Paris When Anne Hidalgo has to explain why she continues to believe in her victory in the presidential election in France despite disastrous polls, she gives a name: Olaf Scholz. Hidalgo is the candidate of the Socialists, the French sister party of the SPD.
The Social Democrats in Germany have also already been written off, she says. Scholz is now reigning as Chancellor. “I take what he has succeeded in Germany as a model.”
Only: A Scholz effect is nowhere near in sight in the neighboring country. Hidalgo’s polls recently even fell below five percent. Their calls to the fragmented left camp to rally behind a candidate for unity have faded. Less than four months before the election, it is becoming increasingly clear that the battle for the Élysée Palace will be decided on the right of center.
President Emmanuel Macron, who is unlikely to make his candidacy for another term official until January or February, also seems to be preparing for this. Five years ago Macron stood as a candidate for a new center alliance with a left-liberal agenda. Nothing has changed in terms of its economic reform promises. In October, he announced that it would invest billions in euros to lead the country into a green and digital future. The president is now also conspicuously concerned with issues such as migration and security, which are important for conservative voters.
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Pollsters are currently expecting two possible duels in the runoff election: Either Macron will have to compete against right-wing populist Marine Le Pen, as it did in 2017. Or it goes against Valérie Pécresse, the candidate of the bourgeois-conservative camp. In the background lurks a man who stirred up the election campaign in recent months: Éric Zemmour.
Prophet of doom
On a rainy Sunday afternoon, Zemmour swears his followers in a fight that, in his eyes, involves much more than just a five-year term in the Élysée Palace. “If I win this election, it won’t just be another change of power,” he shouts. “Then the recapture of the most beautiful country in the world begins.”
Zemmour’s campaign is directed against the forces of globalization, the European Union and immigration from Islamic countries. He is angry with French elites, whom he blames for the country’s loss of cultural identity and political sovereignty.
Within a few months, Zemmour has rallied a new political movement that is not only meeting with approval on the Internet and in surveys: for his election campaign at the beginning of December, almost 15,000 people came to an exhibition center in the north of Paris. When Zemmour moves into the hall, his supporters get on the chairs and wave French flags. A woman holds up a compressed air horn and enthusiastically blows staccato.
For a moment it seems as if France have become world champions. Then Zemmour takes the floor and it comes down to the French decline. When a small group of demonstrators interrupted the speech, they were beaten out of the hall. In the election campaign it is not only the language that threatens to be brutalized.
The shrill warnings about foreign infiltration were a lucrative business model for Zemmour. His books with titles such as “The French Suicide” or “France Has Not Said Its Last Word” landed on the bestseller lists.
His television show on the right-wing conservative news channel CNews achieved high ratings. On this basis, the publicist, who has been convicted of anti-Islamic slogans, is building a new party. The name: “Reconquest”.
Competition for Le Pen
The hype surrounding Zemmour temporarily led to the fact that he was traded as a possible candidate for the runoff election in the autumn. In surveys he was practically on a par with Le Pen. The leader of the Rassemblement National reacts annoyed to the troublemaker from the far right. “I’m amazed at his stubbornness,” she said recently. “That he believes he can win – and thus divides the patriotic electorate.”
After the election defeat five years ago, Le Pen tried to shed its right-wing extremist image. The former party name Front National has been given up, radical demands such as the exit from the euro zone have been removed from the program.
The rise of Zemmour calls into question their course. At the beginning of October, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen criticized his daughter in an interview with the newspaper “Le Monde”: Zemmour “is occupying the terrain that she has given up”.
Zemmour’s polls have since fallen, but are still in the double-digit range. It is still uncertain whether he will get the necessary 500 signatures from mayors, members of parliament and other officials in order to be allowed to vote at all.
But the provocateur has already succeeded in one thing: with his complaints about supposedly lost national greatness and identity, he has shaped a central election campaign topic – and made the rhetoric of the right-wing culture struggle socially acceptable even in the bourgeois-conservative camp.
Conservatives on the right course
The day after Zemmour’s heated election campaign kick-off, Valérie Pécresse made her first trip as a Republican presidential candidate. The Conservative Party follows the tradition of former Presidents Charles de Gaulle, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy. In the EU Parliament she works with the CDU and CSU.
The destination of Pécresse, however, points to a new political reality in her party: In Nice, she visits the MP Éric Ciotti, whose positions in the preliminary decision on the Republicans’ candidacy could hardly be distinguished from the right-wing populists. Ciotti had surprisingly made it into the runoff election in the member survey and got almost 40 percent there.
Pécresse says the trip is “a gesture because Eric did an excellent campaign”. Ciotti explains that the candidate has promised to “spice up” her program with some of his demands. The politician had taken a particularly relentless line in migration policy. He called for “measures to end mass immigration”. Ciotti is particularly targeting the influx of people with an “Arab-Islamic culture”.
In France, the conservative Republicans are sending the ex-minister to the presidential election for the first time.
(Photo: dpa)
Pécresse is actually considered an economically liberal and moderate conservative. The president of the capital region Île-de France even resigned from the party a few years ago because the Republicans were drifting too far to the right. Pécresse only returned officially in October – and is now looking for close ties with the Ciotti grand piano: “I want to bring together all the sensitivities of the right-wing.”
Macron under pressure
Since her nomination, Pécresse has made a leap in the polls. In a possible runoff election, it could become a real threat to Macron. The president gave TF1 a two-hour interview last week. The title: “Where is France heading?”
Macron rejected calls for a freeze on immigration as “absurd” and condemned the hatred of Muslims. At the same time, he emphasized his tough crackdown on Islamists. A number of radical mosques and cultural associations were closed during his tenure.
A central project of Macron for the French EU presidency starting in January is the reform of the migration rules in the Schengen area and a stronger protection of the European borders.
In the domestic election campaign, Édouard Philippe is said to cover the conservative flank in the president’s coalition. The popular mayor of the northern French port city of Le Havre, who was head of government under Macron from 2017 to 2020, says: For Macron’s further term in office, “a broadening of the electorate base” is necessary.
More: Ex-Prime Minister Philippe wants to attract conservative voters for the re-election of President Macron