Minutes after the end of French presidential hopeful Valérie Pécresse’s Paris rally earlier this month, an uncharitable cartoon started to circulate among the WhatsApp and Telegram groups of the candidate’s own Les Républicains (LR) party. It showed a Titanic-like ocean liner sinking in the night among ice floes, while hundreds of marooned passengers, heads bobbing just above the freezing water, held up their smartphones to take snaps of the disaster.
Three weeks ago, Pécresse polled as a possible runoff winner (52-48%) against incumbent Emmanuel Macron. But the leaders of LR, the latest iteration of the party of Charles de Gaulle, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, are painfully aware that if their candidate ends up not clearing the first-round hurdle, they might find themselves paddling unrescued in an ice-cold sea. In recent weeks, we have witnessed the complete disintegration of the historic French Left — could the centre-Right go the same way?
The thing to know about France’s traditional political parties, whether on the Left and Right, is that they are all a pit of voles. Not for nothing is Astérix the Gaul author René Goscinny’s other great comics series, Le Grand Vizir Iznogoud, all about a poisonous, pocket-sized Vizier in medieval Baghdad, hopelessly plotting to seize power from his boss, the benign Caliph — and being endlessly foiled, à la Wile E. Coyote.
The Iznogoud series has been translated, but unlike Astérix never achieved much success outside France. Yet here it is accepted as the other half of Goscinny’s essential civilisational portrait of French society. It was included by shrewd aides in the context briefing notes handed to Angela Merkel before her first meeting with Nicolas Sarkozy (who happens to share Iznogoud’s diminutive stature, raging ambition, and notoriously volcanic temper). “Je veux être Calife à la place du Calife!” — the irate Iznogoud’s leitmotiv is a classic of corporate as well as party politics. Indeed, it has become the shorthand used in almost any fractious work situation, from primary school bureaucracies to the competing factions of the French Catholic Church, most recently seen locked in a deadly but discreet battle over the restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral.
That this usually ends in self-destruction — sometimes quasi-annihilation, as evidenced with the 2% polling estimates currently scored by the Socialist candidate, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo — doesn’t stop anyone. (A new documentary chronicling the decline of the French Socialist Party since the 14-year François Mitterrand monarchic presidency is called La Disparition for a reason.) Le Team Spirit is no staple of French politics.
At the big rally that had imprudently been billed as “make or break”, every Républicain grandee, starting with the Sarkozy entourage, started slamming Pécresse — thereby fuelling the most negative media coverage of anyone in the campaign to date. Her delivery was wooden, the décor dwarfed her, her speech was both “bureaucratic” and “inflammatory” (she named, seeming to decry it, Le Grand Remplacement theory, a Zemmour staple alleging indigenous French populations are being replaced by immigrants). Her voice coach, a highly respected stage actor, was named and shamed on Twitter. By midweek, post-rally polls projected Pécresse in fourth position (14%) for the first round on 10 April, after Emmanuel Macron (25%), Marine Le Pen (17%) and Eric Zemmour (15%). By Friday morning, one poll had Pécresse as low as 12%.
One way of looking at this election is to dismiss it as the predictable Second Coronation of Emmanuel Macron. The “Schrödinger candidate” has yet to declare formally that he is running, protesting that he hasn’t quite made up his mind yet, even though fundraising emails have already gone out in the name of his party, La République en Marche (LREM), to hundreds of thousands of email addresses collected five years ago, and constantly updated. If Macron wins the 24 April runoff, he will have broken the curse of the last three presidential elections, where no incumbent gets a second term.
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