French polls suggest former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe is the elite’s best chance to defeat presumptive National Rally candidate Jordan Bardella in next year’s pivotal presidential election. If his campaign announcement is any indication, Philippe – like much of the waning establishment – remains clueless about how to make the centre hold.
Philippe’s introductory speech contains bromides that would have seemed vapid a decade ago. He told delegates of his centre-right Horizons party that we would “make proposals that would unite others”, while failing to make many concrete suggestions at all. Saying that “populism always backfires on the people,” Philippe said his campaign would show that “freedom and responsibility aren’t only the domain of the right-wing electorate”. It was as if the past decade, which has seen National Rally and other populist forces dramatically increase their support, had never happened.
The real France, rather than the one of Philippe’s imagination, is desperate for radical change. A recent Ipsos poll found that 74 per cent of voters want society fundamentally or radically reformed. That figure went to over 85 per cent among supporters of National Rally and the farther-right Reconquete, who regularly receive 40 per cent of the vote in presidential polls.
His challenge is amplified by the nature of France’s electoral landscape. Philippe’s party is the most conservative of the three that make up President Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble centrist coalition. Members of the other parties – the Democratic Movement (MoDem) and Renaissance – are the most supportive of the status quo, while four parties of the Left regularly receive much greater support in polls.
France’s two-round election system makes his path even harder. Bardella is sure to advance, likely finishing first by a large margin if current polls prove accurate. That means Philippe must finish second to face Bardella one-on-one, and that means consolidating the parties of the centre behind him while avoiding or preventing the leftist groups from consolidating behind one of their own.
Philippe must thread a camel through the eye of the proverbial needle to do this, offering substantial enough change to satisfy the French mood but not so much that he allows room for another candidate to surpass him.
The Ipsos poll also shows how hard it will be for him to unite the parties of the old “republican front” behind him in a second round. The second most important issue for French overall is to restore the people’s purchasing power. Yet the second most important issue for Horizons voters is to reduce the public debt and deficits, a stance that has little support among the left-wing voters he will need in the second round.
Those voters want to reduce social inequalities and fight against discrimination, concerns that barely register with Horizons backers or those of the other establishment centre-right party, The Republicans. Backers of The Republicans place a high priority on reducing taxes and better managing immigration, concerns that voters of the centrist parties are lukewarm about and leftists largely oppose.
The Republican voters align much more with the views of the populist Right parties on those issues, making them ripe for poaching by Bardella in the second round. Philippe’s task, then would be to be right-wing enough to secure their votes while simultaneously being left-wing enough to persuade left-wing voters to turn out rather than abstain, all while preaching not so much radical change to frighten or discourage the centrists.
Two Prime Ministers have fallen, and a third nearly fell, trying to reconcile these demands just in the last year and a half. How Philippe can do better than them while running in the heat of an election is unfathomable.
The French do not want a moderately updated version of the same-old, same-old delivered in angrier and more insistent tones. They want to cast the status quo aside and are largely divided only over how to do so. Populism is popular because populists claim they will deliver that change, not because they are beguiling the masses.
Yet it is precisely this yearning that the elites reject. They have built the current system and still largely benefit from it. They will bend over backwards to avoid dismantling it. That makes them ripe candidates for defeat when the choice – stability or change – is forthrightly put before an angry people.
It is now less than a year before the election. It is very unlikely that the majority of the French will change their minds and decide they like the way things are going before then. Philippe wants to unite the French, and perhaps his candidacy will – by uniting Left and Right against him and the stale, outdated consensus he represents.
Win victory in a democracy: Just give the people what they want and need