Refractory Gauls, or the French politics thread

[Duque de Bragança]

The debate between the two who make it to the run-off could be a factor as well.
Last time, Marine's performance was subpar, not that Macron's was great.

Of course, the famed polemist Zemmour in that debate would make for a more interesting debate but it is not going to happen judging by pre-election polls.

[Sheilbh]

Also I think polls in the second round (after the first round) tend to look a bit different to polls on the second round (before the first round), so there may be a shift - though I am having 2016 flashbacks.

I think the key is the issues this is being fought on are now slightly more favourable to a candidate like Le Pen than you would have expected given revulsion at Russia's invasion. The line from Orban will help which is basically to play on people's fears: Macron (though [insert name] here) is being reckless, we're going to get dragged into a hot war with Russia - and, by the way, cost of living's a nightmare.

In a way this context feels more helpful for her than a campaign focused on identity and immigration (though as I say I think Zemmour has helped make her appear more moderate on those issues). Because I think that set of issues (fear and cost of living) makes it more likely for Melenchon voters to either back Le Pen or abstain than an identity campaign.

The other thing that's extraordinary is obviously the collapse of Pecresse. If she really comes fifth I wouldn't be surprised if the French right goes through the same sort of breakdown that the French left has after 2017. More widely it feels like another step in the implosion of party democracy because my understanding is that LREM doesn't have many real member/activists, similarly for the RN, Reconquete have activists but don't realy have a party structure - I think FI does aspire to be more of a mass movement party.

It is really striking that with Macron, Le Pen, Zemmour and Melenchon they are all to some extent "name" candidates who are creating the party structures behind them (which might not last if they stepped down/away), as opposed to candidates who've come up through the party system and are very much creatures of their party/wing of politics even if they re-mould/constitute it. Maybe a sign of a move to more of a personalist/media democracy which will replace the old 20th century party democracy?

[Duque de Bragança]

Macron is still seen by lots of people as cozying up to Putin as in receiving Putin in Versailles, being on a first name basis and tu (thou as in singular familiar) until very recently so I disagree.

He is widely viewed as a pedant elitist, president of the rich (not just by me), out of touch, and that hurts him more than the Orban line IMO.

Fortunately for him, his bad management of the Covid pandemic is all but forgotten due to the war in Ukraine.

Pécresse and LR collapsing, was intended by Macro so WAD for him.
As for me, LREM is a rump party, with no ideological consistency with a PS wing and some from LR, motivated by opportunism (more opportunities for both than in their previous parties).

I Disagree about Le Pen and Mélenchon, they have had parties for a while, Marine uses a renewed party created by her father, and Mélenchon, with Die Linke as a model, has had LFI for a while.

[Sheilbh]

Fair - if alarming comment - from a political commentator here that it's not great when running analytical assumptions about why, say, the Tories or Australian Liberals are going to struggle to get re-elected over the next year or two (cost of living, limited policy options, possible central bank tightening/recession etc) and then applying that to countries where the alternative is Trump or Le Pen or Fratelli d'Italia.

I'd still expect Macron to win but Western politicians need to work out what they can do and get ahead of this now I think or I fear they'll face domestic/electoral issues.

[Sheilbh]

Interesting NYT piece - as ever I think it suffers a little from a bit of NYT parochialism that understands everything through, or ties it to, Amerrican politics. But plenty to chew on.

Particularly which, from a UK perspective is always striking, that Macron/Republicains establishment party voters tend to be older - while younger voters lean to the anti-system candidates:

Even Before France Votes, the French Right Is a Big Winner
The dominance of right-wing ideas in France's presidential election campaign follows years of cultural wars waged successfully by conservatives on television, in social media and in think tanks.
By Norimitsu Onishi and Constant Méheut
April 6, 2022, 9:04 a.m. ET

PARIS — With just days to go before the first round of France's presidential election, President Emmanuel Macron is still the odds-on favorite to make it through the political juggernaut and win a second term. But even if he does succeed, and before a single ballot is cast, another clear winner has already emerged from the race.

The French right.

Despite a late surge by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leading left-wing candidate, virtually the entire French campaign has been fought on the right and far right, whose candidates dominate the polls and whose themes and talking points — issues of national identity, immigration and Islam — have dominated the political debate. The far right has even become the champion of pocketbook issues, traditionally the left's turf.

Mr. Macron himself has pivoted to the right so consistently to confront the challenge that there is even discussion now of whether he should be regarded as a center-right president, though he emerged from a government run by the now-moribund Socialists in 2017.

In a tightening race, the candidate he is most likely to face in a runoff two weeks from Sunday's initial voting is Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader of the National Rally, according to polls. It would be her second consecutive appearance in the final round of the presidential election, cementing her place in the political establishment.

"The great movement to the right — that's done, it's over," said Gaël Brustier, a political analyst and former adviser to left-wing politicians. "It won't set off in the other direction for 20 years."

Ms. Le Pen and her party for decades softened the ground for the growth of the right. But the right's recent political ascendancy follows many years in which conservatives have successfully waged a cultural battle — greatly inspired by the American right and often adopting its codes and strategies to attract a more youthful audience.

Not only has the French right in recent months wielded the idea of "wokisme" to effectively stifle the left and blunt what it sees as the threat of a "woke culture" from American campuses. But it also has busily established a cultural presence after years with few, if any, media outlets in the mainstream.

Today the French right has burst through social barriers and is represented by its own version of a Fox-style television news channel, CNews, an expanding network of think tanks, and multiple social media platforms with a substantial and increasingly younger following.

These things "did not exist in France or were at the embryonic stage" just a few years ago, said François de Voyer, 38, a host and financial backer of Livre Noir, a year-old YouTube channel focusing on politicians on the right and far right.

"We told ourselves, 'Let's do like CPAC in the United States,'" said Mr. de Voyer, referring to the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual gathering of the right wing of American politics.

So he did.

In 2019, Mr. de Voyer co-organized "The Convention of the Right," a one-day conference that featured leading figures of the right and the far right. It constituted a political launchpad for Éric Zemmour, the TV pundit and best-selling author.

More than any other presidential hopeful, Mr. Zemmour has embodied the effects of the right's cultural battle on the campaign.

In his best-selling books and on his daily appearances on CNews, Mr. Zemmour over a decade became a leader of the new right-wing media ecosystem that painted France as being under an existential threat by Muslim immigrants and their descendants, as well as by the importation of multicultural ideas from the United States.

Though he has now receded in the polls, to about 10 percent support, Mr. Zemmour's meteoric rise last year captured France's attention and ensured that the presidential campaign would be fought almost exclusively on the right's home turf, as he successfully widened the boundaries of what was politically acceptable in France.

Mr. Zemmour brought into the mainstream a racist conspiracy theory that white Christian populations are being intentionally replaced by nonwhite immigrants, said Raphaël Llorca, a French communication expert and member of the Fondation Jean-Jaurès research institute.

The "great replacement," as the theory is called, was later picked up as a talking point even by Valérie Pécresse, the candidate of the establishment center-right Republican Party.

Such penetration into the mainstream is the result of a decade-old organizational effort by the right.

Thibaut Monnier, a former councilor for Ms. Le Pen's party who then joined Mr. Zemmour's movement, said that in the mid-2010s conservatives like him set for themselves a "metapolitical" project of creating new political institutions and their own media.

In 2018, along with Marion Maréchal, the niece of Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Monnier co-founded a conservative political institution in Lyon called Issep, or the Institute of Social, Economic and Political Sciences. The school is an alternative to what he describes as higher-education establishments dominated by the left.

But even as it elbowed its way into the educational establishment, the far right also succeeded in a parallel campaign to spread its ideas on social media to make itself appear attractively transgressive.

Central to Mr. Zemmour's cultural battle has been his command of social media and pop culture codes, Mr. Llorca said.

The far-right candidate is very active on networks like TikTok and Instagram, where he posts daily messages and videos aimed at a younger audience. His YouTube campaign-launching video, riddled with cultural references, drew millions of viewers.

Mr. Llorca said that Mr. Zemmour had successfully waged a "battle of the cool" designed to "play down the radical content" of his ideas without ever changing their substance. He has been helped by a network of internet users who defuse with humor the violence of his extremist ideas. On Facebook and Instagram, accounts followed by tens of thousands of people frequently post lighthearted memes about Mr. Zemmour.

Mr. Zemmour has received support from far-right YouTube influencers mocking everything from feminism to veganism to trade unions. One such influencer, Papacito, whose videos sometimes reach one million views, endorsed Mr. Zemmour recently.

"Our goal is really to make a countercultural Canal+," he told the magazine Valeurs Actuelles, referring to the entertainment TV channel that dominated the progressive cultural scene in the 1980s and 1990s. "One that is just as fun, but carrying patriotic and more reactionary ideas."

Samuel Lafont, the head of Mr. Zemmour's digital team, said that some 1,500 people were working to promote discussions of Mr. Zemmour on social networks and create new visuals accompanying his media appearances.

Mr. Lafont acknowledged that several independent "cells" had even been created to wage the fight on Wikipedia, which he called "an important cultural battle."

Ms. Le Pen's camp has often boasted about having already won the battle of ideas, pointing to how the government has even adopted some of her language, including use of the term "ensauvagement," a racially tinged dog whistle of the far right suggesting that the nation is turning savage.

But the right's most striking success may be the growing use in the public debate of "wokisme," a term unknown to most French just months ago.

Data from Google shows that interest in "wokisme" emerged only in September, just as the news media began focusing on the presidential elections. It peaked in November, fueled by controversies around so-called woke ideas such as the use of nonbinary pronouns.

Nicolas Vanderbiest, a communication expert who studied the appearance of the notion online, estimated that 15 percent of the exchanges that sparked widespread controversy on French social media last year were related to "wokisme."

"Wokisme" spread thanks to conservative publications. Le Figaro, a daily with the second largest circulation nationwide, used the term woke 417 times in its articles last year. That was about 12 times more than Le Monde, a center-left daily with the biggest readership in France.

This anti-woke movement became so powerful that Mr. Macron's minister of national education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, launched a think tank last October meant to combat "wokisme," telling Le Monde that "France and its youth must escape from this."

Though the meaning of "wokisme" was never clear, it became a catchall wielded by conservatives to blunt demands for social justice.

The French left has "allowed itself to be intimidated" by words like "wokisme," making it nearly impossible to engage in frank discussions about racism and other social problems during the presidential race, said Sandrine Rousseau, an economist, an eco-feminist and a leader of the French Greens.

The French right has succeeded in winning the culture wars, in great part because the left has offered no alternative, Ms. Rousseau said.

"We, on the left, have shrunk back in the face of attacks from the right," Ms. Rousseau said. "As they gradually advanced, we were afraid to lead this fight."

Mr. Brustier, the analyst, said left-wing organizations "do not work" to produce new ideas. A few years ago, he said, he tried unsuccessfully to launch a school to train left-wing activists. "It annoyed everyone," he said.

Norimitsu Onishi is a foreign correspondent on the International Desk, covering France out of the Paris bureau. He previously served as bureau chief for The Times in Johannesburg, Jakarta, Tokyo and Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

Constant Méheut reports from France. He joined the Paris bureau in January 2020. @ConstantMeheut

[Duque de Bragança]

Interesting NYT piece - as ever I think it suffers a little from a bit of NYT parochialism that understands everything through, or ties it to, American politics. But plenty to chew on.

That's quite charitable. Remember their headline (later changed following a wide decry) about the murder of Samuel Paty by the islamist Chechen?
https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1317313378973409280?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1317313378973409280%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lepoint.fr%2Fmonde%2Fassassinat-de-samuel-paty-le-titre-du-new-york-times-etait-indecent-19-10-2020-2397181_24.php

Or their trouble in grasping the concept of laïcité?

Make the English press look like geniuses.

[Sheilbh]

From the war thread as I don't want to distract there too much.

They just need to Article 7 his ass.

And quickly - from FT reporter

Anne-Sylvaine Chassany
@ChassNews
The mood in France, according to veteran pollster @BriceTeinturier : "More people say the country and their personal situation would improve if MLPen is president than if it it is Macron"

And her congrats to Orban:
https://twitter.com/MLP_officiel/status/1510710398768533506?s=20&t=_q8Ts7c5OCJu897lgYXNFw

[Sheilbh]

And as a Brit there's nothing more mind-twisting than the age breakdown of French voters (it's been like this for a while), where 60% of 25-34 year old voters support the far-right or far-left:


While they rely on the over-65s (who'll probably do it again) to elect the centrist-ish liberal:


It's just very, very odd for us I don't think demographics is destiny and think views/voting intention change as people age, but it's still weird.

[Josquius]

Older people supporting the far right you can kind of explain away. Of course they're a bit racist. They want the 1960s back, we all have fond memories of when we were kids.

Young people supporting the far right however... Very dodgy stuff there. A serious concern for the future.

[The Larch]

Older people supporting the far right you can kind of explain away. Of course they're a bit racist. They want the 1960s back, we all have fond memories of when we were kids.

Have you even seen the graph? Le Pen and Zemmour are 3rd and 4th amongst 65+, you can't say that old people support the far right when they'll go for Macron much more than for the two far right candidates combined.

My cheap sociological analysis is that old people don't want to rock the boat, they just want stability. They'll mostly vote for establishment parties around the center, by and large they're not in some quest to go back to their glory days of youth.

Young people supporting the far right however... Very dodgy stuff there. A serious concern for the future.

What? Young people supporting radical options, be they on the left or right, is pretty common almost everywhere. Where do you get that young people supporting the far right is dodgy?

[Duque de Bragança]

The Larch is not breaking any new ground but a reminder was needed from what I can see.
Knowing about the 18-24 votes would be interesting as well.
The youth wing of the FN, FNJ, was notorious for being even more to the right than the party in general, back in the day.

As for pensioners supporting Macron, well I guess they won't have any complains if Macron rises again the taxation of their pensions.

[Sheilbh]

Have you even seen the graph? Le Pen and Zemmour are 3rd and 4th amongst 65+, you can't say that old people support the far right when they'll go for Macron much more than for the two far right candidates combined.

My cheap sociological analysis is that old people don't want to rock the boat, they just want stability. They'll mostly vote for establishment parties around the center, by and large they're not in some quest to go back to their glory days of youth.

It's just the bit that's a bit mind-bending from a British perspective because here old people vote right wing and young people vote left wing (which reflects other demographics like education and class interests like property ownership etc).

A lot of people on the left like to pretend that it means they don't need to do anything to appeal to voters, they just need to wait for the elderly to die and be replaced by young lefties (I see similar generational lines in the US too). I disagree with that take because I think that people's politics change as they age (not least because their lifestyle, earnings, property etc shift too). But if they're right it's just a matter of time before France votes RN into the presidency.

What? Young people supporting radical options, be they on the left or right, is pretty common almost everywhere. Where do you get that young people supporting the far right is dodgy?

Actually that's the bit I find striking is these aren't what I'd necessarily call young voters (though you're a saint for saying that ) - which is why I think their radicalisation is interesting. I get the 18-24 year olds being radical (generally they back Melenchon though).

I find it more interesting/surprising that 25-34 which is people often starting their careers, starting to settle down, starting families are so radical.

Edit: And more polling that suggests we could be in for a very troubling result - more people think Le Pen has good ideas for the future than Macron:


And especially in a context of cost of living issues that Le Pen stands up for people like me - you can really see the cost of Macron's approach/style here:


Also more polling showing just how much the French left hate Macron and might not turn out as needed in the second round. It's all rather concerning.

[Josquius]

[
Have you even seen the graph? Le Pen and Zemmour are 3rd and 4th amongst 65+, you can't say that old people support the far right when they'll go for Macron much more than for the two far right candidates combined.

That's the point. It's bucking the trends seen elsewhere.

My cheap sociological analysis is that old people don't want to rock the boat, they just want stability. They'll mostly vote for establishment parties around the center, by and large they're not in some quest to go back to their glory days of youth.

Which is very curious. Why is France so different to the US and UK here?

What? Young people supporting radical options, be they on the left or right, is pretty common almost everywhere. Where do you get that young people supporting the far right is dodgy?

Not really. Again outside France, a lot of young people support the far left but for the far right it's always been a very vocal small minority of them. Not really statistically significant.

As to why it's dodgy... The far right are particularly prone to violence.
It's also a lot harder to moderate with age in the way the far left is.
If you've got people under 35 already at this stage then it doesn't bode well for years to come.

[Admiral Yi]

It's just very, very odd for us I don't think demographics is destiny and think views/voting intention change as people age, but it's still weird.

Agree.  A nation of Proud Boys.

[Duque de Bragança]

Projecting US/UK issues or trends makes for very odd analyses of French politics.

La jeunesse emmerde le Front national is so 80s, as in dated, sadly or not.

https://youtu.be/CuZB9hOQ0DQ