Fierce French presidential race

PARIS – In a country long on edge over questions of identity and belonging, flying the European Union flag over France’s tomb of the unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe was almost guaranteed to trigger fierce opposition.

Bristling reactions to the New Year gesture, meant by pro-EU President Emmanuel Macron to mark Paris’ taking over the bloc’s rotating presidency, rained down from the right of the political spectrum.

It was an “attack on the identity of our fatherland,” fumed far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, echoed both by her rival, the far-right pundit Eric Zemmour and left-wing firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon.

(Photo by Ludovic MARIN / AFP)

Macron’s best-placed opponent, Republicans candidate Valerie Pecresse, went further, suggesting the president “has a problem with French history”.

While the row blew over with the removal of the outsize banner, it was symptomatic of a countdown to the April presidential vote marked by repeated clashes over the national narrative.

History “is a question that obsesses the right of the French political spectrum, matching an anxiety of French society,” historian and political scientist Jean Garrigues told AFP.

Two-thirds of French people agree that “France’s identity is disappearing”, a survey by pollsters Ifop published in early January found, while more than four in five believe “some political personalities co-opt questions related to identity”.

Rather than EU integration or immigration, though, respondents identified the top threats to their identity as a weaker economy, deindustrialisation and unemployment.

Colonial past

Incumbent Macron has not shied away from sparking controversy over history and identity.

His call in April to “deconstruct our history, in a certain way,” so as to better understand its modern echoes including racism, was also met with howls from the right.

“French political actors understand that you have to keep updating history, especially when there are parts of it that won’t go away, like the Algerian war,” said political scientist Pascal Perrineau.

“That was a civil war that left extremely deep traces in our collective life, which created divisions, even if those are gradually vanishing,” he added.

Although Macron is “very keen on all these historical references, he ought to be careful, they’re inflammatory,” Perrineau said.

That was clear in October, when Macron claimed Algerian leaders had “totally rewritten” the country’s history to stir up hatred of former colonial master France.

The comments, which triggered a months-long row with Algiers, overshadowed his past efforts to acknowledge imperial-era crimes.

In December, Melenchon visited French Caribbean territory Guadeloupe, racked by anti-vaccination protests fuelled by discontent over social inequality and low trust in government health advice thanks to a 1990s-era scandal over the pesticide chlordecone.

Melenchon praised Guadeloupe’s “people who won’t let themselves be crushed” and savaged government officials’ “colonial mindset”.

Return to the past

On the far right, Zemmour has made the past the central pillar of his campaign.

In a video announcing his presidential candidacy, he read a speech into a microphone standing on a desk, the imagery recalling Charles de Gaulle’s 1940 radio appeal for the French to resist Nazi occupiers.

The lament for the state of modern France was intercut with montages of past French glories, from singer Barbara to supersonic airliner Concorde, contrasting with modern scenes of demonstrators clashing with police or Muslims praying.

(Photo by JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER / AFP)

Former president Nicolas Sarkozy had already made immigration and Islam a political battleground, creating a controversial ministry responsible for immigration, integration and national identity.

Zemmour has also made provocative historical claims, including that Marshal Philippe Petain, the collaborationist ruler of Nazi-occupied France, helped save Jews from the Holocaust, an idea rejected by historians.

The candidate even called into question the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer wrongly convicted of spying for Germany in the late 19th century whose case drew battle lines through French society that resonate to this day.

Zemmour’s “programme is reactionary, it idealises a past it wants to get back. It’s reminiscent of the far-right programmes of the early 20th century,” historian Garrigues said.

“His project is anchored in history, in a return to the past, when the fundamental point of a political project is to be anchored in the future”.

Best-placed challenger

French right-winger Valerie Pecresse was a rank outsider in the race for the presidency just a month ago, but with under 100 days to the election she is seen as the best-placed challenger to Emmanuel Macron.

Backed by her Republicans party which has deep roots nation-wide, the 54-year-old is bidding to be France’s first woman president with a slogan that promises “restored French pride”.

(Photo by Ludovic MARIN / AFP)

While promising to take a “Karcher” power-hose to crime-ridden urban ghettos in France, she accused President Macron of being soft on drug dealers and “complicit” in a rise in violence.

“I don’t want any more areas without the rule of law, without France,” she told an elderly crowd of a few hundred people in the town of Cavaillon where drug-related gun crime is a source of concern.

Saying she didn’t care about “political correctness”, Pecresse declared: “Yes, I can say it: There is a link between delinquency and immigration.”

Assessment

Surveys of voters show that immigration and crime are indeed among their top concerns, but below the rising cost of living and jobs.

Pro-business Macron is banking on voters crediting him with falling unemployment and rising wages, as well as his handling of the Covid-19 crisis.

France goes to the polls on April 10 and 24 under an electoral system that sees the top two candidates in the first round advance to a second-round run-off where the winner must garner more than 50 per cent.

The country is widely seen as deeply divided, worried about its future and place in the world, and engaged in a culture war over identity and the colonial past.

For all of Macron’s term, polls have consistently suggested this year’s election would likely be a re-run of the 2017 vote that saw Macron beat Le Pen in the second round.

But the emergence of Zemmour, an anti-Islam television pundit, as well as Pecresse’s clinching of the Republicans party nomination in early December, have cast sudden doubt on Le Pen’s future.

“We realise now that Le Pen was far more fragile than we thought only a few months ago,” Bruno Jeanbart, vice-president of polling group OpinionWay, told AFP.

(Photo by Pascal GUYOT / AFP)

All polls currently indicate that Macron would win the first round of the election on a score of around 26 per cent, with Pecresse and Le Pen battling for the second spot in the run-off on around 16 per cent each.

The highly fragmented left trails far behind.

Macron is shown winning the second-round for the moment, but one poll in December suggested he would lose to Pecresse, an outlier for the moment, but it rang alarm bells in the ruling party.

Macron and his team have long-practised arguments against Le Pen, accusing her of playing to the racist and anti-Semitic political fringe, as well as raising concerns about her competence.

Pecresse, who has described herself as “one-third Margaret Thatcher and two-thirds Angela Merkel”, presents a different target.

She is from the mainstream right, a former higher education minister with experience of running France’s biggest urban area since 2015.