Now that François Fillon has
become the French right’s presidential candidate, it is possible
that he will face Marine Le Pen of the Front National in the final
round. Guardian columnist Natalie Nougayrède asks whether it is
likely that France will have a far right president, and what the
consequences would be for the country and for the rest of the world
Time
to think the unthinkable about President Le Pen
Timothy Garton Ash
Logic
is against Marine Le Pen, as it was with Trump and Brexit. No wonder
people are weighing up the possible repercussions
Could President
Marine Le Pen trigger article 50 without a parliamentary vote?
Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, that is, to take France out of the
European Union, following Britain. Such is the question I find myself
discussing in Paris with leading French experts. Provisional
conclusion: since France, unlike Britain, is a presidential
democracy, she could probably do it herself initially, but it would
then require parliament to vote a revision of the French
constitution. The mere fact that my French friends raise the
question, even very hypothetically and three-quarters-jokingly, is a
sign of the times. What was it Rousseau said? “To be sane in a
world of madmen is in itself a kind of madness.”
It is, of course,
unthinkable that the leader of the rightwing, populist,
anti-immigration Front National should become president of the French
republic in elections next May. Just as it was unthinkable that
Britain should vote to leave the EU and unthinkable that the US would
elect Donald Trump. I have come here partly to seek reassurance that
the unthinkable will not happen again, this time at the very heart of
Europe. I will take the Eurostar back to London very far from
reassured.
To be sure, most of
those I talk to are still confident that she will lose to François
Fillon, the candidate of the centre-right. In the second round of the
presidential election, voters of the centre-left will rally round,
holding their noses to vote for Fillon – for the sake of the
republic. After all, in 2002 they voted for Jacques Chirac to keep
out Marine Le Pen’s father, the founder of the Front National,
sighing “better the thief than the fascist”. Protest votes in
European and local elections are one thing, but a presidential
election is serious.
Fillon, with his
strong conservative Catholic patriotism, and his reassuring personal
solidity, can win back many Front National voters in rural, urban and
suburban France. On current polling, both the leading candidates
might get about a quarter of the votes in the first round, on 23
April, but in the second, on 7 May, Fillon would walk home with about
two-thirds of the votes. Thus far the conventional wisdom and opinion
polls, which served us so well in Britain and the US.
François Fillon,
left, ‘has a combination of social conservatism and economic
liberalism that risks alienating voters on both counts’.
Photograph: Jean-Francois Monier/AFP/Getty Images
Now for the doubts.
Fillon has a combination of social conservatism and economic
liberalism that is unusual in France, and he risks alienating voters
on both counts. He takes conservative Catholic positions on issues
such as surrogate motherhood and gay marriage. At the same time, he
wants to deregulate the economy, slash 500,000 public sector jobs,
reform the national health system and cut welfare benefits.
Libération recently caricatured him on its front cover with a
Margaret Thatcher hair-do. Voices are raised against this French
Thatcherism even in his own party. For voters coming from the
fragmented left, this may be too much to swallow, so they may abstain
in the second round. But the economic liberalism also makes him
vulnerable among the working-class and petit-bourgeois voters he
needs to win back from the Front National. They want to be reassured
and protected, not challenged à la Thatcher.
Underneath is the
general sense of malaise, with economic growth barely reaching 1%
last year and close to 25% youth unemployment; a resentment one
encounters at every turn against a political class seen as remote,
self-serving and corrupt; and a widespread desire to give the whole
bloody system a good kicking. While Fillon is not from the classic
Parisian elite, he is clearly of the establishment. As one person
close to Le Pen put it: “Fillon, il est système.” And then
history just seems to be going this way at the moment, with Trump and
Brexit normalising populist choices.
Last but not least,
Le Pen is a strong candidate, the very model of a modern populist,
who marshals all these arguments forcefully. Take a look at the Front
National official Facebook page and watch her Wednesday evening TV
interview embedded there. There she is, smiling down from the top of
the page, with a nice blue rose (appropriating the Socialists’
symbol, but changing the colour) that lies horizontally between the
words “Marine” and “Présidente”. Note the “e” on the end
of “Président”: she would be France’s first female president.
In the TV interview,
she has the Faragesque and Trumpian knack of seeming to speak the
language of ordinary folk. She is standing for election “in the
name of the people”, she says, whereas Fillon is standing “in the
name of the European commission, in the name of the banks, in the
name of Monsieur Schäuble”. She defends “the return of the
nation … and democracy”, adding that “many countries have made
this choice”. She mentions first the US, then Britain, then Italy
voting “no” in the recent referendum. Oh yes, and, “I defend
the rights of women”.
What would she do
about Europe? She wants a referendum on France’s membership of the
EU: “I’m not afraid of the people.” She will organise the
referendum, she says emphatically, and she will respect the result.
No, I’m not
predicting Frexit. If there’s one thing you can safely say about
the French it is that they don’t have a British attitude to Europe.
But Europe Day next 9 May, two days after France’s presidential
decider, could be a gloomy one.
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