This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org. License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l. ------------------------ French elections: why Le Pen could win and defeat Macron By: [] Date: 2022-04 On the face of it, the results of Sunday’s first-round French presidential election look like a carbon copy of those in 2017. This time, Emmanuel Macron, the incumbent president, came first with 28%, followed by Marine Le Pen for the far-Right Rassemblement National (23%), then Jean-Luc Mélenchon for the radical Left France Insoumise (22%). Just like in 2017, Le Pen defeated Mélenchon by a whisker, denying the latter a place in the second-round vote, which will be held on 24 April. In reality, these results are surprising and even unsettling. Abstention was high: at 26%, it came close to the record 28% set in 2002. In French democracy, large numbers of young, poor and racialised people now permanently abstain from voting. The main event, however, was the complete collapse of the two parties that not so long ago dominated the French political system: the centre-Left Parti Socialiste (PS) and Les Republicains (LR), the heirs to France’s right-wing Gaullist tradition. Until 2017, the PS and LR used to take turns in office; on Sunday their candidates received 1.75% and 4.78% of the vote respectively. Their fall from grace is staggering. It is unclear whether they will ever recover at national level, but the early signs are not good. There are multiple reasons for the decline, but Macron’s positioning of himself as both centre-Left and centre-Right has surely undermined both parties. He has quite literally ‘vampirised’ the PS and LR, syphoning off most of their electorate. La République En Marche, the movement created to support Macron’s first run at the presidency in 2017, has absorbed large chunks of PS and LR voters, as well as leading members of both parties. Get our free Daily Email Get one whole story, direct to your inbox every weekday. Sign up now The vanishing centre This realignment has especially weakened the Left. Its social democratic component has now almost completely vanished, even as social democrats are experiencing a relative revival in Spain, Portugal, Germany and some other parts of Europe. While some PS voters will have switched to Macron, others will have opted for Mélenchon, just to give the Left a chance to make it into the second round. Mélenchon has once again performed extremely well in this election. He started off slowly but caught up with his left-wing rivals to eventually become the only progressive candidate who could challenge Macron and Le Pen. Mélenchon is a charismatic orator, if one likes a lyrical and grandiloquent politician – and most French left-wingers do – and he works hard, having started campaigning for this election two years ago. He makes innovative use of social media and new technology, appearing in several cities at once via holographic projection, as he did in 2017. But Mélenchon is also an extremely polarising and divisive figure. Having achieved pre-eminence on the Left in 2017, by receiving almost 20% in the first round, he should have engaged with other parties and traditions – Greens, communists, Trotskyists, the centre Left – to form a loose alliance ahead of this year’s election. But he categorically refused to negotiate with others, mocking the ‘old Left’ and choosing to go it alone. Had he sought the support of the Communist Party and the Greens, he would now likely be facing Macron in the second round. But Mélenchon is neither François Mitterrand nor Lionel Jospin, leaders who were able to win power through compromise. [END] [1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/france-presidential-election-le-pen-macron-melenchon/ [2] url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ OpenDemocracy via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/