Newcomer centrist Emmanuel Macron and hard-right populist Marine Le Pen will face off in the second round of France’s presidential elections on the 7th of May after no candidate won a majority last week. Macron came away with 24.01 percent of the vote, while Le Pen was a million votes behind at 21.30 percent. The traditional mainstream parties in France, the Republicans and the Socialists, were left behind with 20 percent and 6.4 percent respectively, ending 60 years of political domination. Opinion polls show Macron will likely beat Le Pen this weekend – but hell, a reality TV star is the leader of the free world.
Emmanuel Macron once worked for a French banking entity under the umbrella of financial giant Rothschild & C— yes, that Rothschild, the fetishist devil in anti-Semite conspiracy theories. Yet his one-year-old movement, En Marche! (“turned on”, “on the march”, “forward”) is being perceived by members and commentators alike as an organic beast; En Marche! is the (neo)liberal order’s response to the peoples’ movements of illiberal strongmen (and now woman) à la Donald Trump and Macron’s rival, Le Pen. En Marche! is for the urban citizen who liked Simone de Beauvoir on Facebook, is a volunteer liaison for refugee families, and treasures their symbolic ownership of a particular alley-way tweed café. There’s no reason those yuppies can’t be just as fired up as those in the hinterlands posting their resentments and anxieties. Hillary Clinton could only dream of this.
Though having a literal Rothschild investment banker as your rival is also a dream for Le Pen, who will label Macron a globalist loyal to Brussels, not Paris. Macron has also been attacked as a continuation of France’s very unpopular incumbent president, François Hollande.
Importantly, Macron’s party has no seats in the French parliament and will need to win some in the June parliamentary elections and arrange partnerships with other parties if he is to have the power to enact policy changes. The same goes for Le Pen’s National Front, an anti-immigration and anti-EU nationalist party which only has one seat in the National Assembly.
Some commentators have speculated that far left supporters will vote for Le Pen; in a move reminiscent of the US Democratic Party establishment’s scare narrative of BernieBros voting for Trump. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who ran on the La France Insoumise (“Untamed”, “Defiant” or “Unsubmissive” France) ticket, won 19.58 percent of the vote and is seen as the representative of the French left in the elections. Since the results of the first round, Mélenchon’s camp has said that “not a single vote” from its members should go to Le Pen but stopped short of fully endorsing Macron, who is a “a marketing product full of vacuities” according to once Insoumise voter.
Le Pen is a dodgy fascist, so you’d think it wouldn’t be a hard choice for those on the French left. However, with the left vs. right spectrum being seemingly replaced with a globalist vs. nationalist paradigm in the world’s developed democracies, the left, and more specifically the remnants of the labour movement, have found it difficult to find a home and a unifying raison d’etre. A new generation in the working class areas which once backed the Socialists have been captivated by Le Pen’s nationalist message. On the flip side, those who voted for Mélenchonm may look at the most vocal supporters of Macron’s campaign: France’s news media, the old Socialist/Republican guard, the megabanks and German chancellor Angela Merkel, and think ‘I’m tired of this—this is more of the same’.