Emmanuel Macron, re-elected with 58 percent of the votes cast last Sunday in the second round of the French presidential electionsreceived 85 percent of the vote from Parisians and three-quarters of those from Seine-Saint-Denis, a working-class district on the outskirts of the capital where 30 percent of the population is native-born. abroad.
(Macron is re-elected in France with historic progress of the extreme right).
But in the Somme district, where Macron grew up, his far-right opponent, Marine Le Pen, was ahead, and in the Pas-de-Calais, where Macron has a home, he got 58 percent.
(This was the meeting of Duke and Macron; environment, the key issue).
In this deeply divided country, there seems to be no better predictor of the vote than distance from metropolitan centers.
Professional and educational divisions (rather than income) also matter. Two-thirds of French workers opted for Le Pen, and three-quarters of managers and directors, for Macron, according to the Ipsos survey; while three quarters of university graduates opted for Macron, compared to a quarter who did so for Le Pen.
Added to the sociological determinants is location. France is fast becoming a country where people gather close to their peers. Between 2008 and 2018, the proportion of managers and highly qualified workers in cities such as Paris, Bordeaux or Lyon rose four to five percentage points, as many lower-middle-class and working-class residents moved out of those cities.
Parallels with the United States
At a deeper, more individual level, satisfaction with one’s life was a key determinant of voting. Some 80 percent of those dissatisfied with their lives voted for Le Pen. As Yann Algan of the HEC business school in Paris and his colleagues have documented, social trust or lack thereof significantly influences voters’ choice.
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Around 80 percent of those dissatisfied with their lives voted for Le Pen
These results are terribly familiar to us. As in the United States, education level and place of residence seem to determine who you vote for, and support for far-right candidates is taking hold among working-class voters.
But stopping here would be too simple, because the biggest shock of these elections was not the Macron-Le Pen second round, which was expected, but the devastation of the traditional parties that occurred in the first round. While their candidates jointly garnered 56 percent of the vote in 2012, they only received 6.5 percent of the same ten years later. Among the large European countries, only Italy has experienced such a reshaping of the political landscape in recent years.
The winners were Macron and Le Pen, but also Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former socialist minister who reinvented himself as the standard-bearer of the radical left and who failed to qualify for the second round by a hair.. The veteran politician, a sort of French Bernie Sanders, won the vote of young urbanites, with most of those who might have voted for the Greens or the Socialist Party seeing him as the only chance to make a difference.
The voters of Mélenchon helped ensure Macron’s victory, as an estimated 42 percent of them voted for him in the second round (41 percent abstained and 17 percent voted for Le Pen).. But instead of preparing to form a coalition, as in a proportional representation system, where competing parties must find common ground to govern, France’s rival parties are already preparing for parliamentary elections in June.
In his victory speech, Macron promised to take into account the opinions of all those who voted for him, to listen more and to govern differently than he has in the last five years. The question is what this can mean in practice. If he wants to govern from a broader base than the 28 percent he won in the first round, he must take into account the preferences of those whose first choice was Mélenchon.
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Unite, a difficult task in France
An explicit alliance is obviously not in the cards. But even a de facto coalition of wills is hard to imagine. Macron and Mélenchon are programmatically almost oppositeyes While Macron campaigned to raise the retirement age, Mélenchon promised to lower it. Macron wants to lower corporate taxes, while Mélenchon wants to raise them. And while Macron was planning 50 billion euros ($53.6 billion, or 2 percent of current GDP) in new public spending programs, Mélenchon was calling for a fivefold increase.
The only issue they could find common ground on is the ecological transition or green transition, as Macron has explicitly supported Mélenchon’s concept of ‘ecological planning’ and has pledged to put the prime minister directly in charge. But even here there are differences, as Macron wants to launch a new generation of nuclear reactors, while Mélenchon is in favor of going 100 percent with renewable energy.
In this way, France is no different from the United States, where traditional Democrats and Sanders supporters find it impossible to agree on anything of substance, and their bickering sets the stage for a landslide defeat in November’s midterm elections.. But an enduring triangular struggle between left, center and right means that at some point Le Pen, or his heir-in-law, may find a way into the Elysee.
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Change of attitude, key for Macron
The big question for Macron is how to give his second-round voters valid reasons to believe that he has heard them. The one thing he cannot and should not do is stop carrying out the economic reforms he believes will put France on the path to economic revival. Education cannot wait, the employment-to-population ratio is still nine percentage points lower than in Germany, and an aging society cannot leave pension reform unattended.
But there is potential for an opening on three related issues.
The one thing he cannot and must not do is stop carrying out the economic reforms he believes will put France on the path of economic revival.
First of all, the management of the ecological transition is a relatively new and global task, and although it is not an easy field, the positions are less set in stone than those of fiscal and social welfare reform.
Second, Macron must live up to his recognition of the need to change his top-down approach to governance. It takes two to tango, but social dialogue and a more participatory democracy are worth trying.
By last, Macron’s position on social issues has been that equality of opportunity is more important than redistribution. A more balanced approach, with greater attention to distributional issues, would be more reassuring to the voters who have re-elected him.
Senior Fellow at the Bruegel think tank, based in Brussels, and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Holder of the Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa chair at the European University Institute.
EAN PISANI-FERRY
© PROJECT SYNDICATE
PARIS
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