With French Election Looming, It Is Macron Against the Right

PARIS — France faces an unusual presidential election in seven weeks, with no credible left-wing contender, an electorate so disenchanted that abstention could be high, and a clear favorite who has not even announced his candidacy.

President Emmanuel Macron (44), is the favorite. He delayed his decision about declaring he will run until March, which is another way to indulge his penchant to keep his opponents guessing.

Macron, who is comfortable in his elevated centrist position has watched as the right-wing and extreme-right torment one another. Other themes, including climate change and the ballooning debt France accumulated in fighting coronavirus crisis, have been mostly ignored by security and immigration.

“To call your child ‘Mohammed’ is to colonize France,” says Éric Zemmour, the far-right upstart of the election who has parlayed his notoriety as a TV pundit into a platform of anti-immigrant vitriol.

Only he, in his telling, stands between French civilization and its conquest by Islam and “woke” American political correctness. As former President Donald J. Trump, which he spoke to this week, Mr. Zemmour uses constant provocations to stay on top of the news.

Still, Mr. Macron still has a clear lead in polls. He holds about 25% of the vote in April’s first round. Mr. Zemmour, along with two other right-wing candidates, are in the 12-18 percent range. Split left-wing parties are trailing, and for now seem like spectators, for the first times since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1957.

France tends to be right, but this time it is falling apart. “The left lost the popular classes, many of whom moved to the far right because it had no answer on immigration and Islam,” said Pascal Bruckner, an author and political philosopher. “So it’s the unknowable chameleon, Macron, against the right.”

Macron is seen as a beneficiary of the perception that he has overcome the coronavirus pandemic, and has guided the economy through its difficulties. He appears stronger than ever. The economy grew by 7 per cent in the past quarter. France’s unemployment rate stands at 7.4 per cent, which is low for the country. It is possible that Covid-19 measures including mask requirements in many public places will be lifted prior to the election. This step is symbolic of powerful symbolism.

It is a measure of the difficulty of attacking Mr. Macron that he seems at once to embody what is left of social democracy in France — once the preserve of a Socialist Party that is now on life support — and policies embraced by the right, like his tough stand against what he has called “Islamist separatism.”

“He is supple,” said Bruno Le Maire, the economy minister. Mr. Macron’s predecessor as president, François Hollande, a Socialist who feels betrayed by the incumbent’s shift rightward, put it less kindly in a recent book: “He hops, like a frog on water lilies, from one conviction to another.”

The first round saw the two top candidates progress to the second round, which will take place on April 24. The election’s crux has become a right-on-right fight for second place and a runoff against Mr. Macron.

Marine Le Pen, the perennial anti-immigrant candidate, has become Mr. Zemmour’s fiercest critic, as defections to him from her party have grown. She has said his supporters include “some Nazis” and accused him of seeking “the death” of her National Rally party, formerly called the National Front.

Mr. Zemmour, whose own extremist view is that Islam is “incompatible” with France, has ridiculed her for trying to distinguish between extremist Islamism and the faith itself. He has attacked her for not embracing the idea of the “great replacement” — a racist conspiracy theory that white Christian populations are being intentionally replaced by nonwhite immigrants, leading to what Mr. Zemmour calls the “Creolization” of societies.

The president would be confident about his chances against Ms. Le Pen, who he beat easily in the second round of 2017 in 2017, or Mr. Zemmour. Even though the glib intellectualism this descendant from an Algerian Jewish family has overcome many taboos that prevented conservative French voters embracing the hard right, it is not surprising that he defeated Le Pen.

France is troubled, with many people struggling to pay rising energy bills and weary from the two-year struggle against the pandemic, but a blow-up-the-system choice, like the vote for Mr. Trump in the United States or Britain’s choice of Brexit, would be a surprise.

Paulette Brémond, a retiree who voted for Mr. Macron in 2017, said she was hesitating between the president and Mr. Zemmour. “The immigration question is grave,” she said. “I am waiting to see what Mr. Macron says about it. He probably won’t go as far as Mr. Zemmour, but if he sounds effective, I may vote for him again.”

Until Mr. Macron declares his candidacy, she added, “the campaign feels like it has not started” — a common sentiment in a country where for now the political jostling can feel like shadow boxing.

The president has made it clear that this is not an issue. He has stated that he is obliged to keep his attention on the most important matters of state. These include his prominent diplomatic role in trying stop a war with Ukraine through his relationship to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and ending, with allies the troubled French antiterrorism campaign in Mali.

If Mali has been a conspicuous failure, albeit one that seems unlikely to sway many voters, the Ukraine crisis, as long as it does not lead to war, has allowed Mr. Macron to look like Europe’s de facto leader in the quest for constructive engagement with Russia. Mr. Zemmour as well as Ms. Le Pen, who together make up about 30 percent of the vote in France, show no shame in their admiration of Mr. Putin.

One member of Mr. Macron’s putative re-election team, who insisted on anonymity per government practice, said the possibility of a runoff against the center-right Republican candidate, Valérie Pécresse, was more concerning than facing either Ms. Le Pen or Mr. Zemmour will be in the second round.

A graduate of the same elite school as Mr. Macron, a competent two-term president of France’s most populous region and a centrist by instinct, Ms. Pécresse might appeal in the second round to center-left and left-wing voters who regard Mr. Macron as a traitor.

But a disastrous performance in her first major campaign speech in Paris this month appears to have dented Ms. Pécresse’s chances, if perhaps not irretrievably. This week, she received 12 percent of the vote in a poll, compared to 19 percent in December.

Ms. Pécresse has been pushed right by the prevailing winds in France, the European country arguably worst hit by Islamist terrorism over the past seven years, to the point that she chose to allude to “the great replacement” in her campaign speech.

“Stop the witchcraft trials!” she said in a television interview on Thursday, in response to an outcry over her use of a term once confined to the extreme right. “I will not resign myself to a Macron-Zemmour duel,” because “voting for Le Pen or Zemmour is voting for Macron in the end.”

There have been two President Macrons. The first sought to reinvent the French state-centric model through changes in the labyrinthine labor law that made it easier for employees to fire and to hire; suppression of the large fortunes tax; and other measures to encourage foreign investment and to open up the economy to foreign capital.

Then came revolt, in the form of the Yellow Vest movement against rising inequality and globe-trotting financiers — Mr. Macron was once one — seen as blind to widespread social hardship.

No sooner had that quieted, than the coronavirus struck, turning the president overnight into a “spend whatever it takes” apostle of state intervention from a free-market reformer.

“We have nationalized salaries,” Mr. Macron declared in 2020, not blinking an eye.

All that will cost money one day and it will be expensive. But for now the “at the same time” president, as Mr. Macron has become known for his habit of constantly changing position, seems to bask in the glow of the pandemic tamed.

“He got lucky,” said the member of his campaign team. “Covid saved him from more unpopular reforms.”

Anything could still happen — a European war, a new variant of the virus, another major terrorist attack, a sudden wave of renewed social unrest — but for now, Mr. Macron’s aloof-from-the-melee waiting game seems to be working.

“Absent a catastrophe, I don’t see how Mr. Macon is not re-elected,” Mr. Bruckner said. However, the real campaign will only begin when the incumbent enters the turbulent arena.