Feeling anxious about the French election

The polls got it right in France. They showed a very close race among the top four candidates for one of the two spots in the runoff for president two weeks hence—and it was a very close race. The front runner, Emanuel Macron, a former minister in President  François Hollande’s Socialist government, running on a platform of cutting government spending and remaining in the European Union, got 24 percent. In second place, with 21 percent, was Marine Le Pen of the National Front. Just out of the running, with 20 percent, was François Fillon, of the Republicans, the party of former Presidents Nicholas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac. In fourth place, also with 20 percent, was Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a left-winger who called for exit from the EU and a confiscatory (that’s 100 percent) tax on certain high earners. Far behind in fifth, with 6 percent, was Benoît Hamon, of the Socialist party, whose candidates held the presidency in 1981-95 and since 2012.

This is just about the best result one could have hoped for. Polling shows Macron defeating Le Pen in the runoff with 60 percent or more, and there’s no reason to believe that’s wrong: Macron is the next president of France. And while the 39-year-old enarque (graduate of the elite Ecole National d’Administation) and former Rothschild banker is an unknown quantity and will almost certainly have nothing like a party majority in the legislative branch, he’s not going to pull France out of the EU (as Le Pen and Mélenchon promised to) or cozy up to Russia (as Le Pen and Fillon seemed inclined to) or vastly increased an already overlarge and underperforming government (as Mélenchon and Hamon would try to do). A Le Pen-Mélenchon runoff would have given France the nightmare choice of two candidates who could have described each other, hyperbolically but not totally without basis, as a communist and a fascist.

But the sigh of relief inspired by my first look at the results was followed by some frowns of consternation when I started analyzing them. Here are some reasons why:

Judging from exit polling, there was a huge difference among age groups, with a sharp break at age 60 (the usual retirement age in France), with younger voters making some unnerving choices. The combined vote for Le Pen and Mélenchon (anti-EU, pro-Russia, pro-increased-spending, possibly authoritarian) was 41 percent, and Mélenchon’s refusal to endorse Macron in the runoff (as Fillion and Hamon did) suggests that many of his votes, perhaps the bulk of them, will go to her in the runoff. There’s a lot of them especially by age, as shown by this comparison of the percentages for those two compared with the percentages for the two traditional party nominees, Fillon and Hamon.

 
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Feeling anxious about the French election

Πηγή: American Enterprise Institute