition, but, in fact, they had long been vacant. The unemployment rate in Le Luc is twenty per cent, double the national average; fifty-six per cent of its citizens don’t earn enough money to pay income taxes. I couldn’t find a boulangerie, the classic French barometer of a town’s healthy environment. A vandal had taken a hammer to one of the windows at the Café de la Mairie.
Pascal Verrelle, Le Luc’s mayor, received me at the town hall. He is Le Luc’s third F.N. mayor since 2014, the first having resigned for health reasons, and the second having resigned also supposedly for health reasons (but not before sending a letter to the local paper saying that she was quitting because her team reproached her for “not being F.N. enough”). Apparently, there had been some drama over a European Union flag that hung outside the town hall. When Verrelle took over, it came down. Verrelle led me up to his office. A former prison official with a buzzcut, he was wearing a khaki jacket and a lavender shirt, accessorized with wire-rimmed glasses and a gold watch.
I wanted to know why, in Verrelle’s opinion, the people of the town had put the F.N. in power. He said that their vote had not necessarily been for the most attractive party but for the one with which they were least acquainted. “Little by little, they told themselves, ‘We have to try something else,’ ” Verrelle said. He continued, “There were people who thought that we were going to construct watchtowers, that we were going to put up walls to separate the neighborhoods, that we were going to walk around with police dogs, that we were going to kick the foreigners out. Then they realized that we’re no more racist than anyone else, just a little more nationalist.”
Verrelle’s budget was small and his agenda modest: he spoke of having decreased the town’s debt (he’d served a rosé sangria rather than champagne at the annual New Year’s reception), solved its trash problem (he was now leading a campaign against dog poop), and hired four new police officers (“including two maghrébins”—North Africans—“who are excellent”). But despite his claim of representing some harmless arithmetic mean of racism, he touched on many of the F.N.’s identitarian themes. “I have nothing against immigrants, the real immigrants,” he said. But today, he told me, they were all “young men, between twenty-five and thirty, in perfect health, well dressed, with the latest phones. I don’t understand what they’re doing chez moi. And I’m afraid that they’re coming to prepare something.”
We left the town hall and, after a stop at the stamp museum, dropped by a clothing boutique run by a woman named Fanny, who was from Benin.
“She’s the prettiest woman in Le Luc, after my wife,” Verrelle said.
“The Mayor’s looking for a new place for me,” Fanny said, explaining that her current location didn’t draw much foot traffic. She admitted that she had been afraid of the F.N., but said that Verrelle was “super.”
I asked if her admiration for him would translate into a vote for Le Pen.
“Frankly, no. She kind of freaks me out,” she said. “But I never would have imagined that a Front National mayor would come into my shop.”
Verrelle seemed to be practicing a hyper-local version of dédiabolisation, the strategy of “de-demonization” that Le Pen has pursued over the past few years in the hope of making the F.N. seem respectable. The Party has excommunicated a few of the most flagrantly intolerant members of its establishment, including, in 2014, Jean-Marie Le Pen. It has courted groups that it has traditionally alienated, such as women, senior citizens, Jews, practicing Catholics, and gay people. Yet, every once in a while, Marine Le Pen lets a shocking comment fly. She insisted recently that France bore no blame for the 1942 Vel d’Hiv roundup, in which French police arrested nearly thirteen thousand Jews and sent them to concentration camps. The effect, if not de-demonizing, is destabilizing. Unsure what to make of the latest iteration of the F.N., or simply disillusioned with its competitors, some people figure, Why not put it to the test?
The day after my visit to Le Luc, Macron was hosting a rally in Toulon, a sunbaked port city less than an hour away. It was a dicey moment for his campaign. Earlier in the week, during a TV interview in Algeria, he had declared that colonialism was “a crime against humanity.” French people across the political spectrum had reacted to the remark with a level of offense that surprised me. Opinions tended to vary by age and race, the most indignant skewing whiter and older. The few dissenters I encountered said that they appreciated Macron’s willingness to take on a taboo subject. “France has never come to terms with its colonial history, and I share his sentiment that to move on and close this painful chapter we need to acknowledge our past,” Houmria Berrada, the thirty-three-year-old French-born daughter of Algerian butchers, told me. A partner in a consulting business and a Macron supporter, she praised “his desire to change the software of our society, to bring it into the twenty-first century, and to tap into the energy of the working-class neighborhoods.”
Toulon, like many southern cities, has a large population of pieds noirs, Europeans who lived in Algeria during French rule, many of whom returned to France after the country gained independence, in 1962. They have traditionally formed one of the bases of support for the F.N., much of whose early leadership came out of military circles. (Jean-Marie Le Pen has long been dogged by allegations that he committed torture during the Algerian War.) F.N. Party activists were determined not to let Macron’s appearance in the area pass without protest. The morning of the rally, I joined Aline Bertrand, an F.N. regional councillor, as she canvassed the city’s Saturday market.
Bertrand represents a new and potent type of figure in the Party, the arch-articulate young woman who pits women’s rights against Muslim immigration. The exemplar of this trend is Marion Maréchal Le Pen, Marine’s twenty-seven-year-old niece and a member of Parliament from the neighboring Vaucluse, who has warned that the coastal cities of PACA are turning into “favelas.” Maréchal espouses an ultra-hard-line social conservatism, opposing abortion (she claims that this is a feminist position) and same-sex marriage, issues on which her aunt has been ambivalent. According to Bertrand, Toulon’s Muslim immigrants have driven secular, native-born women out of the center of the city. “Here you’ll have a problem if you leave a bar at midnight in shorts and a T-shirt,” she said.
Bertrand was handing out leaflets that featured a head shot of Marine Le Pen, wearing a jacket—in bleu marine, her signature color—with a beaded collar. A late-middle-aged man and woman approached. They were worried about their pensions.
“Go on the O.F.I.I. site,” Bertrand said, referring to the government department that deals with immigration. “Someone who’s never paid into social security in France can get retirement.”
“People think Marine Le Pen is against immigrants,” the woman, warming to the theme, said. “She’s not. It’s justice that we want.”
“It’s like when the refrigerator is full we give to our neighbors, but when the refrigerator is empty we give to our children. The refrigerator of France is empty,” Bertrand said, and the couple trudged off, carrying bags filled with cauliflower and lettuce.
I wandered away and started talking to a woman wearing a quilted leather jacket and lots of mascara. “I adore Marine!” she said, identifying herself as Michèle. She was a French teacher and a pied noir. She had high hopes for the election, particularly after what had happened in America. “Bravo, bravo for Trump!” she said. She was unimpressed by Macron, whom she called “a little opportunistic asshole.” She asked if I knew that he was “a Rothschild banker” (Macron worked for the firm from 2008 to 2012, earning around a million dollars a year), invoking a slur—I heard it repeated over and over, and not just by F.N. supporters—that seemed laser-targeted toward some primal place in the French imagination, where a fondness for conspiracy theory intersected with a suspicion of high finance. “Rothschild banker” suggested, without having to say it, that Jewish influence was at work, making it all the more irresistible for the Front National. Macron also spent four years as an inspector of finance—a high-powered position in the French civil service—but nobody was stuck on that.
The rally was scheduled for three o’clock at the Toulon Zénith, a concert hall. When I got there, around two-thirty, the front gates were locked and the police weren’t letting anyone in. A couple of hundred protesters had surrounded the entrance, creating what they called a “hedge of horror” that anyone who wished to attend would have to traverse. They were chanting, “Macron, treason!” When a scuffle broke out, the police fired tear gas. Two protesters were arrested, a policeman was injured, and a journalist went to the hospital.
Inside, a Macron spokesman told me, “We strongly believe that some people saw the mess, were hassled, and turned around.” The auditorium was conspicuously not full. Still, the atmosphere was upbeat, in keeping with Macron’s assertion that his campaign is the only “projet positif ”—the sole “for,” rather than “against,” on offer. Macron claims to be leading a “transpartisan” movement that is “neither of the left nor of the right.” He shares many of the traditional concerns of the left, but often prefers to meet them with capitalist solutions. He wants to cut corporate taxes, simplify labor laws, consolidate the retirement system, invest in education and vocational training, and reinvigorate France’s relationship with Europe. He has praised Angela Merkel’s generous refugee policy, saying that it “saved the dignity of Europe.” Proud to be a fluent English speaker, he has even appealed to the technocratic, cosmopolitan sector of the American population that has despaired since Trump’s election. To American scientists, he has promised, “From now on, from next May, you will have a new homeland—France!”
There was popcorn for sale. Laurence Haim, a celebrated French reporter who quit journalism to join Macron’s campaign, told me that “change” and “hope” are En Marche!’s keywords. In its disciplined idealism, Macron’s campaign is self-consciously modelled on Obama’s 2008 operation, right down to the armies of fresh-faced volunteers in cool-looking T-shirts. (They have even been going door-to-door, a new tactic in France.) When I visited Macron’s headquarters, in Paris, I found a sign taped to the restroom wall that read, “According to a very serious study, we spend between forty and fifty-five seconds in the bathroom. One like takes you half a second. Ready for 80 likes?!”
A Socialist member of Parliament who’d defected to En Marche! warmed up the crowd with a pilou pilou, a local rugby chant. Then the lights went down and a video, a sort of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” in visual form, began playing on a big screen: contraceptive pill; Simone Weil; Berlin Wall; gay brides; Victor Hugo; Gandhi; Je suis Charlie; liberté, égalité, fraternité. Macron walked in to “Closer,” by the Norwegian electronic-music duo Lemaitre, and took the stage.
“You are brave because you’re here,” he said. “While, at the entrance to this arena, there were those who didn’t want to let you in.” The Front National wanted “to confine France to its fears,” he said, nonetheless admonishing the crowd not to boo the opposition. He said that he wouldn’t apologize for the crime-against-humanity comment, but implored those whom he had offended to “forgive me for having hurt you.”
“I love spring days when we get to work outdoors.”
Macron has conjured an extreme center that didn’t exist before he identified it. He has a talent for balancing opposing ideals, sometimes to the extent of appearing disingenuous or oxymoronic. His economic program gives companies more leeway in firing workers, but it offers unemployed workers higher benefits. Meme-makers delight in his habit of saying “at the same time,” which, in Toulon, he repeated twenty-two times in ninety minutes. Occasionally, his syntheses present new and even revelatory ways of seeing things. “Europe is also the place of our sovereignty,” he told the crowd in a confident voice, managing, for a moment, to unite two concepts—globalization and nationalism—that had roiled politics worldwide for the better part of a year.
As Minister of the Economy, Macron sponsored an explosively unpopular labor reform, which the Hollande government had to push through using a technical maneuver. Marc Ferracci, a friend and adviser of Macron’s, told me that Macron took it as a personal failure—his biggest—that he wasn’t able to corral the votes needed to pass the bill, and that his disillusionment at the gridlock “was the main reason he decided to launch his movement.” Macron has been accused of arrogance. He relishes confronting his detractors, once telling a man who criticized his expensive suit, “The best way to get a suit is to work.” He gets flak for having come out of nowhere, for being “a hologram” or “a marketing concept,” but his youth can be an asset, particularly when coupled with one of his strongest arguments—that the world is undergoing an epochal, accelerated transformation. This theory neutralizes charges of overambition while positioning him as a man of his moment. It also justifies En Marche! as part of a social evolution rather than a vanity project. “The world changes,” Macron told the crowd, announcing the end of the old order, in which “one must be right or left—in a finished taxonomy, as if political life were a frozen species, butterflies that had to be pinned to a wall.”
French voters say that economic issues (employment, buying power, and retirement) rank just above immigration as their most pressing concerns. At the beginning of April, I went to Hayange, a town in the Grand Est region, which has been known for iron manufacturing since the de Wendel family established a foundry there, in 1704. Hayange, where unemployment is seventeen per cent, used to be a bastion of the left, but its political landscape is in flux. During the Presidential election of 2012, François Hollande visited the ArcelorMittal steelworks, which towers over the town, and promised to keep it open. Twenty-nine per cent of the town’s residents voted for him in the first round (their second choice, at twenty-seven per cent, was Marine Le Pen). Later that year, ArcelorMittal closed two blast furnaces, eliminating more than six hundred jobs. In 2014, Hayange elected Fabien Engelmann as mayor. Engelmann, a thirty-seven-year-old vegetarian, started his career as a far-left activist but switched to the Front National in 2010, to protest the candidacy, for regional office, of a woman who publicly wore a hijab.
Hayange, for the moment, still has a middle class. The marriage banns, posted on a bulletin board in the town hall, included those for an auto-body painter and a cashier, a zinc roofer and his stay-at-home fiancée, and an optician and a midwife. In a shoe store, two saleswomen told me that they remained undecided, but were leaning toward Le Pen. “I think everyone wants her to win, but they don’t want to vote for her,” one woman said, depicting a Le Pen victory as a sort of forbidden fantasy of the collective unconscious. (In the first round, thirty-three per cent of hayangeois ended up voting for Le Pen, with Macron drawing only nineteen per cent.) A florist who was preparing a spray of lilies for a funeral told me that his parents were Italian immigrants and had been stalwarts of the left, but that he was considering voting for Le Pen. He dismissed Macron as “a smooth talker who proposes nothing.” His family, like many in Hayange, had jumped across the political spectrum in the space of a generation, skipping over the center entirely.
That evening, I travelled to Monswiller, a tiny village near the German border where Le Pen was speaking. Several dozen protesters were staked out across the street from the auditorium, whose windows were plastered with posters for accordion bands. “No, France Doesn’t Want to Take in Any More Racists,” one of their posters read. They banged on pots and pans.
The hall was packed. Near where I was standing, a woman in Capri pants and a young man with a scorpion tattoo that went from his ankle to his knee were hanging on to a rail, hoping to get a better look. “Marine! Marine!” the crowd yelled as Le Pen came on. She said, “My dear friends, I can’t disguise my immense pleasure at being here, in this dear land of Alsace!” From there, she launched into an unremittingly dark oration, delineating the betrayals of the political classes (“Don’t forget that François Fillon was the first Prime Minister of the Fifth Republic to celebrate the opening of a mosque with a little girl of only six years old, veiled, by his side!”), the culture of permissiveness, the unfair tax system, the dearth of public services, the abandonment of single mothers. Her gruff, sarcastic delivery held the audience spellbound. She had clearly studied the smallest particulars of their predicament.
“Look at these large, merged regions,” she said, veering into a denunciation of a plan by which the French government, in 2016, had consolidated the country’s administrative regions. “I was a victim in the North,” she said of the area she represents. “You, too, here, with the mastodon ‘Grand Est’ imposed on you. Which does not represent anything, which has no history, no soul, no meaning, no coherence.” Her voice booming, she built up to the line that would command the biggest applause of the evening: “I am leading the revolution of proximity. . . . I will give you back Alsace!”
“On est chez nous!” the crowd chanted. “It’s our house!”
Not only was Le Pen talking about the “forgotten people of France,” as she calls them; she was meeting them on their turf. Her rejection of globalism went smaller than nationalism. She was subdividing the country into its narrowest possible parts and trying to conquer them one by one. In the event that Macron’s vision of France stretched to the outer ring of one of those diagrams of concentric circles that kids draw to represent their position in the universe, Le Pen’s was confined to its tight nucleus. Her inspiration is to link the economic suffering of France with its social ills. “We are the owners of our country,” she said in Monswiller. “We must have the keys to open the house of France, to open it halfway, to close the door.”
This time around, a Le Pen ascension comes not as a shock but as a troubling inevitability. Political leaders are not unanimous in the belief that, in the name of solidarity, they must endorse Macron. Mélenchon, the far-left candidate, received twenty per cent of the vote in the first round; his supporters, combined with Le Pen’s, constitute a forty-per-cent share of the electorate. Both reject Macron’s business-friendly economics and his affinity for Europe. In 2002, Mélenchon, then a Socialist minister, condemned Jean-Marie Le Pen, saying, “You must not hesitate. Put on gloves if you want, or hold your nose, or whatever you want, but vote. Put Le Pen down as far as possible!” This time, he was coyer, declining to denounce Le Pen immediately, and leaving it to an online poll to determine whether his followers supported voting Macron, voting blanc (submitting a blank ballot), or abstaining. Fillon, the center-right candidate, threw his support behind Macron, but more than half of his voters are saying that they won’t follow his advice.
Still, the math heavily favors Macron, whom polls, which were accurate in the first round, have put ahead by twenty points. By Nate Silver’s estimate, Le Pen “could beat her polls by as much as Trump and Brexit combined, and still lose to Macron.” Even if Macron wins, he will face another challenge almost immediately: the June parliamentary elections. France’s system is set up so that the Prime Minister, who is chosen from whichever party controls a majority in Parliament, holds numerous executive powers. When the President and the Prime Minister come from different parties—this has happened only three times since 1958—the President is essentially paralyzed. It is far from certain that a fledgling group such as En Marche! can win the two hundred and eighty-nine seats needed for a majority, particularly with a slate of inexperienced candidates composed, in part, of members of civil society, whom Macron has encouraged to apply for candidacy online.
If Macron secures the Presidency and a parliamentary majority, his tenure will constitute the first and the most important fortification of the next barricade against the Front National. But, as the journalist Anne Sinclair told me, “If this next mandate is a failure, you can be sure Marine Le Pen will win next time. And Marion Maréchal Le Pen has forty years ahead of her to become President.” (The F.N.’s official poster for the second round depicts Marine wearing a skirt that falls above the knee, because, according to advisers, “women’s freedom is under attack by Islamist radicals.”) The interval between the two rounds of voting allows passions to cool. The system discourages extremism, but this means that a large portion of the French electorate may feel pushed into an unsatisfactory forced choice. “Ni patrie ni patron, ni Le Pen ni Macron” (“Neither motherland nor bossman, neither Le Pen nor Macron”) someone spray-painted, the day after the first round, at the foot of the bronze statue of Marianne that soars above the Place de la République.
On the eleventh day before the French people had to make their final choice, Macron was in his home town of Amiens, meeting at the chamber of commerce with union members from a Whirlpool plant that has been threatened with closure. Its owners had declined to authorize Macron to visit, but Le Pen, sensing a publicity opportunity, showed up, unannounced, in the factory’s parking lot. “When I learned that Emmanuel Macron was coming here and that he didn’t intend to meet the workers, that he didn’t intend to come to the picket line, but that he was going to take shelter in I-don’t-know-what meeting room of the chamber of commerce to meet two or three handpicked people, I considered it such a sign of contempt for the Whirlpool workers that I decided to leave a committee meeting and come see you,” she said, as F.N. activists handed out croissants. The factory would not be shut down, she promised, if she is elected President.
Macron scrambled over to the site. Even though he received a rough reception—“You don’t know Amiens!” someone shouted, as smoke from burning tires filled the air—he stayed and talked with a group of workers for forty-five minutes, broadcasting the unscripted encounter on Facebook Live. Enduring insults and interruptions from the scrum, he persisted in trying to explain his perspective. He said that, as President, he would try hard to find a buyer for the factory, and, if he failed, he would work to insure the best possible deal for laid-off workers. “I’m not here to offer false promises,” he said at one point. “When Marine Le Pen comes here and tells you we’ve got to reject globalism, she’s lying to you!” ♦
