Notes ahead of the 2022 election

The next French general election is less than a year away now and it is going to be incredibly interesting, tumultuous and significant whatever the outcome is. Not only will it be one of the first major (hopefully) post-pandemic elections in which politicians have to lay out a vision for how they will guide the nation out of plague and economic crisis, but two of the most likely second round contenders are not from the two historic main parties.

The prevailing narrative until recently was that 2022 would be a contest between Le Pen and Macron, that the left was in total disarray and that the Republicans, the more traditional conservative party, would not be able to get a look in as Macronism shifted to the right (rhetorically further than Le Pen in some cases) and as Le Pen gained in popularity. This narrative shifted, at least in the anglophone press, when in the regional elections every region in mainland France was held by Les Républicains and the Socialists. There were some murmurings among English-speaking spectators on Twitter of the return of the left-right divide and much was made of LREM and the RN’s defeats though most people acknowledged implicitly or explicitly that it’s hard to take a huge amount away from those elections because 68% of the French public didn’t vote.

What did change was that the traditional conservative Xavier Bertrand won the Hauts De France region as part of a right-wing ticket in the first round despite aggressive LREM and RN challenges. Well this isn’t a change, he’s held the region since 2015, but his defeat of LREM and the RN as well as the good showing for Les Républicains has set him up as a serious challenger for the presidential election next April. A poll released not long after the regionals showed 52% voting intention for Bertrand if he faced off against Macron, which to the best of my knowledge was the first poll to show a second-round defeat for Macron. Though it is worth stating three things: 1 all polling must be taken with a pinch of salt. 2 that Bertrand isn’t guaranteed to be the candidate of Les Républicains, indeed according to a poll recently released, his support among right-leaning voters is falling and no one right wing candidate stands out as the obvious choice. 3 A year is a long time in politics, especially during a pandemic.

For all the talk of the Bertrand surge and the blows to Macron and Le Pen after the regionals, the two most prominent national presidential candidates remain Mssrs Macron and Le Pen. I’m not in France at the moment, I might be way off, but I have been paying fairly close attention out of personal interest and for my side-job as a researcher. What I think the regional elections demonstrate is that old parties die hard. In a context where 68% have abstained, the parties with the loyal long-time militants, party structures that can mobilise those militants and a hardcore of local supporters will triumph over the newer, less entrenched parties. This is a situation in which the historically excluded RN, Mélenchon’s ‘gaseous network’ France Insoumise and Macron’s ‘startup party’ cannot thrive. The PS and LR might be largely moribund at a national level but locally they remain entrenched. LREM and the RN might not have broken through locally, but the presidential is in no small part about the figures who rise above their parties and Macron and Le Pen still dominate nationally. This is not the return of the traditional left/right divide. What seems to have happened is that the minority for whom the PS/LR left/right divide still matters turned out while everyone else stayed at home.

The real winner then was abstention. As Aurelien Mondon notes in this excellent piece, it’s impossible to impart any one specific meaning to almost 70% of the public not showing up. There’s likely to be a whole mess of reasons why this happened, the non-votes reflecting different priorities for different people. But abstention was more pronounced among the younger and the poorer and it reflects a slow-moving legitimacy crisis for French democracy and a persistent tendency towards anti-politics in French society.

Another manifestation of this anti-politics was the yellow vest uprising which still haunts the country’s politics. The protesters drew from all kinds of ideological traditions, where they did support parties, they tended to be the populists on the right and left, but many were non-voters and anti-political sentiment was common. A piece of graffiti I saw during one of the early protests in Paris sums it up neatly “Macron, Le Pen, Mélenchon dégagez tous!” (Macron, Le Pen, Mélenchon clear of all of you). This sentiment of dégagisme or anti-politics in which a major chunk of the population have embraced a wholesale rejection of the entire political class is a key characteristic of French political life now.

This is evidenced by the reaction to policies contained in Macron’s recent speech in which he decided to bring in a pass sanitaire mandating a person be vaccinated to access various services. Also included in the speech was the return of the widely-opposed pension reform, a strike against which I reported from here when it was initially attempted in 2020. Lots of recent commentary, analysis and reportage has focussed on the resistance to the pass sanitaire and undoubtedly that resistance is real, but I think there’s slightly more going on and for that reason the key policy announcement in Macron’s July speech was the return of pension reform.

It seems that there are three broad strands to the movement against the pass sanitaire; a hardcore of committed anti-vaxxers led primarily by the far-right opportunist, Floriane Philippot (formerly of the RN), a yellow vest type contingent with all the ideological complexity that entails and a slightly more left-leaning contingent who aren’t dissimilar to the yellow vests but who also encompass activisty types that were particularly prominent in organising resistance to article 24 of Macron’s Global Security Law. This would have increased the capacity of the police to surveil crowds, but potentially criminalised filming or photographing cops. It was later struck down by the constitutional counsel and my discussions of these proposals and the securitarian turn within Macronism can be found here and here.

Lots of commentary has nervously remarked on the similarity between the movement against the pass sanitaire and the yellow vests. This is because the second two strands of the movement which aren’t the die-hard anti-vaxxers are motivated by more than just resistance to the pass sanitaire. What draws them together is their burning hatred of Macron the man and resistance to his broader project. One of the most striking characteristics of the yellow vests was the burning anger at the inequality in France and at Macron’s perceived arrogance as he exacerbated it. Macron’s pension reform will likely further exacerbate that inequality and the street protests are what happens when resistance to that politics meets the dégagisme that rejects the political class. There is no alternative political project to embrace so people take to the streets to resist the measures they hate.

It’s not yet clear if Macron has made a strategic error in reviving the pension reform ahead of the election. Indeed, it’s likely part of his election strategy. The most convincing analysis of Macronism that I’ve come across is by the political scientists Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini in their book “L’Illusion du Bloc Bourgeois” published in English under the title “The Last Neoliberal”. Amable and Palombarini show that Mitterand’s austerity turn fractured the left bloc, leaving behind its blue collar, euro-sceptic component that prioritised economic intervention and a strong welfare state while prioritising the more middle class “second left” who were more culturally liberal, pro-European and suspicious of state intervention. This fracturing of the left bloc partly explains the disarray of the French left today. Given that the French right is also divided this presented Macron with an opportunity to disavow both the left and the right and enact his neoliberal program of dismantling the French social model at speed while prioritising finance, big tech and European integration.

Amable and Palombarini argue that Macron is attempting to hegemonise a new bourgeois voting bloc around himself by enacting a neoliberal program and becoming the only viable outlet for the pro-European voters in the professional managerial classes and those who stand to gain from aggressive pro-business reforms. The revival of the pension reform ahead of the election is an attempt to push the program of dissolving the French social model and replacing it with the kind of economy more associated with Britain while consolidating the PMC and comfortable peri-urban middle class that traditionally lean Republicain around him.

Whether or not it will work is unclear, as Amable and Palombarini note this strategy is riven with contradiction. Macron needs some of the lower middle classes in the Bourgeois Bloc to give it the numbers that make it electorally viable, but some of his reforms damage the lower middle classes — the strike I reported from was of teachers for example. To distract from this his government has inflamed the culture wars as excellently explained here, but that in turn has helped ‘de-demonise’ the RN. Equally the popular classes are excluded from the political project of the bourgeois bloc and they’ve not turned to the left, but as I said earlier many of them are resisting Macron’s project either by showing up on the streets in yellow jackets to demand his resignation whenever the opportunity arises, or to protest the police violence that terrorises the quartiers populaires around the cities.

So, it currently looks like the main contenders are Macron, Le Pen and Bertrand, all hailing from the right. The left appears to be in ruins, split between the PS, EELV, LFI and the PCF with a few tiny parties like the NPA taking about a percent. I don’t see how a single left candidate could emerge, the egos seem too big and the differences particularly on things like economic intervention and European integration seem too wide. There are several initiatives aiming to find a unity candidate, but I’m not sure the Greens and the Socialists would accept it if that candidate turned out to be Mélenchon and I’m fairly sure Mélenchon wouldn’t accept it if that candidate turned out not to be him. Perhaps if one of the more radical greens like Eric Piolle or Sandrine Rousseau wins the green primary and a détente between the Insoumise and the communists could be brokered then some kind of pact could emerge, but that’s a whole lot of ifs.

Once again, a year is a long time in politics so nothing is to be taken as a certainty. France is in an era of dégagisme, so that’s certainly conducive to surprises and the pandemic seems to be a time in which decades regularly happen in weeks, so who knows what the landscape will look like come April. However, if things stay as they currently are then it suggests France’s immediate political future will be a battle over which right-winger will take the keys to the Elysée while the popular classes shout in the streets for them all to fuck off.