What a presidential election in France! President Hollande’s approval ratings were so catastrophic that he renounced to stand for reelection. A first in post-war history. The favorites from the Republican party, Alain Juppé and François Fillon, both stumbled.
After the first round of voting, it is clear that the independent Emmanuel Macron with his newly created movement En Marche ! will become the next French president.
At 20:01 Paris time, according to the first estimation, the hot favorite Emmanuel Macron leads with 23.7 %, ahead of the nationalist, extreme-right wing Marine Le Pen with 21.7%, the Republican candidate François Fillon with 19.5 % and the extreme-left wing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon with 19.5 % of the vote.
President Hollande’s former minister of the economy, Emmanuel Macron, became the new, hot favorite in the polls because the “natural” favorite, François Fillon of the leading oppositional party Les Républicains (LR), stumbled over a series of affairs; notably (most likely) fictitious jobs as parliamentary assistants for his wife and children as well as costumes for roughly €50,000 offered to Fillon by rich friends, but never declared as gifts, as demanded by parliamentary rules.
Emmanuel Macron was endorsed by many personalities, including François Bayrou. He is a former minister of education of the center-right governments of Eduard Balladur and Alain Juppé and a centrist leader with almost no troops left. But he has reputation as a man of integrity, exactly what was needed against François Fillon who had won the primary of the right and the center against Alain Juppé and Nicolas Sarkozy with the claim to be a man of integrity, which later turned out to be false.
The French vote is roughly divided into one quarter for the extreme-right, one quarter for the extreme-left, one quarter for the “Republican right” and one quarter for all kinds of centrists.
Marine Le Pen of the extreme-right polled most of the time ahead of everyone in the race, but with around 25% of the overall vote she has no chance of coming close to winning the second round of voting because most of all the other voters are firmly against her and her extreme-right Front National party.
The extreme-left vote was divided between the leader of the populist movement Unbowed or Unsubmissive France (La France insoumise), Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a colorful tribune of the plebs, and Benoît Hamon, the surprise left-wing winner of the Socialist Party primary. With the left-wing vote divided, they both had no chance of ending up in the second round. Why could they not join forces? Because Jean-Luc Mélenchon, as a former member of the Socialist Party, had only one wish, to sink the Socialist Party.
As mentioned in a February 2017 article, with the conservative Fillon and the extreme-right-wing Le Pen fighting for space on the right, Mélenchon and Hamon fighting on the far left, there was a huge boulevard at the political center for Macron who used his chance.
After the first round of voting, it is clear that the French political scene will be profoundly changed. Both Les Républicains and the Socialist Party, who have dominated French politics for decades, have been eliminated in the first round of the French presidential election. This result was overdue because both political camps have been unable to reform France. The employment rate stands at around 10%, the budget deficit remains over the 3% of GDP demanded by the Maastricht criteria and the public debt is over 97% of GDP.
Of the four candidates with a chance of ending up as president, three were anti-establishment candidates and the fourth, Fillon, had started as an outsider in the right and center primaries. Mélenchon and Le Pen are both critical of the EU, the Euro and Nato. Both are against liberal, structural reforms in France. Luckily, Mélenchon and Le Pen have no chance of becoming the next French president.
Liberal reforms are overdue. Will Emmanuel Macron be able to deliver? He will need as many reform willing parliamentarians in all parties in the upcoming legislative election. Who will become his prime minister, who will sit in his cabinet and who will be among his parliamentarian majority needed to govern?
In the run-off presidential election between the two top candidates Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen to be held on May 7, 2017 the 39-year old newcomer Macron (* December 21, 1977) is the hot favorite. According to the latest polls, he should beat the candidate of the extreme-right with roughly two-thirds against one-third. That is way beyond any margin of error.
This article was originally published in “old cosmopolis” on April 23, 2017 at 20:01 Paris time.
Added on April 23, 2017 at 21:14 Paris time: The former center-right prime minister and presidential candidate François Fillon and the former center-right prime minister Alain Juppé have publicly declared that they will vote for Emmanuel Macron in the second round of the French presidential election. Macron will surely become the next French president.
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Emmanuel Macron in April 2015. Photo Copyright © Claude Truong-Ngoc. Article added to our new WordPress pages on December 7, 2021.
