The second round of the French presidential elections will see the incumbent centrist Emmanuel Macron once again face off against far-right challenger Marine Le Pen, whom Macron easily beat in the 2017 elections.
However, this time may not be such a cake walk, and some observers say the tight race is an indicator of the seismic shift in France’s political culture.
Mabel Berezin is a sociology professor and director of the Institute for European Studies at Cornell University.
Her work explores fascist, nationalist and populist movements in Europe and associated threats to democracy.
Photo: AFP
Support for Marine Le Pen has been climbing steadily for some time, she told Kim Hill
“Marine Le Pen took over the party from her father in 2011, And from the beginning her goal was to broaden the kinds of issues that the National Front [now National Rally] spoke about.
“Another goal was to make it all electable party. Her father simply wanted to be provocative, one of her very earliest political positions was her concern with what she called economic patriotism.
“Basically an argument that France had gone over too far to global concerns, and that she wanted to bring economic matters back to France.”
French far right politician Eric Zemmour has made her look more electable, she says.
“He is allowing her to look more electable because his positions are so far to the extreme.”
Left wing politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon only just missed out on the presidential race, she says.
“We need to remember that Mélenchon with his left wing movement actually came within one percentage point of Marine Le Pen last week, and he could as easily have gotten into the second round.”
The question now is where will those 7 million votes go.
“We're assuming they're not going to vote for Le Pen. Some of them will, because voters share some of her pocketbook issues certainly.
“But of more concern are the ones who will vote for no one, they'll cast a blank ballot. And if there are enough of those abstentions, that could shift the outcome. Actually, either way, depending on what the other people do.”
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Macron doesn’t have the political knack of his rival Le Pen, she says.
“I've seen Marine Le Pen in action … and she certainly has been out there doing retail politics I would say for the last six months, and she's been going to all these small villages and things like that.”
Macron can be haughty, she says.
“The problem isn't even that he's a little bit aloof when he's in interactions with people, he also tends to not be able to control himself from saying the wrong thing.
“He was recently in the Northeast of France, and he was confronted by lots people not very happy with his policies and how it was affecting their working life and things like that.
“There was a woman, a dental assistant, who complained to him something like you've kept us locked in our houses, and he turned around and said, ‘you just don't live in the real world.’
“He must have passed on, but she turned around and said to whatever reporters were there, ‘he says I don't live in the real world, I'm a dental assistant that makes what a dental assistant makes, obviously not much, and not as much as a former Rothschild banker'.
“And he can't sort of control those kinds of statements, things sort of come out of him.”
His strength is on global diplomatic matters and his high profile involvement in the Russian invasion of Ukraine has given his numbers an initial boost, she says.
“It did work at the beginning, his approval rating went up. But then as the Ukrainian situation is dragging unhappily on, it started to flatten out.”
Le Pen’s Achilles heel is her past attachment to Putin
“She's taken money from Putin for her campaign, and for her party. And she's actually not been very critical of Putin all along. And she certainly hasn't been as critical as she could have been in this current moment, she has been against the embargo on gasoline.”
Macron and Le Pen are to meet in a head to head debate later this week.
