Big victory

Macron in market for big victory

President’s party on course to take Paris by storm and win big nationwide to secure parliamentary majority.

By PIERRE BRIANÇON

To get a sense of the great upheaval taking place in French politics, you just need to go to a Parisian open-air market.

Only two types of candidates seem to be competing for votes at these traditional venues for election campaigning: French President Emmanuel Macron’s, and all the others.

As France heads to the polls in the first round of the parliamentary election Sunday, the candidates from La République En Marche (“The Republic on the Move”) — the centrist movement-turned-party Macron created a little over a year ago — seem to have more volunteers, more energy and more enthusiasm than rivals from traditional parties looking on in envy.

LRM candidates insist that nothing is done yet, that the electorate has never been so volatile, and that they remain vulnerable to unpleasant last-minute surprises. But they can’t hide their confidence as they ride the wave that carried Macron to the French presidency a month ago. Opinion polls suggest the party is on course for a landslide victory, which would give Macron a powerful mandate to implement reforms to shake up the French economy, such as liberalizing the labor market.

On the LRM campaign posters, the picture of the president is at least as large as that of the local candidates, who don’t campaign on the local or regional issues that aspirants for parliamentary seats traditionally have to master.

This time it’s all about Macron, acknowledged Gilles Le Gendre, the LRM candidate in what is traditionally one of Paris’ most conservative districts, which encompasses the 5th, 6th and part of the 7th arrondissements. “People mostly talk to us about Macron and his platform, national issues, and the details which are of particular concern to them,” he said as he set up camp one morning last week at Marché Monge, a well-known food market in the Latin Quarter.

Le Gendre, 59, is a representative of an army of novice politicians that Macron has tasked with taking parliament by storm. A former journalist who went on to found his own PR firm, Le Gendre volunteered last year to spend a few hours of his time with Macron’s movement. It ended up being more than a few hours, which led him, like 19,000 others across France, to put his name forward for selection as a parliamentary candidate.

Until very recently, the constituency for which Le Gendre is campaigning would not have been seen as fertile ground for an LRM candidate. Its outgoing MP is François Fillon, the former presidential candidate for conservative party Les Républicains, whose campaign foundered earlier this year on allegations of embezzlement and nepotism. The conservatives this time are fielding Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, a flamboyant former minister who also put her name forward for the presidential nomination last year.

“NKM,” as she is widely known, tried hard to convince Macron that she would support him if elected to parliament. To no avail: LRM still decided to put Le Gendre up against her — in contrast to the few other potential conservative supporters left to run without a Macronist opponent.

Kosciusko-Morizet can claim, at 44, to belong to a younger generation than Le Gendre, but she could still fall victim to the feeling expressed by Martine Vinchon, a 52-year-old secondary school teacher visiting the market that day. “I voted for Fillon both as an MP in 2012 and in the first round of the presidential election,” she said. But, she added: “This time, it will be Le Gendre. Macron has been elected, he deserves his chance.”

“People want him to succeed and they have been impressed by his first few days on the international stage,” said Le Gendre who, not to be outdone by “NKM,” is campaigning as “GLG.”

The campaign faced a hiccup, he admits, when Macron’s aura was tainted by nepotism allegations against LRM leader and regions minister Richard Ferrand. That didn’t seem to square with Macron’s campaign promise to clean up French politics and “people were troubled and asked questions,” Le Gendre said.

But then, he smiled, “Trump helped us.” Macron responded to the U.S. president’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord with solemn televised statements — in French and English — at 11 p.m., allowing him to claim the mantle of a European leader ready to pick up the gauntlet. The next day, confirmed Anne Vicher, a volunteer handing out flyers, “questions about Ferrand have disappeared. As if people realized there are global problems that are much more serious.”

Presidential platform

“Voters want to allow Macron to implement his platform, that’s why they want to give him a majority,” said Hughes Renson, the LRM candidate running in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. Renson illustrates how people with a variety of political backgrounds are rallying behind Macron. Once an adviser to former President Jacques Chirac on social affairs, he later became a top executive at EDF, the French mammoth utility.

He will run against the sitting Républicains MP Jean-François Lamour, a former Olympic fencing champion and another ex-adviser to Chirac, who later made him sports minister.

Paris looks set to become one of Macron’s strongholds, confirming the trend set in the presidential election. Thirty-five percent of voters in the capital chose Macron in the first round of the presidential poll, with 26 percent going for Fillon, and National Front leader Marine Le Pen a distant fifth with less than 5 percent of the vote. The national figures for those three candidates were 24 percent, 20 percent and 21 percent respectively.

In the second round of the election, which pitted Macron against Le Pen, almost 90 percent of Parisians voted for the victor — way above the 66 percent national average.

If the parliamentary election establishes Paris’ status as Macron City, LRM could try to cement its domination with a run for city hall. The party already seems to have Socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo in its crosshairs. Hidalgo poured scorn on Macron when he was in François Hollande’s government, notably for his efforts to liberalize the French economy. According to LRM insiders, the party already has a candidate to take her on in the 2020 municipal election: Benjamin Griveaux, the 39–year-old former spokesman of Macron’s presidential campaign, who is also running for a parliamentary seat in Paris this year.

Nationwide support

While the rest of France may not be in the grip of the same levels of Macron mania, the new president seems to be doing well enough across the country to secure an absolute majority of seats in parliament. That would allow him to dispel the notion that he doesn’t have a “real mandate” because so many of his second-round voters were only driven by their rejection of a possible Le Pen presidency.

The Macron camp in recent days has taken to warning its supporters against over-confidence, as poll after poll suggests a landslide victory. The most spectacular survey, by Ipsos-CEVIPOF, showed last week that with only 31 percent of the votes nationwide, LRM could expect to sweep the board, winning between 395 and 425 seats in the 577-strong National Assembly. Les Républicains would become the main opposition, but with only 95 to 115 seats. And all the other parties, including the National Front, would be reduced to marginal roles by the French electoral system.

Asked about his chances last week, Le Gendre said he is just hoping to “come out ahead” in the first round, in a field of 24 candidates, including four or five serious ones. “And then we’ll see,” he added. Under the French system, if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the votes in the first round, two or more leading candidates go on to a runoff.

A few days after Le Gendre’s visit to the market, a new poll conducted in his district came out, showing the formerly “unknown” candidate (as some newspapers called him) polling at 42 percent to Kosciusko-Morizet’s 24 percent.

That’s more than Macron himself scored in that area in the first round of the presidential ballot.