Update on the quest for the Graal

As we get closer to the second round of the presidential elections, the deep divisions within the population and the political parties are getting starker. 

-         -  55% of the population voted neither for Macron nor for Le Pen; what will they do on May 10[1]? 

-         -  Traditional parties and their candidates gathered just 27% of the votes; how will they rebuild, starting with these elections?

-         -  84% of the French were unhappy with the Hollande government and presumably wanted change, but for many Le Pen offers too much and Macron not enough.

The above 55% have a choice: pick another candidate or abstain.  It is always difficult for a losing candidate to recommend that his supporters vote for somebody else, unless of course this helps him advance (or save) his career.

So far, this reluctance combined with voters’ ambivalence about the remaining candidates has led to a rise in abstention expectations for the second round.

Melanchon refuses to endorse either Macron or Le Pen while Dupont Aignan is rallying Le Pen.  The most recent polls indicate that 28% of Fillon’s, 45% of Melanchon’s, and 29% of the Hamon’s voters intend to abstain.

At present, Macron is currently holding to a greater percentage of left-wing voters (40% of Melanchon’s) than Le Pen is to Fillon’s (29%).  Combined with the above abstention levels, this makes Macron difficult to beat. 

If we assume that those who voted for the outliers (Poutou, Asselineau, Arthaud[2]) will vote for Le Pen, then the second round should yield a 59%-41% victory for Macron[3].

This clear margin of victory is not rock solid, for several reasons:

-         - Besides his 24%, Macron needs votes from Les Républicains (which probably views him as too soft and linked to the cabale which plotted the fatal attack on its champion, Fillon), from the revolutionary Left (which has even less in common with him) and from the socialists (who have nowhere else to go if they want to salvage a future, but who probably feel betrayed).  In other words, Macron needs the votes of people who don’t share much with him except a dislike of Le Pen. 

-         -  He is not a seasoned campaigner, he doesn’t work a crowd like Marine Le Pen and yes, he is very young and it shows at times. 

-         -  The May 3 debate with Le Pen will be a high stake one.  If he loses 4% of the Fillon votes to her, and if she convinces half of the Melanchon voters tempted by abstention to vote for her, she wins by the narrowest of margin.   

-        -   Even if he were to squeeze by, he needs a clear victory to herd the parliamentary cats into a working coalition.

    The election is Macron to lose, he shouldn’t, but he could.

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[1]  Date of the second round of the presidential elections.

[2]  Representing respectively the New Anticapitalist Party, the Republican Union and Workers’ Struggle).

[3]  We also use the same polls'estimates of how Macron and Le Pen will win over supporters of the candidates who lost in the first round.

Playing with Fire

The Colombian presidential elections of April 1970 pitted Minister Misael Pastrana against former general and (peaceful) dictator[1] Gustavo Rojas Pinilla.  Into the night, Rojas was leading in the vote count until the Interior Minister ordered radio stations to stop broadcasting partial results.  By morning, several regional voting stations had issued corrected results and Pastrana was declared the winner.

Thus was born the M-19, the most famous left-wing guerilla movement of the 1970s and 1980s.  As one of his founders later remarked, “if the General couldn’t get a fair election, there was no point for us to go on fighting in the political arena”.

Two decades before, the 1948 assassination of Liberal leader and presidential candidate Eliecer Gaetán, a populist “progressive” albeit anti-communist, had triggered a civil war ultimately resolved by the coming to power of General Rojas Pinilla.

Frustrating voters’ aspirations or manipulating elections often leads to upheavals, regardless of culture or geography.

The April Revolution of 1960 overthrew South Korean President Syngman Rhee when people realized that he denied them alternatives and had falsified the results of the vice-presidential elections. 

Similar uprisings or revolutions occurred in the Philippines (1986), Bahrain (1994), Indonesia (1998), Ukraine (2004), Ivory Coast (2010) among others.

Which brings us to France, a country of great sophistication with a penchant for sudden popular outbursts.

Politicians, jurists and journalists’ arguments notwithstanding, it is a fact that, today, French voters are effectively “denied” a vote for political change.  Current presidential candidates include:  Jean-Luc Melenchon (far left, admirer of Hugo Chavez), Benoit Hamon (left of socialist President Hollande who kicked him out of his cabinet), Emanuel Macron (former Minister of Finance in Hollande cabinet, probably center-left), François Fillon (former Prime Minister of President Sarkozy, center-right/right) and Marine Le Pen (president of the National Front, right/far-right).

No sooner was Fillon leading the polls that he was the subject of an anonymous attack in the press about remuneration that his wife had received to serve as his assistant in Parliament.  The dossier was well researched and presented him in the worst possible light.  A panel of three judges was formed to investigate whether or not any abuse had taken place. While it doesn’t look good to employ your wife, and for a while your children, it doesn’t seem that he committed any crime or abuse given the statutes that apply to the funding of congressmen staff in France.  Nevertheless, he dropped precipitously in the polls and has been fighting for his political life ever since.

Marine Le Pen, who was shown as winning the first round of the voting, was also the target of attacks from Brussels for similar issues (employment of assistants) and from French justice regarding campaign financing and other matters.  But unlike Fillon, she has refused to appear in front of the judges, alleging interference with her campaign.

No other candidate has been targeted, only those right-of-center.  The likely calculation of the attackers is that Fillon will not make it to the second voting round (since no one is expected to win over 50% in the first round), setting a Macron-Le Pen contest with Macron winning it.

Such a second round field would be damaging for France as Fillon is the only candidate with an honest diagnosis of what ails France, and both a plan and the will to engineer a recovery.  Le Pen’s economic program is unrealistic, while Macron’s is so timid as to have little impact over a 5 year mandate.

However, the attacks on Fillon could also backfire on the plotters.  While Le Pen and her National Front are described as extreme right, they are, in reality, very populist and nationalist.  And while many of Fillon’s voters approve of conservative economic policies, they are energized by issues such as immigration and regaining sovereignty from Brussels; to them, Macron’s economic program is marginally more attractive, but Le Pen’s nationalism is a bigger draw.  Add to that the spite that their candidate was torpedoed by the left and Le Pen could become a real magnet for Fillon's base.

The election of Donald Trump, and its aftermath, is often presented as what France (and its neighbors) could expect in case of a Le Pen victory.  I think it would be worse.  France is much more centralized than the US, it is deeply enmeshed in the eurozone and the European Union, its society is less harmonious, and its economy is more fragile.  Finally, there is its culture, which produced three revolutions: 1789, 1848 and May 1968.

Countries only make the painful changes that they need after touching bottom, not before.  France has drifted downward for a long time, but it hasn’t touched bottom yet.  However, manipulated elections gone awry could push it down hard and trigger, not change, but chaos.

There is still the possibility that Fillon will win and gradually get France back on the upswing,

Or that Macron will win, ushering an era of stagnation and rising frustration and division,

There is also a chance that Le Pen wins, installing a forceful president with only 2 seats out of 577 in the National Assembly, little hope of building a governing coalition or attracting first class cabinet candidates, and a dangerous economic agenda.

Three possible election outcomes, and I don’t know what probability to attribute each one of them.

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[1]Rojas Pinilla was an unusual dictator in that he was put into the job by both Conservative and Liberal parties to bring an end to their bloody fighting and reestablish peace.