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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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SubscribeA fascinating article. But I should like to pick up on one point – the great replacement. Surely its denial is just another instance of our masters’ taste for Orwellian mind games? On the one hand, when it finally emerges that a city such as London is no more than forty per cent white, it’s champagne all round – we’re all obliged to “celebrate diversity” and woe betide the long face. But when some of us remark that this bespeaks levels of migration likely to “swamp” – to use Mrs Thatcher’s term – the indigenous people, the “debate” is hastily closed down. Of course, the all powerful left is not standing still. To make it impossible to notice, far less to discuss or object to these developments, words such as indigenous, native, local and so forth are queried, declared “problematic” and ruled out of bounds. Authoritarian relativism – the only kind, since in the absence of truth one only has orthodoxy – makes it so easy to peddle hyper-sophisticated points about “perception” in the name of atavistic, dictatorial brutality: the world of “1984”.
In the 1960s the line was; ‘immigrants are few, and will always be a small minority’
In the 2020s the line is ‘Diversity is our strength’
They don’t tell you you’re becoming a minority until you are one, and then there’s nothing at all you can do about it. Powell saw this, and the working class loved him, but he had no party for them to vote for.
I had no idea you were a disciple of Enoch, given your previous protestations!
What about Mr Lawrence Fox & Co?
White British births are close to a minority already in England, but the figures are never mentioned in the media. It takes a race and immigration obsessive (me) to dig them out of the depths of the Office for National Statistics, but they show that the proportion of White British births in England and Wales, falling steadily year after year, had fallen to 58% in 2019.
I’ve not yet dared to look at the figures for 2020 and 2021 but we know that the number of births overall collapsed in 2020 particularly among British born women, so I do not expect good news.
So, the English are going to lose their homeland. But we will not be told until it has happened, and then it will be announced with a fanfare as something to be proud of.
It’s just a right-wing conspiracy theory.
Until it has happened, then it was historically inevitable.
This is a terrific article, not only for it’s insights into France’s complex and quirky political life, but for Mme. Moutet’s superb journalistic skills. Detailed yet concise, witty and perfectly crafted.
Bravo.
Many thanks to Anne-Elisabeth Moutet for a great article. More like this, please Unherd! The two-phase design of French presidential elections makes it so much more interesting, as far as I am concrened.
How fascinating, too, that French traditional political parties “are all a pit of voles”. It will be a fascinating election campagnol.
Anne-Elisabeth articles are a breath of fresh air and knowledgeable of french politics when compared to that of the ineffable pompous John Lichfield ( which I have made a point not to read or comment on anymore).
I had been losing track of the French political scene–pretty dynamic, as it turns out.
This article was most helpful in regaining my footing.
Thank you, Mme Moutet.
I’m confused. Weren’t we repeatedly assured by John Lichfield that Zemmour was doomed and Pecresse the only viable competitor to Macron?
Well, the situation is very volatile here so it’s not surprising you are confused. Plenty of French people are!
Dear Laurie it is not your fault. John Lichfield self proclaimed himself an authority on french politics but unfortunately he doesn’t understand french politics , french history or the French. So when you read anything he writes on France and the French ( or anything else as far as I am concerned) always remember this,he is like a lighthouse in the middle of a bog : illuminating but f… useless, this why The Independent hired him for so long.
I think the real problem / imponderable is how many FrenchPersons bother to vote. Lichfield’s argument is that les gilets jaunes et al have become totally pissed off with the whole thing and won’t bother. Zemmour may be a sufficient dose of Adrenalin to get them out, as Trump did in 2016 & 2020, to vote for or against. Failing that, Macron walks it (imho)
We all know Macron wins but my what a mighty shake of the tree Zemmour is doing. I think we can all support that. Le Pen’s betrayal of her core voters just as their gripes came into the mainstream is quite the political mistake.
I agree. A radical who isn’t tainted in the way the Le Pens are can tilt the balance. Even if France remains in the EU and the euro, it won’t be the France Macron wants to lead.