Four Results of the First Round of France’s Presidential Election

The first round of France’s 2017 presidential election, which took place on Sunday, ended with the victory of the “En Marche!” movement leader Emmanuel Macron and the National Front chairperson Marine Le Pen. Director of Studies at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) Jacques Sapir told valdaiclub.com about what he considers some of the more important results of the vote.

The first result of the Sunday vote is that France jumped from a bipartisan system to a four-party system because the first round of this election has four people representing parties at the front, with between 19 and 24 percent of the share of voters. That is new for France.

The second result is the complete disappearance of traditional parties like the Republicans and the Socialist Party. If we aggregate the two candidates, François Fillon and Benoît Hamon, they got only 26% of voting which is an extraordinarily low result for these two parties, which dominated French politics for nearly 50 years.

The third result is the fact that if you were to take together the five candidates, which defended to some extent the sovereigntist ideas – Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, François Asselineau and Jacques Cheminade – you ended up with nearly 47% of the vote. The sovereigntist vote has never been so high in an election.

The fourth result is that Marine Le Pen has won a cultural victory. Emmanuel Macron did not use the words “patriote” or “patriotic,” so widely used by Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, in his campaign. He used these words twice in last night’s address. This is quite important. The fact that even Mr. Macron is to some extent in a situation where he had to use the same language that is used by his adversaries. That could to some extent show that sovereigntists have won a cultural victory in this election.

Le Pen May Still Win by Shifting Left

It is obvious that for Marine Le Pen, it will be extremely difficult to win against Emmanuel Macron. Pollsters give around 60 percent for Macron and only 38 percent for Le Pen. However, if we look at the landscape of this election, we see that Macron has generated deep ache in some segments of the French electorate. Both in the France Overseas electorate, which is feeling betrayed by the result of this election because many of the people who supported François Fillon expected him to be first or second in the first round, and among the electorate of Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

I think that the only possibility for Marine Le Pen is to capitalize on this disgust for a man who is to some extent the heir of François Hollande, and represents interests of the banks and oligarchic establishment in France. That will probably mean that Le Pen is to turn leftist or at least incorporate into her own discourse part of the discourse of Mélenchon.

Would Macron Succeed as President After Victory?

It is true that Macron could not count on a very strong majority in the French parliament in June, and it is the same case for Marine Le Pen. To some extent, he will try to enlarge his own movement by co-opting people from the Socialist Party, as well as some from the center-right establishment. I do not think it would be enough to give him a true majority.

He will be forced to accept a kind of a non-majoritarian government or to build some kind of alliance with people from what is left of the Socialist Party, as well as people from the Republicans. Because of this, his power will be quite reduced, and at the very beginning, he will be a very weak president. It is obvious that Macron does not want to change anything in the policy implemented by Hollande. It is not surprising, he has been a minister of François Hollande, and before he was one of his closest advisors.

We have to expect a large degree of continuity between the Francois Hollande presidency and the Emmanuel Macron presidency. This is also probably raising a huge problem because most French voters just do not want this kind of continuity.

Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.