If you look at which candidates the French have to choose from for the upcoming presidency, the decision can be summed up as follows: either Emmanuel Macron or a shot in the knee. Neither left nor conservatives have managed to field strong candidates. In the polls, Macron is followed by two far-right extremists: Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen. Then comes the right-wing Valérie Pécresse, whose ideological zigzag course between moderate and radical means that it is becoming increasingly unclear who should vote for her and why.
The best-placed leftist, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, was celebrated in 2017 like a kind of French Bernie Sanders. In the meantime, he seems more like a top dog who is incapable of making compromises, who talks about emancipation and ecology, but explains the world in deadlocked friend-foe images. The group of those who, like Mélenchon, consider the USA and NATO to be the greatest threats to peace are likely to be rather small at the moment.
Now it’s not out of the question that voters will opt for the shot in the knee, as Brexit Britain proves. The longer the war in Ukraine lasts, the more the French will feel its consequences, at the latest when it comes to the energy bill. Marine Le Pen is already speculating on that moment when concerns about his own wallet will again outweigh the fear of war. And loudly denied sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s Russia – allegedly solely to protect the French.
But the majority of French people would be terrified at the thought of being ruled by an extremist like Le Pen in a situation of escalating violence. In addition, Macron is much more than the lesser evil. He is a politician who, with his call for a stronger EU, offers a constructive answer to the current emergency. Whether it was the pandemic or the war in Ukraine, in both cases the EU states chose strategies that Macron has been calling for since 2017. The European recovery fund and joint new borrowing? A common European military strategy? Both are visions of Macron. France’s president not only dominates the EU with big speeches, he actually shapes it.
When citizens think they never had a choice, politics is made on the streets
And yet Macron’s good chances of a second term are only partly good news. It’s hair-pulling how much the moderate left candidates dismantled each other. And it’s depressing how little conservatives value their own ideas. The Républicains are getting rid of themselves by increasingly sounding like far-right extremists.
The weakness of his opponents only helps Macron in the short term, it weakens him in the long term. Macron’s second term is likely to be accompanied by protests even more than his first. The yellow vests and the massive strike against the pension reform had popular support, because in the end only a good quarter of French people really voted for Macron out of conviction. This legitimation problem increases the more powerless citizens feel. The more it feels like they never had a choice. Then politics will no longer be made in parliament, but on the streets. And in the Élysée – alone. This development was fueled by Macron’s extremely vertical style of government. It harms France’s democracy.