The Populist Right’s French Failure

T he media narrative about France’s presidential election on Sunday, which saw Emmanuel Macron reelected for a second term, has largely been complimentary. Macron, the centrist incumbent who won five years ago at age 39 with an upstart political movement called “En Marche!” (French for “On the Move!”), was the early front-runner. Citing the war in Ukraine, he didn’t campaign much this time around — hosting his first large rally just a week before voting on April 10. The war was also one of Macron’s strongest campaign arguments, as he emphasized the need for stability and continuity, claiming the “worst is yet to come” in the Russia-provoked conflict.

The media’s focus on this path to victory, however, has glossed over other details. In reality, Ukraine had allowed Macron to divert attention away from significant issues affecting his presidency. Macron was a weak incumbent, with an approval rating on par with or worse than Joe Biden’s — reaching, per Ifop, a low of 25 percent in 2018, the largest drop in popularity since Jacques Chirac in 1995, before rebounding into the 40s more recently. For Marine Le Pen and the populist Right, Macron’s failures were a big target.

Immigration, the populists’ central issue, has been hotly controversial as Muslim migrants from the Middle East countries have streamed into France and the European Union since the Arab Spring in 2011. Some French citizens saw them as a cultural and security threat. Since Macron’s election in March of 2017, France has faced 26 major Islamist terrorist attacks by foreign-born immigrants — most notably, the beheading of middle-school teacher Samuel Paty in 2021, for teaching a classroom lesson on free speech.

Then there were the “yellow vests,” a protest by working-class French against Macron’s economic policies — under which the cost of living skyrocketed and fuel prices, under climate-driven taxes, reached record highs. They continued for a whopping 150 weeks atop national headlines throughout the middle of his presidency. This, too, was an obvious issue for the French populist Right.

The protests only ended in 2020 with the outbreak of the coronavirus, on which Macron also stumbled badly. France ended up having, at one point, the third-highest case rate and fourth-highest death rate in the world. In some French localities, local food markets were turned into morgues, while high-speed trains became “Covid Express” services to transport patients across the country as hospitals overflowed. As Politico reported, France’s health-care capacity issues stemmed from the outsourcing of supplies and services to China, which increased under Macron’s presidency.

Macron’s foreign-policy woes presented another issue for the Right, as the country has found itself embroiled in disputes with Turkey, over Cyprus and Libya, as well as the U.S. and U.K., over a submarine deal with Australia (which cost France a $90 billion contract and $5.5 billion in taxpayer money). Moreover, that Russian president Vladimir Putin — the subject of a long charm offensive by Macron, to position himself as a broker of tensions between Russia and the U.S. — invaded Ukraine just a week after meeting Macron in Moscow was not a great look.

Instead, Macron became the first French president to win reelection in over 20 years. It happened not because of his successes, but because of the populist Right’s failures. As the news cycle shifted to Ukraine in the final days of the campaign, Marine Le Pen — who had been campaigning since 2020 — couldn’t find a convincing message. In fact, the candidate herself began to be weighed down by her own baggage on this score. The French far-right has been famously close to Russia, with Le Pen holding a “bilateral meeting” with Putin in 2017 and once supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

The populist Right was hardly effective at bringing other issues back into the news cycle, either, despite the Ukraine focus having diminished by the first two voting rounds in mid April — revealing their incompetence at communications. They certainly weren’t helped by Éric Zemmour, the other populist challenger, who once styled himself as a “French Putin” and proposed a “Remigration Ministry” to summarily deport Islamic migrants — and who gained nearly 10 percent of the vote in the first round. That Le Pen herself garnered 41 percent in the runoff, up from 33 percent in 2017, should not necessarily be seen as progress for the populist Right. It’s confounded by her move toward the center: shedding her party’s antisemitism (which included expelling her father from it) and her signature plan to leave the EU.

Though their effort was careful and sustained, Le Pen and the populist Right still never had a grasp of the race, either on the issues or process of the campaign. They were always down in the polls despite Macron’s vulnerability. Only by changing their signature policies — that is, by becoming less populist — did they increase their votes. Clearly, French voters have little appetite for the kind of politics that Le Pen, Zemmour, and others offer. The score’s still zero for the populists and will stay that way — for another five years, at least.