Such has been his success at building a broad centrist church, and so poor have been the legacy parties’ efforts to re-establish themselves, that he has no strong, credible moderate opposition
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskThe event was the talk of France’s political classes. But maybe only the man on the stage believed that the movement he was starting would go as far as it has. “At the time we didn’t even know if Emmanuel Macron would run for the presidency,” recalls Brigitte Fouré, the mayor of Amiens.
With the Gaullists and Socialists still nowhere, there is a 90% chance that this election’s second round will be a re-run of 2017’s. Its result, though, looks like being a great deal closer: the number of people willing to shift their allegiance to Ms Le Pen from other candidates is much higher than it was. No poll of second-round voting intentions has as yet shown Ms Le Pen as the winner. But our poll of polls puts the likely result at 53% to 47%. In many systems that would be a landslide.
Today weeds are growing in the car park of the Whirlpool factory; a sculpture made from 18 steel tumble-dryer drums dominates its deserted entrance hall. Twice new owners promised to keep the plant going. Twice they failed. “It’s a disgrace,” says Frédéric Chantrelle, a former union representative. Less than half of the 280 former employees have found another permanent job. Other industrial workplaces have suffered similar fates.
No longer seeming beyond the pale is Ms Le Pen’s great success. Some of it is cosmetic; changing the name of a party hardly changes its essence . As Gilles Finchelstein and Raphaël Llorca note in a study for the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, a think-tank, Ms Le Pen’s written programme is still focused on immigration, “Islamism”, and “national preference” for the French.
In 2018 it was in this car-dependent semi-rural France, where McDonald’s drive-throughs sit next to newly built roundabouts decked out with kitsch sculpture, that people first put on high-visibility jackets——to complain about the way in which an increase in carbon taxation had pushed up the price of motor fuel. Their protests spread throughout the country. As French uprisings always do, they evoked echoes of 1968, 1848 and 1789. The government backed down.
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