Next, the most crucial thing for Macron will be the parliamentary elections.
At 8 p.m. local time on April 24, the dust of the French presidential election settled, and the current president representing the centrist faction, Emmanuel Macron, finally defeated the far-right candidate Marina Le Pen and became another re-elected president of the French Republic after Chirac. Coincidentally, Chirac's pinnacle rival in 2002 was None other than Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Counting the showdown between Macron and Le Pen in 2017, this year has been the "three consecutive defeats" suffered by the far right in the second round of presidential elections, which shows that the French still withstood the extreme right trend at the last moment, rationally chose a relatively moderate political line, and put the "brakes" on the rapid "right turn" of European politics.
Picture according to Xinhua News Agency
Judging from the election results, Macron's victory was not much of a surprise, mainly for the following reasons:
The first is the electoral system. France implements a two-round voting system, that is, in the first round of voting, if no one gets more than half of the votes, the two candidates with the most votes will enter the second round of voting duels, this system design helps to stabilize the public opinion base, reduce the occurrence of unexpected reversals, so the polls have a strong reference, pre-election polls basically show that Macron is more dominant.
Secondly, after the first round of voting, other political parties formed a front against the far right, republican candidate Valerie Pécrés, Green Party candidate Yannick Ardo, Communist Party candidate Fabian Russell, Socialist Party candidate Anne Hidalgo, etc. all explicitly called on supporters to vote for Macron; Jean-Luc Mélangon, the third-most far-left party "Indomitable France" candidate, although he did not express support for Macron, he explicitly opposed voting for Le Pen, and indirectly contributed to Macron's vote.
Third, the French people fear the insecurity that comes with the far right. For two weeks, people from all walks of life, including athletes, artists, medical staff and others, have rallied against the far right. On April 16, many environmentalists and anti-racists believed that Le Pen would bring unpredictable dangers to France, and the insecurity caused by this uncertainty was more obvious after the Russian-Ukrainian conflict worsened the European security environment, and Macron, who represented European interests and shuttled through diplomatic coordination and cooled down the situation, let the people see confidence and hope.
It is true that French politics has a radical tradition, but it may not allow a far-left or far-right party to blossom on this soil. During the 2007 French presidential election, Olivier Besanceno, the leader of the far-left New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA), was once regarded as Sarkozy's strongest rival, but the French just liked him and did not want him to come to power, after all, "it is easier to transform a government than to transform society".
After Macron won, he gave a speech at the Champ de Mars in Paris, expressing his determination to unite the country as quickly as possible, saying, "I am no longer a candidate for one camp, but the president of all." "However, the re-elected president's record is not remarkable. The latest export polls show that Macron's advantage in the second round is only 58.2% to 41.8%, which is not only far from Chirac's 82.06% to 17.94% record in the second round that year, nor the 66.1% to 33.9% advantage he won in the 2017 election.
The results of The French national research agency Ipsos-Sopra Steria also provide a set of data: the abstention rate in the first round of the general election reached 26.31%, and the second round reached 28.2%, an increase of nearly 2.8 percentage points compared with 2017 (25.44%). The low vote rating and high abstention rate show that French voters did not score macron's first-term report card high.
In the past five years, Macron has fought a series of hard battles, including the protracted "yellow vest movement" in China, the new crown epidemic, terrorism and refugee flows, energy shortages and clean energy transformation, as well as The European border conflict related to France, common defense construction and the War on Terrorism in Africa, each of which is related to people's well-being and national security, and each one is also a frozen three-foot cold.
In the next five years, these difficult diseases will continue to be an important part of Macron's agenda, and at the same time, he will also work on the development of renewable energy, strengthen border and immigration management, and promote the construction of European strategic autonomy. Although Macron was expected to lead the European Union after Brexit and the change of German chancellor, the biggest concern of the French people is still the issue of people's livelihood security and purchasing power.
For now, the most critical thing for Macron will be the next parliamentary elections. The reality is that French domestic politics has become divided. The traditional left-wing political parties are declining, the polarization trend is obvious, the overall "rightward" political pattern is difficult to reverse, and Macron's middle way is increasingly squeezed, which challenges the second term. He will need to complete his inauguration, select a new prime minister and appoint a new government in more than half a month, and then fully prepare for the parliamentary elections in June, and whether he can obtain a parliamentary majority will determine whether his reform plan will go smoothly in his second term.
His opponents had already launched an offensive. Although Le Pen lost the election, her vote in the second round was nearly 7.9 percentage points higher than in 2017, and she declared that the ideas she represented had reached new heights; Erik Zemur, who is also on the far right, also called for "the right and the patriots to unite"; and the far left Melantong sounded the horn to the left, calling on the left to defeat Macron in the "third round".
The sudden Russian-Ukrainian conflict could also trigger greater uncertainty. After the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the sanctions and counter-sanctions imposed by the United States and Europe on Russia have triggered serious differences within Europe, and the impact on the ruling parties of various countries is particularly obvious. During the French election, the far-right political party "National Alliance", under the leadership of Le Pen, denounced Macron's sanctions against Russia for harming the French economy, and concentrated its firepower to attack the government's economic policies and inflation, picking the biggest concern of the voters, which was also in the hearts of the voters, and the public opinion support was once close to Macron.
Although Le Pen lost the presidential election, it is clear that she has other battlefields to continue to compete with Macron, and if she can win and form a cabinet in the upcoming parliamentary election, then the "co-governance" pattern that has appeared in the history of French politics will be staged again. Whatever the outcome, Le Pen and his supporters will be an important force in French politics in the future. As long as France's far-right remains active in politics, a unified European policy toward Russia will become more difficult, and the unity of the transatlantic stance toward Russia will be even more rifted. At that time, the world pattern will show more uncertainty.
Red Star News Special Commentator Zhou Qiujun (Associate Professor, School of Government and Management, Shanghai University of Political Science and Law)
Edited by Huang Jing
Red Star Review Submission Email: [email protected]
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