In eight weeks’ time the people of France head to the polls in the first round of voting for the presidency of their republic. There seems to be a growing consensus now that Marine Le Pen, the anti-euro leader of the National Front, will lead that first round, with some 26 per cent of voters saying that they will cast their ballots in her favour. That still leaves her far short of the simple majority needed to secure an outright first-round victory, and she will square off two weeks later against the second-placed candidate.
But this is not a normal year in French presidential politics. If there is indeed such a “normal” election, it traditionally sets Right against Left. With the French Left in crisis, this year’s second-round vote on May 7 will pitch Le Pen against a centrist, and there is a growing likelihood that Len Pen will square off against Emmanuel Macron.
French President Francois Hollande is so unpopular that he decided, three months ago, it would be foolhardy to invest time and what little remains of his political capital and reputation by seeking a second term in the Elysee Palace. When Hollande announced he wasn’t running, Francois Fillon seemed to have all of the momentum to take on Le Pen. As the former British prime minister Harold Wilson had noted, a week is a lifetime in politics. For Fillon, the past three months have been a political eternity.
Fillon’s supporters have been shocked by the probe into revelations that his wife had earned almost €1 million (Dh3.86 million) in public wages over several years without actually doing any proper work. His polling numbers dropped by about 5 percentage points to 20 per cent when the revelations came to light, and they have been in a freefall ever since.
As new details of the growing scandal came to light last week, Fillon had to announce that he was indeed still running and was not pulling out of the race.
Macron, 39, a former minister in Hollande’s Socialist government, has been gaining on the anti-immigration Le Pen in opinion polls on first-round voting, with an OpinionWay survey published Wednesday putting the gap between them at just one point — less than the margin of error.
Recent elections in the United States and the United Kingdom, however, have shown that voters are generally cranky now, and are willing to upset the applecart. A Le Pen victory would be bad news for the rest of Europe — and the euro.
