(3 minutes read)
24 April. France’s Presidential Election. The run-off between the two candidates who win most first round votes on 10 April.
Today it’s 100 days until 24 April. Emmanuel Macron’s place in that Election run-off appears, for now, near-guaranteed. All he has to do is identify the best moment (and the best medium) before formally declaring. YouTube? TikTok? Not unimaginable.
But his opponent? Pick your ‘favourite’ from a nightmare choice of Hard-Right Valérie Pécresse, Ultra-Right Marine Le Pen, and Scaremongering-Fanatical-Immigration-And-Islamic-Threat-Obsessive Eric Zemmour.
Who wins? Macron by a mile against the Ultra-Right, though (depressingly) a far shorter mile than his 2017 66% – 34% victory against Le Pen. But against Pécresse? Not so sure. The Left would abstain in droves and Pécresse could well be France’s first female President.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
18:00 on the 6th Friday before 10 April is, for now, much more important
To be an approved ‘Presidential Candidate’ at least 500 so-called parrains must sign a form publicly ‘sponsoring’ the candidature. Those forms start being signed on 30 January and must be delivered to the Constitutional Council by 6pm on 4 March. Such ‘sponsorship’ doesn’t imply support for the individual. It certainly doesn’t connote ‘financial support’. They’re signatories alone.
In France and its overseas territories over 42,000 people could be parrains. These 20+ varieties of Elected Notable include Senators, Deputies, Euro-MPs, Regional and Departmental Councillors, and Mayors. And those 500 Elected Notables must be from 30 of France’s 101 Départements.
The 500 Signatures requirement (originally only 100) was intended to limit the candidatures. However, over 7 Presidential Elections, there’s been an average 11 Presidential candidates, with 16 candidates in 2002, including three Trotskyists, three Socialists, two from the Ultra-Right, and two ecologists. [And there’s every likelihood that at least two Trotskyist candidates will again find their 500 parrains this year.]
Government’s vie-publique.fr website describes the 500 Signatures rule as ‘anachronistic and outdated’, criticising its ‘inability to accommodate popular candidates who are outside the system’. But there’s greater uncertainty than usual as to whether certain candidates with significant potential support will obtain enough signatures to stand.
There are more than 35,000 Mayors in France. However, many Mayors are said to be diffident about publicly ‘endorsing’ certain candidates, such as Hard-Left Jean-Luc Mélenchon and (particularly) the Ultra-Right Inciter of Racial and Religious Hatred Eric Zemmour.
Hard-Left and Ultra-Right face identical problems
The Communist Party’s last Presidential Candidate was in 2007. Marie-George Buffet won 2% of the vote. In the last two Elections, the Party supported France Unbound’s Hard-Left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. However, this time, the Communist Party’s national secretary, Fabian Roussel, is standing, and causing Mélenchon problems.
The problems are nothing to do with Roussel being easily the most credible Presidential candidate on the Left. At least until last weekend when Roussel said ‘Good wine, good meat, good cheese. That’s French gastronomy.’ Whereupon he was accused by the Left of being viandarde (‘meat-ist’) and playing identity politics trying to appeal to traditional Ultra-Right voters.
Mélenchon’s problems have been accentuated by Roussel urging all (850+) Communists with elected office to parrainer him, tweeting ‘I want the largest number [of signatories] to further strengthen my candidature’ [and so stuff other(s)]
It’s reported Roussel has already got at least 500 ‘promised’ parrains but his intended hardball grab of every available signature can only be aimed at Mélenchon who, currently, has the support of 400 only
There’s more acute problems for Zemmour, and similar ones for Le Pen. Zemmour claims to have identified 300 signatories and Le Pen 450. Who knows the extent to which any of this is true.
The system is failing
This is no way to be running a democracy.
We have a situation where candidates who finished 2nd (Le Pen) and 4th (Mélenchon) behind Emmanuel Macron (in 2017) winning 40%+ of the vote may not be able to stand.
Their support today is lower than in 2017: yet Le Pen (17%) and Mélenchon (10%), with Zemmour at 12%, remain among the 5 most popular possible candidates. How dangerously anti-democratic and absurd if any were excluded from the Presidential Election because of an archaic system of signatures. The Ultra-Right must be beaten in the ballot box. Yet were any candidate unable to stand to stand by virtue of insufficient signatures that would leave France in a considerably more worrying situation than today.
There’ve been suggestions that every parrain be given two votes: one to demonstrate ‘support’, the other for ‘republican’ purposes to enable other candidates to stand. Too radical. Mélenchon’s France Unbound Party proposed the replacement of the system of a laissez-passer signed by 500 Notable Electors by one in which the signature of 150,000 electors was required. Too democratic.
Practical help may be available from the traditional (and wholly self-serving) Right. All 12 opinion polls this year show Pécresse and Le Pen neck and neck (well within the margin of error). If Zemmour doesn’t stand some of his support returns to Pécresse, some to Mélenchon (really), some abstains, but most (whence it came) to Le Pen. And it’s goodnight Pécresse.
Hence this week’s democratically-inspired, disinterested intervention by Gérard Larcher (Right-wing Républicains Party Sénat leader) on France Inter public radio: ‘To parrainer is not to support … I want the elected to use their right to parrainer as much as possible … they should parrainer without fear … Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Marine Le Pen, and Eric Zemmour represent a significant portion of public opinion and must be allowed to stand in the Presidential Election.’
Valérie Pécresse added her own disinterested ha’porth saying she believed ‘every individual who represented a current of thought in France must be able to stand in the Presidential Election. That’s Eric Zemmour’s situation with, currently, over 10% support in the polls.’
These principled pro-democracy sentiments allowed people to wonder how far The (Traditional) Right was prepared to go in ensuring Zemmour’s candidacy.
French politics today 
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