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Few people want to recognise that Emmanuel Macron’s re-election is far from a foregone conclusion, and that Marine Le Pen’s is perfectly possible. For at least four reasons:
1. No president has been re-elected without a cohabitation or after a five-year term or if he was elected the first time he ran. Emmanuel Macron fulfils all three conditions.
2. At least two candidates considered as elected in advance, (Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Lionel Jospin), were defeated by surprise, i.e. by the abstention of his camp.
3. After the soft disengagement, from which Emmanuel Macron benefited in 2017, may come the hard disengagement, against him; as the Convention came after the Constituent. The alliance of all against the incumbent can, once again, come into full play. And succeed.
4. The discourse of the extreme right is no longer demonised. Whereas five years ago, Marine Le Pen appeared as an incompetent extremist, she now poses as a moderate expert; more acceptable, more legitimate, more reasonable than Éric Zemmour, who serves as a repellent and attracts moderate votes towards her.
Without going back over the frustrations, disappointments and anger that Emmanuel Macron and his policies have provoked, it is time to face reality: Marine Le Pen may be elected in less than four weeks.
What would happen then?
The implementation of her programme would plunge the country into an unprecedented and largely irreversible crisis, of which her voters would be the first victims.
On the purchasing power she claims to defend: she announces innumerable and very vague social expenditures, a massive reduction in VAT which would only benefit the rich, an implausible reform of income tax and pensions, not financed, except by a vague loan (while she denounces the public debt) and by hypothetical savings on benefits for migrants. All this will in fact cause inflation, of which the low paid and small savers will be the first victims.
On ecology: she intends to cancel all wind power projects and to dismantle the wind turbines in service, which would make it even more difficult to control greenhouse gas emissions by 2040.
On foreigners in France: she intends to withdraw their access to health care and family and social benefits, prevent them from working, and withdraw their French nationality. Not only would this violate several fundamental constitutional principles, but it would quickly make it impossible for our economy to function, would turn millions of people who are perfectly integrated today into homeless people, and would deprive the country of hundreds of thousands of French people, born in France, whose contribution is invaluable. Furthermore, not to welcome any more foreigners would be to deprive ourselves of doctors, researchers, professors, engineers, artists, whom we need so much. Finally, having our embassies process asylum applications would mean, for example, admitting Ukrainians only if they have submitted a valid asylum application to our embassy in Kiev…
On justice and security: here again, her election would lead to reforms that violate all our constitutional principles: for example, granting police officers a presumption of self-defence and forcing judges to take incompressible penal sanctions would be to deny the separation of powers.
On culture, which she intends to reduce to a narrow vision of France, we must be particularly concerned about her project to privatise public broadcasting, which augurs a takeover by her Hungarian and Russian friends.
On Europe: unilaterally reducing France’s contribution to the European budget and asserting the primacy of national law over European law, as she intends to do in June, would mean calling into question France’s membership of the European Union. Let us repeat it here: electing Madame Le Pen would mean leaving the European Union, without having really decided to do so. It would be a Fréxit without debate.
Finally, it would be to put our armies and the foreign policy of the country in the hands of a person whose only allies in the world are Messrs Orban and Putin. In other words, if Madame Le Pen is elected in less than a month, we will immediately see a reversal of alliances: our country would ally itself with Russia against Ukraine, against the rest of the European Union and against NATO.
Think about it, before you play with the idea that, after all, five years of Macron is enough. Above all, reproach the former major parties for not having been able to bring out programmes and candidates worthy of our great country and of the great debate that this presidential election should have been. And let’s avoid the temptation of the worst.
j@attali.com