Last Sunday, the people of France offered themselves the very same stale dish they had served up in 2017. I observed with great curiosity the events, I even made my way to my local polling station but I did not vote. We will not get into that today, but I will offer you something no one else is capable of doing: presenting the French election story in its original packaging to you who does not understand France.
The Election System
In many ways, France presents quite an impressive way of running elections. There are very low opportunities for any electronic voting, the tradition has always been to pick up many ballots and isolate yourself behind curtains and place only one in the envelope you are given.
You then discard the others in the trash can made for that purpose, and drop the other one into a transparent box. You may also peer into said trash to observe and deduce the previous votes. In any case, this process is repeated across the country and its many overseas territories, whether in the Caribbean, or other oceans.
This is also the same across the world, as France is one of the only nations to provide the right to vote for each of its citizens no matter where they are. And yet, as soon as the bell tolls, the vote is counted and tallied and the two faces which advance to the second and final round appear on screen to the nation. This is a result of the transparent voting process, as well as a traditionally competitive culture amongst the polling stations. Everyone wants to be the first to report the outcome.
In truth, this is not actually necessary. If a candidate receives a majority of the vote he is instantly named the next President of the French Republic. This has only ever happened once, during the first election where Charles De Gaulle won with more than 70% of the vote.
That election was done with indirect universal suffrage, meaning only elected officials, parliamentarians and other “Great Electors” could vote for the President. De Gaulle was largely the founding father of the Fifth Republic and his Constitution of 1958 was heavily criticized by the Communist and other parties of the Left, as a “coup d'état”.
These Great Electors now only remain in the mayors of France, whose signatures have to be collected in order to qualify for the race. 500 signatures is the minimum.
The French Government, via the generous and bountiful contributions of the French taxpayer, also finances political campaigns. It provides a sum of 153 000 euros for that purpose in advance. Candidates who receive less than 5% of the total vote will also receive a refund of their campaign expenses up to 4.75% of the total. Those who fared better receive up to 47.5%, and those making it to the second round will receive the same for the rest.
The second round has both candidates face off in a national TV debate, and then finally the vote happens and the winner gets to be President.
The Suspects
In third place, we have Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He was born in what was then known as the Tangers International Zone in Morocco, to two French of Algeria parents (not French Algerian, there is a difference) a.k.a. Pieds-Noirs. In 1962, he moved to Normandy in mainland France. Describing the experience, he says:
When we arrived in France, it was horror for us. We discovered a lost corner of Normandy, the Pays de Caux, where the people had never seen anyone else. The rural parts of France were extraordinarily backwards compared to the urban parts of Morocco. Casablanca was a more modern city than Clermont-Ferrand. […] I cannot survive when there are only blue-eyed blond people. It’s beyond my abilities.
A very colorful character as you can imagine. He’s also a relic of a nearby time, when socialists (or whatever it is we call those who keep busts of Lenin in their studies these days) used to advocate for closing borders out to immigrants who weakened the position of the workers.
Anyway, we’re now in 2022 and he is the poster child of environmentalism, multiculturalism, etc. Today, he has essentially no sense of the nation, he advocates for naturalizing all immigrants whomever they are. His standard voters are young people issued from immigrant parents, their apolitical parents and the type of person who thinks dyeing their hair blue is fashionable.
Other than that, the man is quite the character full of culture and an avid student of history. I quite enjoy hearing him debate, shout and insult his opponents. At around 22% of the vote, it is a very respectable performance after around 30 years of political career. This is Mélenchon’s last election. Had he gone on to the second round, the far Left could have scored a massive victory and a scary future for France.
He has called all his supporters to “not give a single vote to Marine Le Pen” but without calling to vote for Macron, as is his custom.
The candidate for the mainstream right winger (Right-Centre) party “The Republicans” — which links itself to De Gaulle somehow, and thus claims to be the founding political family of the Fifth Republic — Valérie Pécresse achieved an abysmal 4% of the vote. Keep in mind this was the party (under a different name) which brought Nicholas Sarkozy to the Presidency in 2007.
A career civil servant, she has served under the regime under numerous governments faithfully and loyally. She is essentially running to be Macron’s prime minister. Dubbed “Madam 8:02” by another candidate, as she would — and did — call to vote for Macron as soon as the tally came out.
As you’d expect, no substance to her whatsoever and she could be replaced by any number of regime pawns if needed. Her policies are essentially identical to Macron’s, with some irrelevant differences for campaign purposes. Her and her party’s constituency is firmly rooted in the right wing upper classes, especially the urban bourgeois of Paris (dubbed “bobo” by their counterparts).
Anne Hidalgo, the current mayor of Paris, running for the Socialist Party. Once the largest party in France, it was reduced to ashes by Macron in 2017. She has achieved a respectable 1.8% of the vote. Essentially reviled by Parisians for her fine work in turning the city into a hub of cyclists, preventing people with cars older than X years from driving to work and reducing the car lanes within the city limits to the bare minimum.
Her positions are frankly not worth dwelling over. You get the picture. Of course, she calls to vote for Macron.
The darling of the American Right, Marine Le Pen is in firm second position, as she was in 2017. Heir to the Le Pen political dynasty, her father ran the show for a while but his name became too toxic and branded as “extreme right”. Once his daughter took over she distanced herself and changed the party’s name from the “National Front” to the “National Rally”. The American equivalents would be Buchanan or Bannon. She is faithfully running the family business in any case.
She is what you would call a Social Nationalist (a more palatable term than National Socialist), 40 years ago Mélenchon would be indistinguishable from her but times change. She has the largest populist right wing party with a constituency composed of the right wing lower classes and those who have nowhere else to go. The Yellow Vests are pretty much completely issued from her side of the equation.
Marine is a long time member of the European Parliament, and enjoys the perks that come with it. Her policies range essentially from socialist to anti-immigration, and it is hard to say how much she would accomplish within the EU framework.
President of the French Republic and Co-Prince of Andorra, His Excellency Emmanuel Macron arriving in top position as it should be. His policies are irrelevant, in fact he didn’t even run with any back in 2017. His career includes being a civil servant at the Ministry of Finances (dubbed Bercy, after the neighborhood where the building is), former partner at Rothschild & Cie Banque, minister of the Economy and some tech whatever ministry thing during the last Socialist President François Hollande’s stint.
Right before the 2017 election, he betrayed his former mentor Hollande and began the road towards the Presidency by creating his own party. He has tried to style himself as a monarchical president, but he’s in the wrong era and this has largely just translated to signature French arrogance which doesn’t play well with the French.
His achievements so far include record immigration waves, outsourcing the COVID Health policy to McKinsey, a failed reform of the retirement system, some pathetic foreign policy stunts, shutting down nuclear power plants, and reducing the budget of the military to such a point that he had to fire the equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he complained about it.
I’m being harsh of course, Macron has performed several reforms in terms of taxation or something, and is now reversing course on both the army and the nuclear plants! I’m also being told that pre-COVID he has distributed so much tax money that he was able to save french industries, and post-COVID he has produced respectable employment numbers.
Really, Macron’s selling point is that the regime is aligned with him. The best people in the civil service are around him, and he went to school with most of the cronies running the government. We have to respect that.
Anyway, you know what he’s about. Globalism, liberalism, WEF, the whole charade. A stale and frankly rotten formula that is on its last, but long breaths. Long Live the King.
The newcomer to the race, the infamous Eric Zemmour. A well-known reactionary pundit and author, he was a regular on the most popular talk shows in France for the last decades. Issued from a family of Jews of Algeria who immigrated to France following the Algerian War, Zemmour was born and grew up in Montreuil in Seine-Saint-Denis in the suburbs of Paris. He was also the second coming of Hitler according to the French media.
He achieved a mere 7% of the vote, which is not the grandiose victory he preached but he still did double the mainstream right wing party’s score. He has also created the largest political party in France within a few months, with more than 130 000 members. The registration form for the party is quite interesting, asking questions regarding competency, profession, education level. Whatever comes out of this, it is a big piece of political leverage.
Really, Zemmour’s problem is that he was too much of an intellectual. His lack of charisma did not do him any good either. Instead of seizing the political wins wherever he could, he instead allowed himself to be buried by media nonsense and his stubborn coherence in the wake of the war in Ukraine (he pointed out that French interests could not allow sanctioning of Russian gas, and that Ukrainian refugees were better served in Poland) made matters worse.
Furthermore, the debates for the first round were not held as both Macron and Le Pen refused to participate. Zemmour being a very cultivated man, and a huge student of history, his best asset was denied. I mean, you’ve got to admire the eloquence:
We must put everything back together. We must free ourselves from the religion of the human rights, because it has forgotten that it also addressed the citizen. Lamartine wrote in the History of the Girondins "when there is contradiction between principles and the survival of society, then those principles are false as society is the supreme truth". We must free ourselves from the powers of our masters: media, universities, judges. We must restore the democracy which is the power of the people against the liberal democracy which has become the means, in the name of the Rule of Law, to hinder the popular will. We must abolish the liberticide laws which in the name of non-discrimination have rendered us strangers in our own country. We must on the contrary everywhere honor the principle of the national preference, which is nothing more than the foundation of a nation which only has purpose if it favors its own. We must assume our conception of ecology, the one which defends first and foremost the beauty of our landscapes, our sites, our art de vivre, our culture, and our civilization. Of course, we must be conservative and conserve our identity but what could we possibly conserve when all has been destroyed. Our task is more immense, almost desperate, we must restore. I am not saying that the question of identity is the only one which presents itself to us. I am not saying that economy does not exist, that deindustrialization does not exist, that the difficult end of months do not exist, that meager pensions do not exist, that the labor code does not exist, that offshoring does not exist, that the constrains and defects of the Euro do not exist. I claim only that the question of the identity of the French people supersedes them all, even that of sovereignty. It is a question of life or death. An Islamic French Republic could be sovereign, in what way would it be French?
He is really not suited for the democratic process, there would need to be some procedural amendments for him to have the advantage.
Although his project was to unite the Right wing, both the popular classes as well as the bourgeois and reconstitute the Gaullist party, he has fallen short and will instead focus on creating a base within the assembly, in the legislative branch.
While he had vehemently attacked Le Pen during the campaign, saying that her purpose was “to lose facing Macron”, he has called his supporters to vote for her to get rid of of the incumbent and his clique. In fact, his speech on the matter was quite admirable.
I think of France before anything. Because it was all the meaning behind my candidacy. I could not remain quiet in front of the issues that await our country. I have many disagreements with Marine Le Pen, I have gone through them during this campaign and I will not go over them again. But in front of Marine Le Pen, there is a man who has brought in two million immigrants, a man that has not said a word of security or immigration during his campaign and will thus do worse when he is re-elected. I will not pick the wrong adversary. That is why I call on my voters to vote for Marine Le Pen. There is something much bigger than us all, and that is France. I know that some of my voters will not want to vote for her, and I do not judge them as I have accepted the differences within the union of the right wingers. Some have wanted me to negotiate for these few words, but I am not a merchant. I do not see politics as negotiation of interests, but as the eruption of the human will in History. I have put myself forward in respect to France, because I believe that our country is in danger, because the duel that had been announced already for five years now was headed for the failure of our ideas. I pray the Heavens today to be wrong. Long Live the Republic, but more importantly Long Live France.
What comes next
The regime’s story here is that the race is already called. The outcome in 2017 was a horrible debate performance by Le Pen which tanked her credibility. Coupled with the media’s standard formula of calling her Hitler ad nauseam, it got her around 27% of the vote, giving Macron a triumphant victory.
The story goes that Mélenchon’s voters will all block Le Pen, as will any other socialist voters and the right wing (besides the Zemmour camp). I believe this to be another blind spot. The reality is that a large part of Mélenchon’s voters are those men who remember Left wing figures such as Jean Jaurès which did not differ too much from Le Pen’s rhetoric. There are also those that vehemently hate Macron with such passion that they would possibly go the other way to spite the system, or the man as they say.
It’s a simple game of mathematics. Macron’s tally is 27.6%. Those are not going anywhere as the French usually vote for the candidate they love in the first run, and then vote against the one they dislike in the second round.
Le Pen stands at 23.4%. Those are not going anywhere either. Add Zemmour’s votes, people who will definitely not be voting for Macron, that’s an additional 7%, now at 30%. We’ll also add 2.1% from the guy who ran to be her prime minister last time, that’s 32.1%. That’s already better than last time.
Let’s give Macron the socialist voters (1.7%), the environmentalists (4.6%) and Pécresse’s voters (4.8%). Giving him the Trotskyists (tallying at 1.4%, yes there are even Trotskyists…) and the self-proclaimed communists (2.3%) puts him at 40.7%.
Mélenchon’s got 21.6% to give away, there’s another 5.6% up for grabs from random obscure candidates and around 26% of voters didn’t vote at all during the first round (they do not count in the tally). If Mélenchon’s voters don’t vote “fuck you”, they might not even vote at all. Think Bernie voters in 2016.
In normal circumstances, I’d say the media will do the work but they’ve done something really desperate in the last few months. They have completely rehabilitated Le Pen as a “normal candidate”, to maximize the effect on Zemmour. The consequences are that you now hear left wing people who say things like “at least Marine doesn’t say X”. What happens in France when a Le Pen arrives in the second round is that the regime activates, the universities start sending out emails to their alumni and faculty calling to “vote with their conscience”, same in the media, on TV, etc.
This will not have the desired effect this time around. We already tallied the ones already susceptible to that message. The numbers do not lie. Unless every single one of the undecided votes against Le Pen, things could get interesting.
I believe the result will be much closer, and I can absolutely envision a Le Pen win. While it would not be my favorite outcome, it would be popcorn worthy for sure. I will be having quite the laugh. And finally, while Le Pen has a recognizable brand her party leadership is made out of bozos who will not do well in the reins of power. In fact, her niece Marion Maréchal, also a favorite of the American Right, has defected to Zemmour’s side.
If Le Pen wants to effectively govern, she will have to cut deals with the Zemmour camp and make use of their pool of qualified jurists, civil servants, media people, etc. Let’s see what happens, perhaps we’ll be running this scenario again in five years.