It increasingly seems that the French took one good look at what happened around the world in 2016 and decided they could do… well, perhaps not worse but sillier.
Where to begin ?
Until recently, the French political spectrum used to be neatly divided in two, with the Socialists (PS) on the Left and Gaullists as a form of pragmatic Right (not the traditional anti-republican, racist Right). Further Left, you had the Communists who held a lot of power in the post-war decades but who never really stood a chance of winning a presidential election, especially after they fell behind the Socialists in the 1970s. At the Far-Right, you had the Front National, founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972, at first a motley crew of xenophobes, negationists, Catholic fundamentalists as well as various provocateurs and street thugs. Until the mid-80s, the FN’s electoral performance was merely a blip, if that. It started to change around 1984. In 2002, Le Pen stunningly reached the Second Round of the Presidential Election against Chirac. The latter won in a landslide. Starting with Sarkozy in the mid-2000s, some prominent Gaullists started flirting dangerously with the FN ideas. In the meantime, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter Marine succeeded her father as head of the FN. Her rethoric may be less provocative, leading to big electoral successes, but the party remains rabidly anti-immigration, anti-EU and socially extremely conservative.
So, for this election a normal face-off would have been President Hollande (PS) against a Republican (Gaullist) candidate. The latter was expected to be Alain Juppé, an extremely experienced politician who used to be seen as Chirac’s heir (the former President famously described Juppé as “the best among us”). However, he was somehow unexpectedly defeated in the Republican presidential primary by former Prime Minister François Fillon. Upset number 1.
In December, President Hollande announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection, a very unusual move but not exactly a surprise. Hollande has the appeal and energy of wet toast and, as President, he often looked like a pathetically awkward kid in adult clothes and was widely unpopular. Still, upset number 2. That opened the way for younger Socialists to throw their hat in the ring. Relative unknown Benoit Hamon beat Hollande’s natural successor Manuel Valls. Upset number 3.
Then, there’s Emmanuel Macron. A former member of the PS, he defected to found his own party. Its social-liberal platform is still unclear. Some kind business-friendly socialism, it seems.
And of course, Marine Le Pen is the FN candidate. At the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon. So, 5 main candidates.
Until the last few weeks, it looked as though the second round would be a modernized repeat of 2002: Fillon vs Le Pen. Except that the former, who used to make a big point of being the scandal-free, ethical and hard-working candidate has seen his bid increasingly torpedoed by the so-called"Penelopegate" that revealed that he had paid his wife and children very large sums from the public payroll for years for very little work. He refuses to step down although his aides have started leaving in droves and Republicans are begging for Juppé to replace him. The latter has said he was “technically ready” but would only do so if asked by the whole party (he’s probably still butt-hurt of being passed over twice, in favour of Sarkozy in 2007 and Fillon now). Recent polls show that Fillon would not reach the Second Round. It would be Macron vs Le Pen. Upset number 4.
And this is where it gets serious. You see, in 2002, Socialists voted massively for Chirac in order to prevent Le Pen from becoming President (“Vote for the crook, not the Nazi” IIRC). But the legacy of the Sarkozy era is that Republicans are much more to the Right than 15 years ago. In other words, it is unclear that the Republican voters would reciprocate and may very well be tempted to prefer Le Pen over Macron, a former Socialist with an unclear program.