The Certain Uncertainty of the French Presidential Race

The Napoleon admirer he claims to be should have known a winter campaign was a risky choice. A gaffe here and a misstep there were all his opponents needed to make counter-maneuvers of their own. His downslide in the polls was epitomized by a sobering, failed trip to Marseille. To save his campaign he had to act. In an attempt to drown out the Les Républicains (LR) party congress, he declared his candidacy on 30^th November and, five days later, held his first political rally in front of nearly 14,000 supporters. Results: lukewarm. Despite a stellar show and a media frenzy, the surprise nomination of Valérie Pécresse (president of the Greater Paris region) as the presidential candidate of LR (the center-right party of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy) had a greater effect on the electorate. She leapt in the polls overnight, from 10% to 19%, even potentially beating Emmanuel Macron in the run-off. Éric Zemmour had managed to halt his downward spiral but the winds had changed, and he had to start rowing.

The French presidential election works as follows: should no candidate win an outright majority, a feat never achieved since the establishment of direct universal suffrage in 1962, two candidates with the most votes go to a run-off. The legislative election is held two months after the presidential one, but it is never a tense affair. By then, the French people usually internalize the presidential election result and always give the victor’s party a ruling majority in the Assemblée Nationale, France’s lower house. (France’s upper house, the Senat, can be overruled by a combination of the lower house and the executive in the event of a disagreement, and so is less important.)

With Emmanuel Macron polling at around 24% of the first-round votes, miles ahead of the next best candidate, the real race is for the second place in the first round of voting and a qualification to the run-off.

Zemmour has not yet been able to significantly reduce the margin between himself (13.5%) and both his main right-wing rivals, Le Pen (17%), and Pécresse (16%). Nevertheless, he is still within touching distance and his campaign has been showing signs of gathering momentum. His strategy of “the Union of the Rights” is starting to bear fruit – something, he claims, neither of his right-wing adversaries are able to do; Pécresse, because she won’t break the cordon sanitaire around the RN (understand by this a firewall between the right and the far right), and Le Pen, because she is unable to appeal to the conservative bourgeois electorate of the LR. His newly established party Reconquête! already has 85,000 members and his movement has received the support of a wide array of political actors. After recruiting Philippe de Villiers, a popular figure of the Catholic right, former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s ex-counsellor Patrick Buisson, and Jacline Mouraud, a key instigator of the yellow vest protests (the populist movement whose protests plagued the first half of Macron’s presidency), Zemmour has managed to sway several heavyweights from both the LR and the RN to his cause.

These defections have undoubtedly hurt his right-wing opponents and given his political persona some much-needed weight. The killing blow, however, still eludes him. Murmurs of Marine Le Pen’s charismatic and popular niece, Marion Maréchal, joining his team are growing ever louder. Her backing would likely be the push he needs to become the leading challenger to Emmanuel Macron. Hopes are high in the Zemmour camp, but expectations might have to be managed. After becoming, in 2012, the youngest MP since 1791, Marion Maréchal turned her back on party politics in the wake of aunt’s disastrous 2017 debacle. She has since founded a political sciences university in Lyon (ISSEP) to serve as a counter-weight to the increasingly left-leaning Parisian SciencesPo in the education of the country’s political elite. She and Zemmour have a strong friendship and much esteem for one-another but, despite being a strong proponent of the Union of the Rights, jumping back into the political quagmire with no guarantee of success might not be her best option.

Zemmour may have convinced some of the officer class to follow him; he must now convince the common soldiers to do the same if he wishes his presidential run to amount to more than an entertaining footnote. Abstentionism has been growing in France and many of his compatriots are simply uninterested in the campaigns. But the electoral geography might work in his favor.

Marine Le Pen’s star seems to have been dimming for some time. She was left humiliated after her 2017 rout by Emmanuel Macron. Her failure to garner more than 33.9% of the run-off votes, in large part due to an embarrassing televised debate, created a wave of disillusion within her ranks. Her subsequent failure to make any gains in the minor elections throughout Macron’s presidency, often snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, has made many of her supporters question if she is the right leader to get their ideas realized. Her attempt to appeal to left-leaning voters, and her strategy of softening her party’s image, have further alienated some of her traditional hard- and far-right supporters. They could find in Zemmour a new champion, close to their core values, and, like Trump, someone who’s not a career politician and who’s not afraid of being demonized.