Yes,
President Marine Le Pen is now more possible
How
France’s far-right candidate can also defy conventional wisdom.
By NICHOLAS
VINOCUR 11/10/16, 5:31 AM CET
PARIS — Not long
ago, the prospect of Donald Trump being elected president of the
United States seemed, to many sensible people, remote, if not
laughable. Similar assessments have been made about the election
prospects of French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who is running to
become president next year.
Now that Trump has
been elected, will fate make a mockery of polls in the case of Le Pen
as it did with Trump? The French and American election systems differ
so vastly, particularly in that a French candidate needs to win at
least 50 percent of the vote, that direct comparisons make little
sense. No matter. The underlying trends that carried Trump to power
are also present in France, and they are likely to fuel an
inordinately strong performance by Le Pen next May — perhaps even
her victory.
In evaluating her
chances, the first question to tackle is polling, which currently
shows Le Pen losing to a center-right rival, probably Alain Juppé,
in a runoff round of the presidential election. Unlike Trump, Le Pen
has been tested multiple times at the ballot box over the past two
years, and is a career politician with a track record. When her
National Front party, which advocates withdrawal from the European
Union as well as drastic cuts to immigration, participated in an
election, it topped out just under 30 percent of the popular vote.
Withdrawal from the
eurozone remains a huge factor of uncertainty for many French voters.
This pattern gave
rise to a theory espoused by many National Front observers, including
this reporter. It goes like this: Le Pen cannot be elected president,
because she simply does not have enough reach to gather 50.1 percent
of popular vote. The main problem: Her party’s plans to withdraw
from the eurozone remain scary for big chunks of decisive voters,
like seniors, executives and the highly educated, who do not want to
run the risk of seeing their euro-denominated assets dilapidated in
the event of a “Frexit.”
This argument still
has a lot of merit. While Trump promised radical change on trade and
fiscal policy, he never told Americans he was going to devalue their
currency. Had he done so, even the angriest voters might have thought
twice about casting a vote that could lead to the value of their
homes or their retirement portfolios dropping precipitously.
Withdrawal from the
eurozone remains a huge factor of uncertainty for many French voters
— so much so that Le Pen may still have serious trouble winning
over the extra 20 percent she would need to get elected president.
New numbers
However, as online
stockbrokers warn, “past performance is no indicator of future
results,” and the same holds true for Le Pen in the next election.
For one, she may further water down her euro withdrawal proposal to
reassure voters (she has already done so twice). Secondly, the
presidential election is a very different beast from the regional,
departmental, municipal and European Parliament elections that
preceded it, and in which the National Front never won more than 28
percent of the popular vote.
In those elections,
voters were choosing a party — a popular, rebellious one, to be
sure, but a party. Next May, they will be voting for Marine Le Pen, a
political celebrity. What’s more, they are likely to turn out in
vastly greater numbers than for any of the intermediate elections —
a fact that, as Brexit and the U.S. presidential result have shown,
can easily throw off polling.
A more useful guide
to Le Pen’s future is how she did in the 2012 presidential
election, one year after she took over the National Front’s
leadership from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. She won 17.9 percent
of votes in the first of two rounds, or just over 6.4 million votes.
That is a huge number by any standard, especially for a first-time
candidate. The National Front only surpassed that vote total, and
narrowly, three years later in the regional elections of December
2015, right after the Bataclan attacks.
Jean-Marie Le Pen,
founder of the National Front | Georges Bendrihem/AFP via Getty
Images
Jean-Marie Le Pen,
founder of the National Front | Georges Bendrihem/AFP via Getty
Images
Next May, bet on
this: Marine Le Pen will explode her total-vote record. And this
time, whoever ends up challenging her on the Left will not win 28
percent of the vote, as François Hollande did in the first round
last time. They will be lucky to get 12 percent, on par with far-left
leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Which means that Le
Pen is all but guaranteed to be in the runoff (not a wholly original
statement: some 40 polls in the past two years have shown her
breaking through to the final round). Against whom? If polls are any
guide, her rival will be Juppé, who is currently competing to win a
presidential nomination in a primary open to centrist and
conservative voters. Juppé, a moderate conservative who has been in
politics a long time, is seen beating Le Pen in a runoff. But then
again, Hillary Clinton was seen beating Donald Trump, right up until
the last minute.
The Clinton factor
Juppé is not
Clinton, to be sure. He is running as a member of the opposition
against a deeply unpopular government, not one defending a legacy. He
is not so hated by his rivals as Hillary Clinton was by hers.
However, drill down,
and you find many similarities between Juppé and Clinton. Both have
been active in politics for decades, Juppé having occupied the post
of prime minister and foreign minister. Both are assimilated with
“mainstream” positions — Atlanticism, defense of globalization,
belief in the European Union in Juppé’s case. Both have been
accused of political corruption (Juppé was even found guilty and
sentenced to a suspended jail sentence albeit many years ago).
In terms of campaign
dynamics, they also echo one another. Both were seen as the “default”
candidates for right-thinking, proper people who believe their
countries should be improved incrementally and who did not hate
anyone. Both enjoyed relative supremacy in polls months before the
election, without inspiring fits of enthusiasm in their supporters.
Neither had the charisma nor the energy to stir crowds emotionally —
unlike Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen.
The common wisdom is
that, if Juppé faces Le Pen in the final round, he will win with
about 60 percent of votes versus 40 for her. This is a rudimentary
extrapolation, based on the idea that Marine Le Pen is about 20
percent less toxic than her father, who won about 18 percent of the
vote when he reached a runoff against former president Jacques Chirac
in 2002. It’s foolish guesswork. The world really is not the same
in 2016 as it was in 2002. After all, Brexit happened. Donald Trump
happened.
Alain Juppe is
favourite to win next year — but will his campaign go the same way
as Clinton's? | Paul J Richards/AFP via Getty Images
Alain Juppe is
favourite to win next year — but will his campaign go the same way
as Clinton’s? | Paul J Richards/AFP via Getty Images
Can Le Pen, as a
political veteran, replicate Trump’s wild ride to the White House?
Their campaigns are likely to be very different. Temperamentally, Le
Pen is risk-averse, while Trump tended toward recklessness in some of
his pronouncements. While she presses the same buttons and seeks out
a similar tranche of voters, Le Pen is more timid than Trump when it
comes to making polarizing statements that dominate the news. But her
campaign teams are pushing her to go much harder from February, when
she officially launches her campaign.
Of course, Juppé
could lose the conservative primary, which takes place in two rounds
on November 20 and 27. And former president Nicolas Sarkozy could win
it. In fact, that is precisely what many people in Le Pen’s
entourage expect to happen.
Sarkozy would be a
younger, possibly more energetic opponent to Le Pen than Juppé. But
he’s also got skeletons in the closet, and many more so than Juppé.
With Sarkozy in the final round, the presidential election could turn
into a yes/no vote focused on him. That’s what happened in 2012,
and François Hollande got elected.
None of this is to
say that Marine Le Pen has an open, easy road to the French
presidency in 2017. But, after Trump’s election, the notion seems
less absurd. In fact, it’s starting to look quite plausible.
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