Macron is down now, but he is far from out

French presidential careers tend to begin euphorically, screech to a halt in the face of protests over promises becoming policy and end somewhere between indifference and contempt when voters bring out the ballot-box equivalent of the guillotine. The results of regional elections seemed to prove the pattern. President Emmanuel Macron’s party racked up a humiliating defeat less than a year away from an increasingly tight re-election bid against far-right nemesis Marine Le Pen.
Yet on closer look, things are more complicated. While Macron has failed to broaden the appeal of newcomer La Republique En Marche beyond his white-collar base, his personal popularity is at the highest in a year thanks to the lifting of lockdown measures and a “whatever-it-takes” approach to public spending. That can still count for a lot in presidential elections.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s that Macron’s Covid-19 response has smothered voter anger without offering a real vision for the future. That’s what he’ll need to conjure up as the presidential election campaign shifts into high gear.
As seen at last year’s local elections, the enthusiasm generated by La Republique En Marche, created as a reformist, pro-European alternative to the establishment Left-Right parties, is gone. It won just 6.7% of the nationwide vote to renew metropolitan councils nationally, according to exit polls. Importantly, the biggest showing didn’t come from Le Pen’s National Rally, on track for 19.8%, which also struggled to broaden its appeal. It was the traditional forces Macron had aimed to usurp, with center-right and left-leaning parties coming in at 38.8% and 34.7%, respectively.
The Covid-19 voter mindset in France is slowly taking form, and it’s unimpressed with disruptive populist answers. Turnout was shockingly low and not a single region changed hands in mainland France. Despite a lot of frantic rhetoric that France was facing social unrest close to “civil war,” as one hugely-publicised letter by retired generals put it, Le Pen’s results were poor, with her party failing to deliver on expectations of a regional win. The anger propelling anti-establishment parties simply wasn’t on show.
If there’s any momentum to speak of, it’s with the mainstream right, whose candidates are pitching themselves as the best bet to defeat Le Pen by tapping into public angst over security and immigration. The macho language on display from Xavier Bertrand, who described his victory in the northern Hauts-de-Seine region as having “smashed the jaws” of Le Pen’s party, sounded carefully chosen to portray Macron as a mere spectator. But none of this erases Macron’s popularity as president. A Harris poll put his approval at 50%, the highest in a year.
Right now, leading is less about reforming and more about spending: France’s budget deficit is at its highest since 1949 and its public debt is over 100% of GDP. It might seem odd to see Macron’s popularity rise nationally while tumbling locally, but it fits with the way Covid has empowered states to pursue their most Leviathan-esque dreams and sidelined local actions for now.

—Bloomberg