The future of Europe is at stake in France

The first round of the French presidential elections is less than two weeks away. Two weeks in which it will be decided, barring a hecatomb, who will accompany the current tenant of the Elysée, Emmanuel Macron, leader in the polls, to the second and final round on 24 April. A face-off for which the heiress of the French extreme right, Marine Le Pen, who has been closing the gap in recent polls at a considerable rate, is emerging. A long list of candidates are still in the running for the presidency in a campaign conditioned by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the economic devastation it has caused, but only two will be left after 10 April. 

The mass events organised this week by the main contenders staged the kick-off of an election campaign marked by issues such as the rising cost of living, citizen security and immigration. The far-right polemicist, Eric Zemmour, summoned his host to the symbolic Trocadéro square, with the Eiffel Tower in the background, to capture a momentum lost in recent weeks. The leader of Reconquête (Reconquest, alluding to the expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian peninsula), he came to unseat Marine Le Pen in voting intentions, although he has faded in the polls after seeing his great theory, Le Grand Replacement, according to which the white Catholic French are being replaced by other Arab peoples, snatched away by other right-wing candidates.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, founder of La France Insoumise (Unsubmissive France), has again embarked on the quest for a constituent assembly to undo the Gaullist Fifth Republic. The far-left candidate, a former militant of the ex-Socialist Party, also took a massive meeting in Paris and allowed his acolytes to dream by climbing to third place in the polls. A position from which he threatens Le Pen's aspirations and where, for the first time in months, he sees himself with serious options of making it to the second round. Among his recipes are France's exit from NATO, the lowering of the retirement age and the legalisation of cannabis. 

The third candidate in contention with a chance of making it to the grand final is Valerie Pecrésse, the candidate of Les Républicains (LR), the traditional right, a state party that in the past has brought figures such as Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy to the presidency of the Republic. The party is perhaps at its lowest ebb, stuck between the Macronist centre and the radical right of Le Pen and Zemmour, with no differentiating ideas in the face of an electorate hungry for solutions. At the forefront stands a woman who defines herself as "two-thirds Merkel and one-third Thatcher", but with little backing from her party, once again torn apart by the primaries. The most recent polls put Pecrésse in a timid fourth place. 

In 2017, an energetic but unpopular former Economy Minister under then Socialist President François Hollande launched his candidacy under his own acronym (EM!) and ran for the Elysée, disrupting the traditional way of doing politics in France in the process. In the words of RNE's correspondent in Paris, Antonio Delgado, before Macron, French political careers were long exercises in patience and discipline. He broke that formula. Macron, never before elected to public office, became head of state at the drop of a hat. He reversed the mode. 

Five years on, with the wind at his back from the war in Ukraine and his newfound international leadership role as Vladimir Putin's main interlocutor, Macron will try to use his image as a resolute figure abroad as a springboard for re-election at home. If successful, he would be the first French president to repeat in office in two decades. The last to do so was Chirac, whose onslaught against the radical Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002 won him the massive backing of the left-wing electorate. A vote that Macron is trying to secure, as he did in 2017, to win in a new direct confrontation against Le Pen. That is why his team fears a high abstention rate, as it could jeopardise the re-election of his mandate. 

The centrist's rise five years ago brought together the majority of supporters of the traditional parties, the former UMP and the Socialist Party, especially the latter, of which Macron was a member. The youngest president of the Fifth Republic dominated the central space with little resistance and stole more than half of the votes from the left and the right, wiping out two parties that are now struggling to survive. The socialist desertion towards Macron's ranks left behind a shorn party whose candidate, Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris, has a derisory 2% in the polls. The demise of the PS and the imminent fall of the LR also leaves a breeding ground for extremism, once embodied by Le Pen and today intensified by Zemmour and Melénchon.

With Europe's attention focused on Ukraine, the critical stage that France will go through next April is likely to go unnoticed by the general public. However, Brussels is paying special attention to the events of 10 and 24 April, which have been on the calendar for some time now. It is not only France whose future is at stake; so is the European Union. With the exception of Macron, a convinced pro-European, any candidate with a real chance of winning the presidency would pose a real threat to European values. From left to right. 

Absorbed in the leadership of the EU-27 with the rotating presidency of the European Commission and aspiring to achieve strategic autonomy for the continent, Macron has faced a series of aggressive crises for France that have irreversibly shaped the electorate. The revolt of the yellow waistcoats, the devastating COVID-19 crisis or the strong measures against Islamism have hardly redefined his way of governing, visibly distanced from the citizenry - hence the nickname of Jupiter - but they have changed his neoliberal agenda in favour of greater state interventionism. 

The discrediting of his figure, despite having received the majority support of the French electorate, has fuelled the rupturist and nationalist movements that seek to retract France's position on the international stage to "recover" lost sovereignty, a nostalgic rhetoric that, while common in recent decades, has not yet had the capacity to govern the eurozone's second largest economy. Anti-globalist populism is once again knocking on the door - will it make its way back into the continent's arteries?