Could France’s ‘forgotten’ voters hand Le Pen victory?

A short war in Ukraine would not suit Emmanuel Macron. The longer it lasts the longer the president of France can project to his people the image of the implacable wartime leader. So far so good. If the polls are to be believed, next month’s presidential election is a foregone conclusion; the latest poll has Macron on 31 per cent, way in front of his closest rival, Marine Le Pen, on 18 per cent.

Despite such a dominant lead over the rest of the field, Macron’s campaign team insist that they are on their guard against complacency. The president will unveil his programme in its entirety on Thursday, just over three weeks before voters go to the polls in the first round of voting, and in the meantime his minions are out in the field distributing pamphlets on his behalf.

Three of them accosted me at the market on Sunday. They were nice enough people. He wore a Barbour waxed jacket, she a pair of chic suede boots and the younger man – perhaps their son – had around his neck a scarf of the sort English public schoolboys wear.

This is Macron’s demographic, the well-off metropolitan middle-class who share his optimism about the future of France, a future in which Europe is very much at its heart. They have never lost confidence in their president over the last five years even though the vision he sold them in 2017 has not come to pass. Don’t blame him for soaring inflation and energy prices, they say, blame the Yellow Vests, the pandemic and now the Russians.

Also dishing out bumf at the market were activists from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. They had less of the debonair about them but their belief in their leader remains strong. They sense a surprise in the air. So does Le Pen. There is a significant tranche of society who have yet to declare their voting intention. Some of course may not vote, as was the case in 2017 when the 25 per cent abstention rate was the highest in half a century. Most in that category were the young and the working-class. Le Pen’s task is to mobilise them in the coming weeks, particularly those who are what one might describe as old-school socialists. 

Only the ill-informed categorise Le Pen as right-wing. She’s always leaned to the left economically and also on several social issues, a point made last year by Macron’s Interior Minister, Gérald Darmanin, who accused her of being ‘soft’ on Islam.

‘Her appeal is still strong with the young, the working classes, those with fewer qualifications and she also has the advantage of being a woman,’ remarked recently Frédéric Dabi, the director of France’s top polling company.

Le Pen isn’t alone in appealing to this demographic. So does Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of the left-wing France Insoumise. The latest poll has Mélenchon – often described as France’s answer to Jeremy Corbyn – on 11.5 per cent, ahead of Valérie Pécresse of the centre-right Republicans and not far behind Eric Zemmour on 13 per cent.

Last September, Mélenchon confronted Zemmour in a live television debate, to the consternation of those on the left who believe democracy is best served by insulting or ignoring those who hold opposing views. Mélenchon believes that the most effective way to defeat your enemy’s ideology is by exposing its falsehoods in a civilised discussion. An obsolescent view, perhaps, but one that explains why the Socialist candidate, Anne Hidalgo, who refused to debate with Zemmour, labelling him a racist and anti-Semite, is currently polling at two per cent.

Valérie Pécresse squared up to Zemmour on television last week, an aggressive and unedifying spectacle that did neither any favours. Pécresse’s misfortune, as I described in December, is her ideological similarity to Macron; Zemmour’s faults are myriad. Despite enticing prominent several Le Pen activists into his camp in recent months – as well as her niece, Marion Maréchal – Zemmour has gone backwards in the polls. His fondness for Vladimir Putin is partly to blame but so is the fact he is too intellectual and aloof. His is not a voice that resonates with the white working-class, many of whom live among or work with Muslims and don’t share his antagonism. Bigotry in France is generally strongest within the bourgeoisie.

In a recent interview, Le Pen joked that her greatest attribute is her ‘crocodile skin’. She’s not wrong. Le Pen is not a particularly skilled politician but she’s a stayer, a woman who has survived innumerable setbacks in the course of her career. The latest, the defection of her niece to Zemmour’s Reconquest party left her close to tears in a television interview.

But it hasn’t done her any harm in the polls, quite the reverse. It would be a stretch to say that the French are warming to Le Pen but they certainly respect her. What you see is what you get. Not so with Macron, the incorrigible actor, whose latest guise is that of a Gallic Volodymyr Zelensky.

According to the polls, Macron is the overwhelming favourite to win next month’s election but a shock could yet be sprung by France’s ‘forgotten’. These are men and women who work hard for low wages and have become increasingly disillusioned with the ruling class. Yet, as a Sunday newspaper reported at the weekend, they have not yet given up on the ballot box and 86 per cent of this demographic surveyed say that will vote next month. ‘Our greatest adversary is neither Zemmour or Macron but abstention,’ commented one of Le Pen’s campaign team recently.

If Le Pen can win over this adversary in the coming weeks and persuade them – as Boris Johnson did of Red Wall voters – to ‘lend’ her their vote she might yet seize the Élysée.