French citizens head to the voting stations Sunday to narrow the field of candidates for the nation’s next president. The top two winners in the first round of voting will go head-to-head in a second round of voting on May 7, if neither wins more than half the votes, which is unlikely. The second-round contestants are likely to be non-traditional parties: neither the Republicans nor the Socialist candidate is expected to survive round one. But the polls say the race is too close to call. The Cipher Brief’s Kaitlin Lavinder spoke with Steven Kramer – a public policy fellow at the Wilson Center, who served as Policy Advisor to the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs from 1996 to 2002 – about the upcoming French elections, and implications for France and the global community.
The Cipher Brief: What is your take on the first round of France’s presidential elections coming up Sunday? Who are the candidates, and how do you think they’re going to do?
Steven Kramer: Nothing’s for sure. This has been a completely unpredictable race from the beginning. A long time ago, when there was the primary for the Republicans party, the polls indicated and everybody was convinced that Alain Juppé was going to win by a huge margin – but the polls were totally wrong, and he lost. Francois Fillon, who is running in this presidential race, was polled to come in third, and he came in first. Anything that you say has to be subjected to a lot of doubts about the validity of polling.
That being said, if the polls are right and if things continue the way they are now, which isn’t for sure, it is a four-person race. In the last few weeks, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far left candidate who had been pretty much tied with Socialist candidate Benoit Hamon, is now way up around 18 percent. It’s possible that if Mélenchon continues his rise, he could even be one of the top two. That possibility was real enough that prices fell on French bonds.
The most likely thing is that it’ll be Marine Le Pen, the far right candidate versus Emmanuel Macron, the centrist candidate, but there’s no way of knowing.
TCB: Mélenchon’s rise and Hamon’s fall seem to be turning this race into one of non-traditional parties. There is still the chance that Fillon, from the traditional Republicans party, could make it to the second round, but many people think it’ll be Le Pen and Macron, and maybe now even Mélenchon. So my question is, what are the specific attributes of France – the French economy, the French body politic, etc. – that make this race one of non-traditional parties? Or is this a phenomenon of the broader movement across Europe, and even here in the United States, of angst against the establishment?
SK: I think it’s both. There’s no question that this has been a year or two of huge frustration and antagonism toward the establishment. That was really shown in the American elections and to some extent in Britain, although a large part of the conservative establishment was supporting Brexit. I think the same thing is happening in France. It’s to some extent those people who benefit from globalization versus those people who oppose it, those people who support a more transnational view of the world versus those who want to return to a more nationalist view of the world. There’s a lot in common, but then there are also things specific to France.
Specific things relate to the fact that the French Fifth Republic has been dominated by two major parties: the Gaullists, who have used lots of different names since 1958 and are now called the Republicans, and the Socialist party, with the new Socialist party being recreated in the early 1970s. Most of the time, the two leading candidates – that is, candidates that make it to the second ballot – came from those two parties. It’s incredible when you think about it that most likely in this election, neither party will be present, which means that the French party system is in the process of collapse. Why is that happening? Some of the answers are specifically French.
In the case of the right, the results of the primary are a little bit like the Republican primaries here in the United States – people often vote in Republican primaries for the most conservative candidate, and Fillon was the most conservative of the three, in that he came from an old Catholic subculture, which is a minority in France. People had had it with the old guard – that is, Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s former President, and Juppé, the former Prime Minister.
Fillon is a former Prime Minister but he was so obscured by Sarkozy, who treated him like an office boy, that somehow he didn’t get the opprobrium of people who had been part of the system. But Fillon, who everybody should have thought would have been part of the top two and would have defeated Le Pen, seems to be hopelessly corrupt. And by deciding he would protect his reputation by staying in the race rather than withdrawing, he has managed to damage his own party. Right now, he’s around 18 percent, which is incredibly low. You’d normally expect 25 or 30 percent. This may mean the major party of the right will fail to get into the second round. Consequences for the general election, for parliament would be huge. There is the possibility of the collapse of the old party of the right, the party of order.
And in the case of the Socialist party, that party is also almost at a point of total collapse. It wouldn’t be surprising if that happened. In 1969, the old Socialist party, the SFIO, was in a situation where its candidate got only four percent of the vote, because the leader of the old Socialist party told people to vote for a centrist candidate in the hope that he could defeat the Gaullists. What’s happening now is a little bit similar. The Socialist party was discredited, to an extent, by current President Francois Hollande’s very unsuccessful tenure. The fact that he wasn’t willing to run again was just amazing. That meant the party didn’t have a good chance.
The party is really factionalized, even more than usual. Hollande’s former Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, is a very right wing Socialist, and Hamon is a very left wing Socialist. Valls lost in the primary, and Hamon won, but I would say a large part of the right of the party won’t vote for him. To make it worse, there is also a dissident leftist running against him – Mélenchon. And Mélenchon has momentum. The weakness of the two traditional parties gave Macron – a guy from the center, who’s young and reformist – a real chance. It has completely upended French politics.
Unless Mélenchon continues to gain support, it’s going to be Macron versus Le Pen, and neither of them comes from the old political guard.
TCB: Logistically, how would that work if somebody from neither of the two traditional parties is in power? How does he or she go about forming a coalition in the legislature, and how does that play out in governance and effectiveness?
SK: That’s going to be a huge question. Let’s say that it’s Le Pen and Macron. What’s happening now is that all the politicians – all the people in the National Assembly – are trying to figure out what they do. If a Socialist supports Macron, he’ll face a lot of enmity from other people in the Socialist party. If he doesn’t support Macron, then he may not be endorsed by Macron as a candidate for the assembly. There’s a careful effort to try to find a way out of that. After the first round, it’ll become a lot clearer – there will be a lot of people who want to run on a Macron ticket, and probably that will include people from the Socialists and the center and maybe even a few from the right.
In the case of Le Pen, it’s a real problem, because for most of the last few decades, there has been an attempt to isolate her party, the National Front, for good reason. But there have always been some conservatives willing to work with them. If she makes it to the second round, and if there’s a chance she might win, then a lot of conservatives might decide to support her. It’s hard to tell what they’re going to do. But everybody has to be thinking about what’s the best way to hold onto a seat in parliament, and the two old parties have to decide how they stay in business. That’s going to be very confusing and chaotic. And then the next president is going to have to figure out how to govern, how to create a majority in the National Assembly. You can’t really govern without a majority – you need a Prime Minister who’s going to implement your own program.
TCB: How important is the role of President in France? What I’m really trying to get at is, say, for example, Le Pen wins both rounds, and then there’s this confusion in the legislature over which party is supporting who and what coalitions are built. Is there some kind of work-around to the President so that things can still get done effectively, with people in the traditional parties still holding onto a fair share of power and sidelining a Le Pen presidency?
SK: You’ve asked a really great question. First of all, how does a large part of the country react to the victory of someone who has been seen by many as semi-Fascist or proto-Fascist? That’s really a huge question.
The second thing is, how can you govern without a majority in parliament? First of all, Le Pen’s National Front party has a very strong extremist, fascistic wing. She has done her best to act like a reasonable person most of the time, but I’m sure that the old guard is still there.
But, if she were elected president, France’s constitution provides the mechanism that could be used to get around parliament – above all, the referendum. The president can decide to hold a referendum which goes above the head of parliament. Le Pen already said that she would have a referendum on Europe, that she doesn’t really need the political parties, and that there are a lot of ways in which a president in a time of national threat can rule without parliament; France has been in a state of emergency since January 2015, after Islamist terrorist attacks.
I would be really worried about Le Pen being elected. It would be a disaster for France. And it would probably mean she would do everything she could to get France out of the European Union. Whether the EU could survive a Le Pen presidency, whether France could survive a Le Pen presidency, is up in the air.
Well, what if she doesn’t win, but gets 45 percent? That still doesn’t make you feel very good. Why would she do so well? In part, because the other parties haven’t come up with answers to questions she’s raising. It comes down a little bit to like what happened in the Unites States, why Donald Trump won the presidency – because no one was talking to many people in the country who were really hurting and upset and worried, that is, lower-middle class and the old working class. I think that’s the case in France as well. No one really has been dealing with their problems. It’s a wake-up call, but the wake-up calls should have come earlier. So if Le Pen loses, but with 45 percent of the vote, unless the next president really does a great job, she may very well be back and could win the next time. There’s a lot to be concerned about.
None of this answers the question, what would happen if Mélenchon were elected? Mélenchon’s goal is to eliminate the Fifth Republic and create a Sixth Republic that is less centralized. But how would he go about doing that? He would have no parliamentary majority either.
TCB: Do you have a general sense of what the voting public in France is like right now? Are people engaged with the debates, or do they seem less engaged than in the past?
SK: There’s a very high percentage of people who haven’t made up their minds. In addition, there’s about 30 percent of the people saying they’re not going to take part, which would be a very low level of participation. It’s precisely those two factors that make the election so volatile. We don’t know what the people who haven’t made up their minds might do, and abstentions can make a big impact because depending on who abstains, that could really turn the second ballet.
The anticipated turnout is much lower in this election than in the past, and that’s already an important statement that people have been disgusted by politics.
TCB: Any final thoughts on this first round of the elections?
SK: I’m not a poll specialist, and there’s no way of predicting what’s going to happen in the first round. At the moment, the most likely result is Macron and Le Len. But a surprise is really likely. Anything could happen.
