In a few days time , precisely 23rd April, the French will go to the polls for the first round of the 2017 presidential election. The second round run-off should come up two weeks later, if none of the eleven candidates scores more than 50% of the votes cast.
The outcome of the election should be of interest to us in the ECOWAS sub-region in general and in Nigeria in particular , if for nothing , at least for the place of France in the world – a permanent member of the UN, with veto power – and its continued influence in its former African colonies with its attendant impact on the Nigerian economy.
A case in point is the French-backed CFA franc (directly tied to the Euro), the currency used by Nigeria’s Francophone neighbours, many of them ECOWAS member countries like Nigeria. O the Nigerian borders . A visit to Nigeria’s borders like Seme will convince you!
The race to determine who will succeed President François Hollande at the Elysée Palace (their own Aso Villa) is now in its last lap. It is obvious that, barring any surprises of tsunamic proportions, the race will run into its second round run-off on Sunday 7th May.
For anyone who has followed closely the recent campaign and events in France and especially the barrage of relevant polls conducted by different polling agencies and institutes, the run-off of the French presidential election should be between the two forerunners, Marine Le Pen and 39-year-old Emmanuel Macron. Not even the recent surprise surge in voter intention of the far left candidate, Jean- Luc Mélenchon, should ,we believe, change this summation.
Marine Le Pen, daughter of the famous (infamous?) Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the far right party, National Front (le Front National} , has consistently topped the polls, until recently. The other frontrunner, Emmanuel Macron, a former minister of the economy of the incumbent Socialist President François Hollande, is running as an independent on the ticket of a movement called En Marche! (‘On the Move!’) which he formed on resigning from Hollande’s cabinet less than a year ago.
He claims to be neither to the left nor to the right of the French political divide. With these two candidates as frontrunners in the race for the Elysée Palace , the 2017 French presidential election can truly and rightly be said to be an historic one.
If the polls are anything to go by, for once in the history of the Fifth Republic, founded by Gen. Charles de Gaulle, we shall have a situation where the official candidate of each of the two major, mainstream political parties, the ruling Socialist Party , on the one hand, and the main opposition centre right party, the Republicans (Les Republicans),the new name of former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP, on the other, could be absent in the second round run-off.
This has indeed made the current campaign exciting, and intriguing. While Benoit Hamon, for the Socialists, and the embattled Francois Fillon, of the Republicans (LR), are running 5th and 3rd respectively in the polls, pundits and the man in the street in France and across the world continue to wager and argue as to whether the latter, once considered the next likely president , can make it to the run-off round by coming at least second.
Time it was when Sarkozy’s prime minister for all the latter’s five years in power (2007- 2012), wa s seen as the next French President once he had beaten Alain Juppé at the LR primary against all odds . Right from the onset there had been no doubt that the blonde eloquent and no-nonsense Marine Le Pen (who even got her father Jean-Marie expelled from the party he founded) would be present at the run-off in May, having consistently been on top of the pack and credited with more than a quarter of the polled voter intentions.
Should that happen on DDay it would be only the second time an FN candidate would do so in the history of the French Fifth Republic, after the shock result of 2002 that saw Marine’s father beat Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin to the third place in a contest finally won by incumbent Jacques Chirac.
This time around , the game has changed, or so it appears. Whereas the LR candidate, François Fillon was for long a close second in most polls behind Marine Le Pen , the scandal involving the former’s wife, Penelope, in a sinecure-type fake jobs allegation, for which he is under investigation, has now taken a significant toll on Fillon’s chances, at least at the first round, according to the polls.
The man who was once seen as the probable next president of France, after he had won the LR’s primary against all expectations , is now running behind Macron and Ms Le Pen, and may, therefore, not get through to the run-off stage.
On the other hand, Emmanuel Macron’s fortunes have consistently improved over the past weeks owing to a combination of factors, not least of which is the prevalent anti-establishment sentiment, anti-mainstream politician feeling . While the so-called Penelopegate (alleged use of public funds to pay Fillion’s wife as his parliamentary assistant, and even two of his children) obviously led to a loss of supporters for Fillon, the fact that Macron was able to attract supporters from both the left and the right of the political spectrum has helped him not only to displace Francois Fillion from the second position according to a cross section of the opinion polls but indeed to also catch up with Marine Le Pen at the top of the ladder.
There has, obviously, been a bandwagon effect in favour of the young former minister of President François Hollande, only 39.The outsider, Macron, hardly known a few years back, is today the toast, as they say, of a sizeable, significant section of the electorate.
The candidate of En Marche! has indeed been able to attract to his candidacy not only the traditional core centre politicians such as François Bayrou of the MoDEM Party,a recurring decimal in French politics, he has also garnered open endorsement by president Hollande’s recent former prime minister, Manuel Valls, and a host of such prominent members of the Hollande administration as the minister of defence, Jean-Yves Le Drian, and other top-flight politicians , like Daniel Cohn-Bendit.
What is striking in all this, clearly a success story, that of a brilliant banker and economist turned politician, is that the winner of the Socialist Party primary, Benoit Hamon, has had to cry havoc and treachery to the high heavens for the fact that contestants at the presidential primary of the party had been made to make an undertaking that they would support the winner of that primary , come rain or shine.
In other words, a major loser at the Socialist Party primary, Hollande’s recent former prime minister Valls, should normally be the last person to lend his support to independent frontrunner Macron, who had turned his back on the Socialist Party, at least not before the ineluctable run-off in May.
But then, the opinion polls, for whatever they are worth, and woe betide any serious politician who would deny their relevance, have consistently put the Socialist Party’s official candidate far behind not only frontrunners Le Pen and Macron, but also the embattled Fillon, and now also one Jean- Luc Mélenchon, a far left charismatic rabble-rouser.
All this has led to the now famous ‘vote utile’ (‘useful vote’) and would explain why a good many Socialist Party supporters have shifted ground and continued to endorse, strengthen and swell the ranks of the former socialist, turned independent, Macron. The latter’s En Marche! movement has turned out to be more than a mere slogan but a veritable rallying call.
The membership of the movement to have hit 200,000, more than double that of the mainstream Socialist Party and about the same as that of the old Gaullist party that has continually governed France under different names and appellations: RPR, UDF, UMP, used by Sarkozy, and now Fillon’s LR. What’s in a name? The bandwagon effect referred to above may well be due to the perceived need by a non-negligible section of the French electorate, and their friends and allies abroad, notably in Europe, to stop the ultra-rightist National Party incarnated by Marine Le Pen from producing the next president of France. The reason is simple.
If it is highly probable that neither the candidate of the ruling Socialist Party of President Hollande, nor that of the rightist LR Party (Les Républicans) of the immediate past president Nicolas Sarkozy would make it to the second round run-off, it is clear that only a candidate strong enough to give the FN’s Marine Le Pen a run for her populist, anti-EU, anti-immigration, and some would say racist ideology, come 23rd April, could ensure that the far right candidate does not find her way to the Elysée Palace. If Macron comes first at the first round and Marine Le Pen a close second, the race for the Elysée Palace in the run-off would be literally a battle royal.
The lesser candidates, the French call them ‘les petits candidats’ :small candidates, prominent among whom could be a certain Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate of the far leftist party, Le Parti de Gauche, with his movement called La France Insoumise (France Unsubdued) – rebellious? – and the Socialist Party candidate, Benoit Hamon on the one hand, and the combination of the supporters of François Fillion and the weight of abstentions, and today’s undecided voters, all combined, on the other, could very well determine who wins the race.
The opinion polls in fact suggest that as many as 20% of those to vote on 23rd April are yet undecided, while abstentions could be as high as 30%. •Continued online •Ekundayo Simpson, Professor of French, CEO Interlingua Limited
