France's Dubious Choices

Helle C. Dale

Politics, France

No matter which way the election goes, France is headed for a pretty dispiriting outcome.

At first blush, the results produced by Round One of the French presidential election, which took place Sunday, might look somewhat like a repeat of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. French voters roundly rejected traditional political candidates and the parties behind them, and went for two outsiders.

On the one side, we have a socialist front-runner, Emmanuel Macron, who was all but endorsed by former President Barack Obama. He recently founded his own political party, En Marche!, which has no seats in the French National Assembly. Macron, who has never held elective office, pulled in 23.7 percent of the vote.

On the opposing side, we have the right-wing, populist Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front. She has been widely criticized—and in some quarters ostracized—for her anti-immigration views. The closest runner up, Le Pen garnered 21 percent of the vote.

The winner of the May 7 face off will govern France for the next five years, taking the country in one of two entirely opposing directions.

Macron is an internationalist, highly pro-EU. In fact, he has called Brexit—the British vote to exit the European Union—a crime and predicted that the Brits will lead lives of servitude.

Le Pen is a protectionist. She is also bitterly anti-EU and wants to follow Britain’s example.

Superficially, and some U.S. media have been reporting it as such, one might see a Clinton versus Trump lineup repeated in France. Yet differences are more profound than similarities between the two elections, and nuance is important when looking at politics across the Atlantic Ocean.

Early polling suggests that Macron will win big in May, potentially with more than 60 percent of the vote. However, we all know only too well that pollsters can get it wrong. But Emmanuel Macron is no Hillary Clinton. He does not have Clinton’s scandals and heavy political and personal baggage to weigh him down. Many American voters, though not completely enamored with Donald Trump, voted for him because they felt Clinton was simply unacceptable.