PARIS — With a tense battle for the future of France underway ahead of a presidential runoff election next month, the far-right insurgent Marine Le Pen is pulling a page from the same improbable victory playbook as President Trump: encouraging her opponents to stay home.
Opinion polls suggest that Le Pen’s opponent, centrist newcomer Emmanuel Macron, holds a commanding lead ahead of the May 7 runoff, less because French voters believe in him than because they are frightened by Le Pen’s National Front, which has long been dogged by charges of anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathies.
But in a year when voters are storming the establishment bastions around the world, many mainstream French politicians are warning that Macron’s campaign is dangerously complacent. Despite polls that show Macron sweeping up more than 60 percent of the vote, several post-election missteps have kept the door open to a Le Pen upset, analysts say — even as the path she must walk to the Elysee Palace is vanishingly thin.
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“An election is combat, and it’s necessary to fight,” Ségolène Royal, a senior Socialist leader who has thrown her backing to Macron, told BFMTV.
Macron, who was economy minister until August, is a 39-year-old former investment banker who has never held elected office. His unorthodox campaign platform mixes ideas from the left and right — but above all is a cheerful endorsement of the idea that a borderless, globalized world is the best way to ensure prosperity for France’s citizens.
But the political neophyte’s path to the doorstep of the presidency has been eased by the failures of his traditional party rivals. A corruption scandal downed center-right candidate François Fillon, who was otherwise considered a shoo-in. The incumbent president, Socialist François Hollande, is historically unpopular, destroying his party’s chances of a second term.
Now Le Pen’s victory chances depend on disillusioned left-wing voters staying home, holding down the total voting pool enough for her to top 50 percent. With nearly half of French voters opting for anti-establishment candidates in Sunday’s first-round vote, there is a slender possibility it could happen, even if it’s unlikely.
An upset would have some of the echoes of Trump’s victory. Far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose anti-globalization agenda had many shades of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign, has held back from calling on his supporters to vote for Macron to deny the far-right a victory.
[Marine Le Pen goes from fringe right-winger to major contender]
Le Pen’s campaign has seized on Mélenchon’s wavering, pushing out a point-by-point comparison of their campaign positions, many of which share a skepticism of globalization and big business.
Many of Mélenchon’s supporters resent the pressure to vote for Macron, saying that even if they loathe Le Pen’s attitude toward foreigners, her centrist opponent embodies all of the globalist, pro-business stances they detest.
“What really bothers me the most is the amount of unanimity,” said Antoine Hémon, 30, a PhD student in economics who worked on Mélenchon’s campaign. “As though it were a parlor reflex, saying you have to vote for Macron in order to build a rampart against Le Pen.”
He said he was still making up his mind about how — or whether — to vote in the runoff.
“On Sunday I was in favor of voting blank,” casting an empty ballot as a protest against the system, he said. “On Monday I was in favor of voting Macron.” Now he’s thinking about abstaining, he said, although “if there’s the slightest chance that the fascists come to power,” he said, referring to Le Pen, he’ll probably reconsider.
Even if Macron wins, a narrow victory will sap his momentum going into June legislative elections and could make it difficult for him to enact his agenda. And if France’s unemployment remains stranded at 10 percent and economic growth stays disappointing, Le Pen could return stronger than ever in the next elections in 2022.
“He will have to dramatize the election in the coming week,” said Vincent Martigny, a professor of politics at École Polytechnique, a university in a suburb of Paris. “It’s not about victory but the type of mandate he wins.”
Le Pen has been delighted to exploit her opponent’s missteps. Her skills were on display Wednesday when she seized on a trip by Macron to his home town of Amiens, where workers at a Whirlpool clothes dryer factory have been picketing to protest plans to shutter the plant and move production to Poland. About 290 jobs will be lost, a prospect that has ignited a debate over globalization.
[The leading French presidential candidates Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, in their own words]
Macron met with a handful of representatives from labor unions in a stuffy, gray-walled conference room in the city’s Chamber of Commerce, taking notes across the conference table and earnestly nodding at their concerns in front of rolling television cameras. It was a classic political set-piece intended to show his solemn dedication to solving workers’ problems.
But as the meeting was underway, Le Pen rolled up unannounced in a white passenger van to the striking workers’ encampment at the factory entrance and cheerfully set off a campaign explosion.
“The fact that Macron isn’t with the workers here today is a sign of contempt,” Le Pen said, as she was thronged by dozens of strikers in front of a pile of burning tires. “I’m not currently eating petit fours with representatives who actually only represent themselves.”
As she hugged appreciative workers one by one, she told them she heard their concerns and would fight for them against the forces of globalization. Some of them started to cry. French television networks aired the powerful split-screen drama, contrasting Le Pen’s earthy appeal with Macron’s policy-wonk note taking. His campaign scrambled to add a stop at the factory, which he had not initially planned to visit.
“Ms. Le Pen is playing politics and goes into parking lots and whips up the crowd,” a testy Macron told reporters at the end of his meeting. “I in turn withwill deal with things in depth.”
Analysts said that Macron’s weaknesses had been in sharp relief since Sunday.
“They’re completely unprepared for this very peculiar atmosphere between the rounds,” said Charles Lichfield, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. He has given Le Pen a 35 percent chance of winning on May 7, despite polling agencies’ analyses that turnout would need to be significantly lower in the second round in order for Le Pen to stand a chance of taking the election.
“If turnout is lower in the second round, and there is more complacency on the far-left and the center-right because of these very reassuring polls, it is just about possible,” Lichfield said.
Virgile Demoustier contributed to this report.
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