France’s 2017 Election
Going into the French election, media sources and pundits insisted that terrorism would influence the election. It did, but it wound up hurting the candidate everyone expected to capitalize on the issue: far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. It’s now time to explore how, and why it hurt “the anti-terrorist” candidate, as the runoff campaign commences.
Why Did The Le Pen Soufflé Collapse?
Commentators just assume that terrorists win elections, and that their chaos either knocks off an incumbent, or benefits the most hardline anti-terrorist candidate, in the absence of an incumbent. But as the evidence shows, that’s not always the case, as research of mine on Spanish and American elections have demonstrated (though it does fit the Israeli case).
In the case of France, when a policeman was tragically slain by a likely terrorist on April 20, everyone predicted Marine Le Pen would finish first in the presidential election or at least improve her polling numbers, giving her campaign a boost going into the second round. They were wrong.
Le Pen did manage to make it into the runoff, with 21.4 percent of the vote. But that’s far below her 2015 showing, when the National Front won 30 percent of the vote, well ahead of the conservatives and the socialists that year.
Even with the tragic truck attack last year, Le Pen did start off as the front-runner, ahead of all candidates by several percentage points. But throughout the campaign, her big lead crumbled and she finished several points behind a centrist independent who had never run for office before. In fact, Le Pen had a one point lead on April 12, but lost three points after the terror attack on the French policeman as the election concluded.
Rather that claim her ideas were heartless or mean or divisive, as the French left usually concludes, Macron effectively argued that Le Pen’s solutions to terrorism were overly simplistic and unlikely to work.
In fact, it was Macron who seized the initiative on the terror issue by focusing on targeting encryption that terrorists use to communicate with each other, while Le Pen’s response to the new idea was to call him “weak,” on terrorism, an ineffective strategy that saw her numbers continue to decline, rather than rebound.
Terrorism Issue Couldn’t Save Le Pen From Herself
Le Pen rails against “financial globalization” as well as “Islamic globalization.” But French voters didn’t seem to buy that the two were related, or that her solutions would improve the situation. When Le Pen was at the top of her game. Britain was voting for Brexit and Donald Trump became an improbable front-runner.
Now the French have witnessed the political and economic chaos in a post-Brexit Britain, while Trump’s first 100 days show that at least it’s going to be a lot tougher for the new president than it seemed in mid-November, when anything looked possible.
Maybe that’s why the Dutch turned their back on a Le Pen-like candidate earlier this year. Having a candidate like Macron whose expertise is more in tune with economics instead of politics sounds a lot more favorable than Le Pen, whose life has always been about politics?
A Le Figaro poll in February of 2017 claimed that 33 percent of French see the international market as a threat, two-thirds think the country is in decline, and 80 percent want a candidate who “is ready to change the rules of the game.” Business Insider predicted this would all benefit Le Pen. Yet she barely got above 20 percent, far below her 2015 showing in regional elections. That’s because the Le Pen family participation in French politics is getting pretty stale.
Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, ran five times for the presidency. She also ran for the presidency before and lost. In fact, she’s held her political office back in 1998 and has campaigned in just about every election for something since then, so it is hard for her to make the case that she’s an outsider, simply because her party loses a lot of elections.
The moniker “frequent candidate” hardly implies new and fresh ideas, the way a neophyte like Macron can provide, who only increased his polling numbers as the campaign went on. Additionally, the investigation into misspent EU funds by Le Pen and her campaign to go along with her fraud conviction in 2014 didn’t boost any confidence into her governing abilities. Had conservative candidate Fillon not suffered his own fake jobs scandal, she may not have even made the runoff.
Le Pen could still pull off an upset in the second round, but with her surprise second-place showing behind an inexperienced candidate her odds look longer. If she loses as expected (most polls have Macron the second round by a wide margin) the National Front might consider a merger with conservatives, or a different party leader, not connected to the Le Pens.
L'épée may be mightier than Le Pen, it seems.
John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Ga. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His twitter account is johntures2.