Après moi, le débat...

A blow-by-blow of the Macron-Le Pen Rematch

I doubt it changed many people’s minds. Mainly because not many people watched it – only 15.6 million according to Médiamétrie, the worst turnout ever.

Those that did watch it, and already thought Emmanuel Macron an arrogant elitist, probably still do, while those that previously thought Marine Le Pen even more diabolical and dangerous than her father, are now no doubt doubly confirmed in that opinion.

Are these views accurate? Are they relevant?

Macron’s arrogance, for example, his “Jupiterian” conceit. The morning after the debate, Le Pen described his performance as “very contemptuous, very arrogant, including in his posture” (he smirked, crossed his arms and slouched a lot), which “surprised, I think, no one in France.”

This echoes something that Gilles says in this week’s Hexagon podcast: “Many French people actually hate Emmanuel Macron. He’s created very deep anger with his personality, maybe because he is the typical golden boy, the successful one. And somehow this doesn't really work with the French.”

It doesn’t really work with citizens in other countries either. Even before Brexit, Trump and Covid-19, people everywhere have been unabashed in their suspicion and hatred of experts and elites.

Macron fits these bills to a tee. Like four other French presidents and eight Prime Ministers, he’s an énarque, a graduate of the infamous ENA grande école. In his two-year stint as a Rothschild investment banker, he pocketed millions overseeing multi-billion-euro acquisitions. He became Minister of the Economy under François Hollande without ever having been elected. He ran for President without ever having held office. And then he handily won, completely decimating the French political landscape in the process, devouring the centre-left and centre-right, and pushing millions of French citizens towards the extremes.

What’s to like?

Well, liking is hardly the point.

“Should we reproach the musician for his virtuosity?” Jacques Attali tweeted the morning after the debate. “We must stop denouncing as arrogance what is above all the affirmation of a competence. France will only be great when it values expertise and excellence.”

Attali of course is hardly an objective voice. He too graduated from ENA (and the École polytechnique, the École des mines, Sciences Po and University Paris Dauphine). He was François Mitterrand’s economic “sherpa” for ten years. He worked for Sarkozy during his presidency. And with Macron during Hollande’s.

Still, the point holds. During the debate, Macron threw numbers around with typical golden-boy wonkease. Some, he fudged. But he successfully punctured many of his opponent’s proposed economic policies: combatting inflation by lowering VAT on “essentials” for example: “Not everyone in France, the four of us, for example (pointing to himself, Le Pen, and the two moderators) can’t afford to pay the higher rate. We should pay it.” He called instead for a continued freeze on fuel prices, something Le Pen and her party refused to vote for.

He also rightly pointed out that the purchasing power of the French has increased during his five-year term, by 4% on average for all French people (5.3% for the 10% most modest, against 3% for the 10% most well-off). This is more due to an increase in employment than to any measures his government took, which mainly benefitted people at the top end of the income scale. But still.

More on this: Le Pen proposes to “permanently lower the VAT on energy from 20% to 5.5%.” By energy, she means VAT on what consumers pay for fuel, gas, electricity and fuel oil. The problem with this isn’t just the one Macron pointed out – that those that can should pay 20%, as cutting this universally will pull billions out of the treasury. More to the point is the fact that fuel taxes are governed by European law, not French. A reduction below 15% is prohibited.

Where Macron really scored, however, was not on economic issues, but cultural ones. Namely, Le Pen’s plan to ban headscarves in public, not just in schools or on civil servants.

“This garment is a uniform imposed by Islamists,” said Le Pen. Macron countered that such a ban is contrary to the very concept of laïcité – state-supported secularism – and the French Constitution: "You're going to create civil war if you do that… and how would you enforce it? With thousands of police running down the street after girls in headscarves and [Jewish] boys wearing kippahs?”

Which brings us to the diabolical and dangerous. Despite Le Pen’s masking of her extremist views behind policies of “social-populism” (Gilles Ivaldi’s term) borrowed from the left, the darker elements of her agenda were nakedly on view in the debate. How to fix the problems in French schools? More discipline. Schools for delinquents. Immigration? Amend the Constitution (by means of an anticonstitutional bypassing of parliament through a referendum, as even if she were to win April 24th she is not likely going to get many seats in the legislative elections in June) to restrict foreigners’ capacity to “change the composition and identity of the French people” — a rewording, as Rim-Sarah Alouane pointed out in her Thursday’s NYT opinion piece, of the white-supremacist “Great Replacement” theory.

Macron also nailed Le Pen on her links to Russia. He described her as one of the first political leaders in the world to recognise Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014. Le Pen countered by holding up a tweet from that year, expressing her full support for Ukraine. "Ukraine without Crimea," said Macron (smirking and slouching even more arrogantly). Precisely: ever since that tweet, she has stated that Crimea was not annexed by Russia.

And then Macron brought up her party’s Russian bank loan, which is now held by a consortium of former Russian military officers. “When I meet with Putin,” he said, “we are two heads of state. When you speak to Russia you're talking to your banker.”

Other takeaways: Neither candidate takes climate change seriously. When asked by the moderators, they focussed entirely on energy issues, not on the need for emergency measures to save the planet. Neither seemed to really care about schools, either—that subject, for which time had been put aside in the debate, was barely addressed. And neither wants to address inequality, nor would ever dream of considering any kind of redistribution of wealth. Say what you will about Jean-Luc Melenchon, the perennially angry leader of the radical left-wing La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”), but at least when he was still in the running (he came in third in the first round on April 10th, only 400,000 votes behind Le Pen), these issues were on the table. Macron patted himself on the back for raising the minimum hourly wage from 10.57 € to 10.85 €. Le Pen promised a “permanent boost” to salaries, to which Maron crossed his arms and bellowed: “You are not in charge of salaries, Madame Le Pen! Employers set salaries, not the government! I don't want the people listening tonight to think that under your government, their salaries would increase by 10% – it's not automatic!”

There is of course a vast divide between the two. Macron was and is arrogant. Le Pen, despite her attempt to reposition herself as a normal, friendly, cat-loving candidate, showed yet again, especially in her proposals on how to solve France’s “massive and anarchic immigration problem”, that just under that mainstream mask is her father’s spawn: a diabolical and dangerous extremist, who winks at white supremacists by making “OK” hand signals in her campaign posters.

Personally, I’d choose arrogant over illiberal, racist, nationalistic, xenophobic and undemocratic every time.

To get a fuller sense of all of this, have a listen to this week’s Hexagon Podcast with Gilles Ivaldi, an expert – yes, an expert – on French political parties and elections, populism, and the far-right.

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