
Emmanuel Macron - 39 years old - on track to become France's next
president
How do the French presidential
candidates compare to figures in UK / US politics?
A very
approximate table of
equivalences to throw some more light on the French election.
Marine
le Pen
: Paul Nutall (UKIP) Donald
Trump
François Fillon
:
David
Cameron (Conservative) Jeb
Bush
Emmanuel Macron :
Tony Blair (New Labour) /
Obama
Benoît Hamon :
J Corbyn (Old Labour) / no equivalent
Jean-Luc Mélenchon
:
George Galloway / no equivalent
UPDATE:
Election day - Sunday 7th May 8pm French time
MACRON
PRÉSIDENT !
According
to exit polls, French voters have chosen centrist and pro-EU candidate
Emmanuel Macron as their next president, and by a substantial margin.
At 9 pm, Macron is credited with 65.8% of votes, and Marine Le Pen with
34.2% - less than expected.
Following the drop in the score of the right-wing Norbert
Hofer
in the rerun of the Austrian presidential election last December, and
the considerably poorer than expected showing of the Eurosceptic far
right in the recent parliamentary elections in the Netherlands,
Macron's substantial margin of victory confirms that support for
right-wing Eurosceptic parties, which brought Brexit in Britain and
Trump in the USA, is waning.
Macron's election is not
just a victory for the moderate and pro-European majority of electors
in France, it is a victory for the European Union too. A win for Le Pen
had the potential to do even more damage to the European Union than the
narrow victory for Brexit in the UK's referendum in 2016.
While the months of pre-presidential election wrangling in
France
are now at last over, for Macron the next act in the play is just
starting. His first task as president will be to attempt to ensure a
parliamentary majority to support his government.
Macron's movement "En Marche" (In motion) was created as a
movement crossing traditional party lines; it attracted support from
parliamentarians and figures from across the traditional party
spectrum. The upcoming legislative elections will test the
strength and cohesion of the new movement. Macron has stipulated that
to stand with the backing of the "En Marche" ticket, candidates –
including many sitting MPs – cannot stand under the banner of another
party at the same time.
French voters will return to the polls on June
11th and June 18th to elect their deput�s (members of parliament)
UPDATE: Sunday 23rd April.
All
opinion polls show Macron cruising to victory in the second round on 7th May.
France will not follow the UK and the USA into unchartered waters by
electing a far-right leader hostile to the European Union.
Emmanuel
Macron - France's next President.
As a centrist
candidate who already, even before the first round of
voting, had the support of former Socialist Prime Minister
Manuel
Valls, former conservative prime minister Dominique de Villepin, and
centrist leader Francois Bayrou, Macron will go into the second round
of voting as the candidate of traditional pro-European French political
parties, opposed to Marine le Pen, the populist candidate of the anti-European far right and far left.
While many of far-left candidate Jean-Luc M�lenchon's voters are
expected to vote for Marine Le Pen, voters from everywhere but the
extremes will vote for Macron. The only risk is that in the second
round Marine Le Pen's supporters will mobilise massively, while many of
those who voted in the first round for Fillon or official socialist
candidate Benoïît Hamon will be less motivated to vote, and may abstain.
This is an unlikely scenario. As we wrote on this page
several
months ago, the possibility of any member of the Le Pen family becoming
President of France is such an anathema to about
two thirds of the population, that they would make it their duty to
vote for any non-extremist candidate, from whatever part of the centre
ground. This barrage against extremism is known in France as
"the
Republican front".
Last time a member of the Le Pen
family made it to the presidential runoff, in 2002, Marine's father
Jean-Marie Le Pen was trounced in the second round of voting, as voters
- including Socialists - turned out en masse to vote for traditional
conservative candidate Jacques Chirac who romped home with 82.2% of the
votes. Macron is not expected to achieve such a resounding
victory, but victory will be his – and by a good margin.
After that however, he will have to form a government backed
by a
majority in Parliament; and while forming a government will not be too
hard – plenty of experienced and up-and-coming men and women are
already in the Macron camp – building a stable majority in the National
Assembly may be harder. But probably not as hard as much of the
commentary in the media would suggest.
Macron, as
President, will ask French voters to give him the parliamentary
majoriity he needs - just like other presidents before him, but with
one huge difference. Macron is neither left nor right, or he is both.
Recent Presidents, Sarkozy and Hollande, have had to perform a
balancing act to please both the hard liners and the moderates in the
party or parties providing them with a parliamentary majority, and have
ended up pleasing neither.
The situation for Macron
will be different. There is arguably a lot less difference between the
centre-left and the centre-right in France in 2017, than between the
different factions in the conservative "R�publicains" party, or
between
the far-left and the centre-left in the Socialist party. It is
significant that even before the first round of the Presidential
election, Macron was being openly championed by former Prime Ministers
Manuel Valls (Socialist) and Dominique de Villepin (Republicans), as
well as by Modem (Centre) party leader François Bayrou and by
the
one-time firebrand of "68" and Green party MEP Daniel Cohn
Bendit.
When it comes to the crunch, a majority of the electorate in
France reject the extremes; and with the current level of
perceived threat from the anti-EU nationalist fringes on the left and
the right, the majority of French voters will wish to avoid the
instability and potential for disaster that would ensue from leaving
President Macron without a majority in the National Assembly.
Macron's government will be, in all but in name, a government
of
national unity. Expect to see in it a lot of new faces, some of them
from outside politics, but also for the sake of reassurance – and
because there is plenty of talent to choose from – some
well-known figures who, until now, have sat on different sides of the
political divide.
To give a sense of the break with
tradition, if Macron were forming a new government in the UK, not in
France, one might expect to see him inviting into his government people
like Richard Branson, Ralph Fiennes, Bob Geldof, Stephen Hawking, Sir
Ivan Rogers, Vince Cable, Tristan Hunt, David Miliband, Sadiq Khan,
Stephen Dorrell, Anna Soubry and more like them.
France is entering a new political age, one in which the
entrenched divisions between "left" and "right" have lost a lot of
their meaning. This is what the new politics is all about.... even if
many in the media, and some in traditional parties, have difficulty
coming to terms with it.
Earlier
posts
23rd
April
With Republican
party candidate and
former front-runner François Fillon knocked out of the Presidential
race, France's main conservative party has achieved
the impossible: it has failed to win a place in the second round of an
election that - just four months ago - opinion polls showed to be
unlosable on account of the record levels of unpopularity of Socialist
president François Hollande.
The knives will be out -
indeed they have been out for some time now - against their official
candidate Fillon, who put personal pride before party and country,
refusing to stand down as candidate after being charged with fiancial
irregularities concerning the supposed fictitious employment of his
wife Penelope and his two children.
While Fillon
remains innocent of all charges until proved guilty, this election has
showed quite clearly - and not very surprisingly - that French voters
will not elect a person who is
under investigation by the courts, in particular a person
who had initially won the primary by campaigning as a Mr Clean.
UPDATE:
12th April.
The French
election campaign has
entered a danger zone. Yesterday President François Hollande, who is
not standing for reelection, envisaged the possibility of a nightmare
scenario for the second round runoff. In the event of
centrist
Emmanuel Macron being
pushed into third place, the two candidates left to fight it
out
could be two anti-establishment populists, one from the far left and
one
from the far right - Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen...
Such a choice
could plunge France into chaos with massive levels of abstention or
spoilt ballots on the second round, and a lame-duck president from day
1. Neither Melenchon nor Le Pen will be able to convince French
electors to elect a majority of either far left or far right deputies
at the ensuing Legislative elections (parliamentary elections) in June.
UPDATE:
22nd March.
The French presidential election campaign is in turmoil, as it looks
increasingly as though neither of the candidates representing the two
major tranditional parties, the Socialists on the left and the
Republicans ont he right, will make it through to the second round.
This looks likely to be a runoff between populist far-right candidate
Marine Le Pen, and independent centre-left candidate Emmanuel
Macron – leading to a
clear Macron victory in the second round.
Socialist party candidate Benoît Hamon is faring poorly in
the
polls, as centrist Socialist voters and party members turn towards
Macron; and the official Conservative alliance candidate is François
Fillon under investigation for a string of financial irregularities.
However, almost each day brings its new surprises, and on
20th
March President Hollande's interior minister Bruno Leroux was forced to
resign after accusations similar to those made against Fillon - namely
that he paid his teenage children for fictitious jobs as his
parliamentary assistants. Marine le Pen, too, is facing charges of
misappropriation of funds – though unlike Fillon and Leroux she has
claimed parliamentary immunity.
UPDATE:
22nd February.
Emmanuel
Macron
has received a boost to his campaign from centre-right leader François
Bayrou. Bayrou, leader of the Democratic Movement (MoDem) announced
today that he would not be standing for the presidency. He was credited
with up to 5% of voting intentions. Most of these voters are likely to
now support Macron.
UPDATE:
5th February.
Former outsider Emmanuel
Macron
looks increasingly like the front-runner to challenge far-right
populist candidate Marine Le Pen in the second round of the
Presidential election. Accusations of financial irregularities have
taken a serious toll on the ratings of the conservative candidate
François Fillon ; 39-year old Macron is seeming more and more like
the candate most capable of uniting enough voters to ensure
second
(or maybe even first) place in the first round of the election. With
credentials that include both being a liberalising finance minister in
Hollande's Socialist government, and being a former merchant banker
with Rothschilds, Macron has the potential to draw in a broad spectrum
of voters ranging from the centre left to the centre right.
However
- and this is a big however - it remains far from clear how things will
go in the first round of voting, now only two and a half months away.
If the left-winger
Beno�t
Hamon, who
surprisingly won the Socialist party primary, can unite
enough of
the left wing behind him to pull off second place in the first
round, the runoff on May 7th would see French voters having
to
choose in the second round between a far left candidate and a far right
National Front candiate, Marine Le Pen ... which all those in the
middle would see as a nightmare scenario.
The resulting
runoff would land France with a lame-duck president from his or her
first day in office. The Presidential election is followed, a
month later, by legislative (general) elections in which neither the
far left nor the far right could possibly win a majority, on account of
the electoral system which, as for the presidential election, involves
two rounds of voting. In second rounds, voters tend to vote against the
candidate they like least, making it hard for candidates from the far
left or the far right to get elected.
UPDATE:
30 January.
Far left candidate Beno�t Hamon has won nomination
as the
candidate of the Socialist alliance in the upcoming Presidential
election. Hamon defeated former PM Manuel Valls in the second round
runoff of the primary election to choose the Socialist candidate.
Hamon's victory leaves the Socialist party, currently in power under
president Hollande, facing infighting at the coming presidential
elections which will see two far left candidates, Hamon and
his
former colleague Arnaud Montebourg, both former Socialist ministers,
running against each other in the first round.
With
current front-runner and Republican party candidate François
Fillon now fighting off accusations of financial fraud (see update 26th
Jan below), the chief beneficiary of Hamon's victory is likely to
be Emmanuel Macron, Hollande's former finance minister. Hamon
is
standing as an anti-establishment independent, and is now likely to
appear as the only remaining candidate representing the centre left.
UPDATE:
26 January.
François Fillon's campaign in turmoil. Satirical
newspaper Le Canard Ench�in� has claimed that
Fillon's
wife Penelope was paid 500,000 € over 8 years for a fictitious
job
as her husband's parliamentary assistant. While there is
nothing
illegal in parliamentarians hiring family members as secretaries or
assistants, and at least 50 French MPs employ their wives, the fact
that Penelope Fillon was highly paid for a job that nobody seemed to
know about is alarming, because in the past Fillon has always
said that his wife kept out of politics.
Fillon strongly denies any wrongdoing, and judges are now investigating
the claims. Fillon has announced that if charged with any offence, he
will withdraw from the presidential race. If this happens the
Republicans' election campaign will be back to square one. Alain
Jupp�, who was the runner up in the Republican primary, has
excluded reentering the race in place of Fillon.
UPDATE:
23 January.
Manuel
Valls (former prime minister) and Beno�t Hamon are the two
candidates through to the runoff in the Socialist primary due on Jan
29th. The runoff will present a clear choice between a left-wing
candidate (Hamon) and a centrist (Valls). Mathematically, Hamon should
win, as he and the other left-wing candidate Arnaud Montebourg,
garnered 54% of the vote in the first round. This situation is similar
to the one that saw Jeremy Corbyn chosen to lead Britain's Labour
Party, though he was not the preferred candidate of the majority of
Labour MPs..
UPDATE:
27th November.
François
Fillon has won the primary of the Centre and right,
and will be their candidate in the 2017 election.
UPDATE:
2nd December. François
Hollande has announced that he will not stand for a second term in
office.
WILL
MARINE LE PEN BE THE NEXT FRENCH PRESIDENT ?
Short answer:
NO ! It
is virtually impossible !
She is expected to be one of the two candidates to make it
through to the second round, but with a 71% disapproval rating (a large
part of which could be called an abhorrence rating), there is no way
that she could beat the other candidate who makes it into the runoff.
Unless..... No, there just isn't an "unless". A
majority of
French voters would vote for anyone, even for Mickey Mouse, if he were
the sole alternative to a candidate from the Front National.
UK Brexiteers who dream of the French electing a candidate who will
implement a Frexit are just not in touch with the reality of the French
political system, nor of the mindset of French voters.
Marine Le
Pen is not Donald Trump, nor is she Brexit. Trump managed to win
because he was the candidate of the conservative Republican Party...
not an outsider; and in the UK people voted for Brexit because it was
championed by big shots from the Conservative party, not just by UKIP.
Marine le Pen is a different case altogether : she does not have the
support of any mainstream political party in France, except her own
party the Front National.
For a while, it seemed likely
that the next French president would be François Fillon, who
besides being an Anglophile, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, and
having a British wife, is also a neo-Gaullist who has pledged to make
the French economy competitive again, taking the drastic measures
required to do so. This will include cutting bureaucracy, cutting taxes
and regulations on business, and making France "a good place to do
business". But in January Fillon became bogged down in a
financial scandal.
The other potential winner, Emmanuel Macron, is also an
economic
reformer who made a start pushing through some important economic
reforms as President Hollande's finance minister.
With the UK pledged to leave the EU, the
opportunities
for attracting business from London to Paris will be enormous. At
present, in 2017, with the Socialist regime in France and the UK still
in the EU, few international companies would consider moving their EU
operations from London to Paris – as has been much remarked
in
the pro-Brexit UK media (though HSBC has already said it will do so).
But in the course of 2017, the relative
advantages and disadvantages of Britain and France for international
companies are liable to be considerably changed, if not turned upside
down.
Come summer
2017 Marine le Pen will not be dragging France towards an
inward-looking Frexit; quite the reverse – France
will
probably be embarking on a deregulating "liberal" revolution... just
when impending Brexit is making many international firms reconsider the
extent of their operations in non-EU Britain. No wonder many
in
France are saying that Brexit will be a golden opportunity.... for
France ; all other things being equal, there are many world
business leaders who would love to live and work in
Paris rather than London.
The
electoral
system:
As for most elections in France, presidential
elections are conducted in
two stages.
The
first round, which takes place on 23rd April, is open to
any candidate who meets the
requirements (which include the written support of five hundred
elected representatives, including mayors and
deputies) and has enough funding.
Assuming, as is virtually certain to happen, that
no single candidate acquires an
absolute majority of votes on the first round, there is then a
second
round, a fortnight later, which is a runoff
between the two
candidates with the most votes in the first round. The next President
of France will be whoever gets a simple majority of the votes in the
second round.
The
current president, François Hollande, a socialist,
was elected in 2012 . A
president can serve no more than two five-year terms in office.
Background
to the 2017 election
The 2017 Presidential election in France is likely to be the most
significant for many years.
For the last two decades, candidates for the French presidency have
been promising to make changes and get the French economy back and
working properly again; but for the last two decades, the promises made
at elections have not led to much fundamental change.
President
Sarkozy
(a conservative) promised sweeping reforms
when he became President in 2007, but little came of them, apart from a
reform of the retirement age in France which was pushed through against
a background of strident complaints from the political opposition and
from the Unions. And even that reform was watered down.
Sarkozy's unpopularity led to the victory of his Socialist
opponent François
Hollande
in 2012. Hollande promised to cut
France's endemically high unemployment rate, and get the economy
growing again. But if he has just got the economy back into positive
territory, he has failed dismally on the unemployment front, and the
number of jobless in France today is far higher than it was when he
took office.
Hollande is now the most unpopular French president since
the Second World War, with approval ratings hovering below the 20%
mark. His Socialist party is now bitterly divided between the moderate
reformers and the hard-line left; and by trying to please both wings of
his party, Hollande has managed to displease almost everyone.
In
January 2017, realising that he had no chance of being reelected,
Hollande became the first president of the Firth
Republic to
not run for a second term.
It was possibly a premature move... He could not
have
predicted the scandal that would, in late January, engulf the then
front-runner, the conservative candidate François Fillon.
The 2017 election - uncharted
territory
The 2017 election will take place in a world that is very
different from just a year ago. Right-wing populism has triumphed in
the UK with
Brexit,
and in the USA with Donald Trump, and in France the right-wing
populists of the National Front, led by
Marine
Le Pen, are dreaming of
power.
The trouble for them is that France is not the UK nor the
USA, and with its two rounds of voting, the French
electoral system has safeguards built into it to prevent populists and
demagogues from sweeping to power. Six months before a
momentous Presidential election, no-one in France would wager
much money on who the next president will be; on the other hand, it is
a pretty safe bet that it will not be Marine le Pen, even if she does
make it into the runoff, as her father did in 2002.
The reason? Marine le Pen's personal
popularity rating stands (January 2017) at just 23% – and
her
unpopularity
rate at 71% (Ipsos / Le Point monthly poll). Even
if she reaches the second round of the
Presidential election, which she may well do, she cannot win, because
a large majority of those 71% of French electors are so viscerally
opposed to her and her party that they will vote for anyone but le Pen
– just as happened in 2002.
For the time being - late Jan 2017 - pundits expect
Marine le Pen to make it into the second round of the election; but
even that is not certain, and who her opponent will be remains
uncertain. A possible scenario is that her opponent in the
second round, if she gets there, will be the winner of the Centre-right
alliance primary election, François Fillon, who was
Sarkozy's Prime Minister. Nicolas
Sarkozy only
take third place in the first round of the primary, and so has been
eliminated.
On the left, Hollande's decision not to stand for a second
term left the door open for his Prime Minister, Manuel Valls,
to
throw
his hat into the ring; but that assumed that Valls would be victorious
in the Socialist primary. In the end, he failed, and voters instead
chose Beno�t Hamon, the furthest to the left of the seven
candidates who took part in the primary. This is bad news for the
Socialist party, as Hamon will be up
against at least three other candidates on the left, Jean-Luc
Mélenchon of the Parti de Gauche, Hollande's
former economy minister Emmanuel
Macron,
and a Green party candidate. However of the four, only Macron appeals
to the centre ground, so Hamon's win in the Socialist primary
has boosted Macron's chances of making it into the second
round of the presidential election
Macron has long been seen as the joker in the pack. A former
Rothschilds
banker, he was Hollande's economic advisor and then Minister of the
economy, but he is not a party member. He is standing as a candidate
for change, another anti-system candidate; and he has
supporters across the political spectrum. It is by no means clear if
his candidacy will mainly just fragment the left-wing vote, or whether
he could actually, as another anti-system candidate, also
drain votes away from Marine le Pen.
Apart from Marine Le Pen, either Fillon or Macron
is now seen as the most
likely person to
make it through to the second round; but Fillon will find it hard
to recover
from the accusation of financial irregularities that are dogging his
campaign. And can he keep ahead
of Macron? If Macron can take votes not just from his
supporters
on
the left but also from the centre ground, he could well push Fillon
into third place; but if Macron and Hamon can also take
votes from
Marine le Pen, we may see
a Fillon - Macron runoff in the second round.... a new and
unconventional variation on the classic right - left duel.
With so many candidates running in the first
round, none is likely to take more than about 26% of the vote.... and
the second-past-the-post could make it through to the second round with
as little as 20% of the vote. Unless a clear second-runner
emerges from the pack between February and the end of April, and
assuming that Marine Le Pen does not lose her supporters (which is
unlikely), it will remain very difficult to predict who her opponent in
the second round will be.
We will probably have a much clearer view by mid
March, as the polls in France tend to be a lot more effective in
predicting results than those in the UK or the USA.
The Presidential elections take place on
April 23rd and May 7th 2017.
As of January 2017, the bookies' favourite to
become
the next President of France remains François Fillon.
Who is François Fillon
?
The post below was
written before François Fillon's election hopes were
severely
dented by revelations in the French media of financial irregularities.
Fillon's wife Penelope has been the subject of intense media scrutiny
over allegations that she was in the past paid large sums of money as
Fillon's assistant, while doing nothing to justify any such
payments.
In the latest allegations, it is also claimed
that she was paid 46,000 € as a severance payment, when she
stopped working for her husband at the National Assembly. And not only
was she paid this sum after doing a job that she always claimed she
never did; she was actually paid it twice.
How much of all
this is fake news? Time will tell. Fillon has denied all
accusations of impropriety; but the damage is already done,
and
his popularity has plummeted in public opinion ratings.
Are
Fillon's accusers, like those of Hillary Clinton, being unwittingly
manipulated by internal or external forces wanting to help a different
candidate win the presidential election? Speculation is rife.
Fillon
was Prime Minister of France from 2007 to 2012, during the presidency
of Nicolas Sarkozy. He previously served as a minister in the
governments of Edouard Balladur, Alain Jupp� and
Jean-Pierre Raffarin. In this respect, he can hardly be seen as "new
blood". However he has a reputation as a reformer. In 2003 he
made a first serious attempt to reform France's much-criticized
retirement laws, by bringing public sector retirement rules in line
with those governing the private sector.
In 2004-2005, as
education minister, he pushed through, in the face of considerable
hostility, a reform of the French Baccalaureat.
As Prime
Minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, he was somewhat in the shadows of the
man people described as the "hyper-president". Sarkozy was the
conductor and the first violin of the orchestra of government; the role
of Prime Minister became that of second fiddle. In 2010 he resigned as
Prime Minister, but was promptly reappointed by Sarkozy who wanted to
bring Alain Jupp� back into the government. Jupp�
would
not serve under those competing for Fillon's post, so to bring on board
Jupp� and his many supporters, Sarkozy had to reappoint
Fillon.
In 2011, with France struggling to reduce its
deficits, Fillon announced an exceptional tax on high incomes and more
duty on alcohol cigarettes and sugary drinks.
After
Sarkozy lost the 2012 election, Fillon was favourite to become chairman
of the conservative UMP party; but in an election marked by acrimony
and accusation of fraud he lost. The narrow victory of
Jean-François Cop� was upheld, and the UMP became
a
machine designed ultimately to get Sarkozy reelected as president in
2017 – a mission in which it has failed.
Cop�'s
apparent involvement in shady party financing deals with a dubious
company known as Bygmalion left many UMP members bitter. To try and
forget the past, Sarkozy engineered a rebranding of the party under a
new name, Les R�publicains, and Fillon was largely a
bystander.
However he remained popular with grass-roots party members, and
maintained a high popularity rating among French voters in general.
When in 2013 he announced that he would stand in the 2016 primary of
the Centre-right alliance (Les R�publicains and their
allies),
few people thought he would stand a chance, given the power of the
Sarkozy fighting machine ; but with Sarkozy still linked to accusations
of shady party funding in 2012, and seen to be moving increasingly to
the right, Fillon began to look like a stronger contender. There was
just the problem of Jupp�.
71-year old
Jupp� remains popular too, and until a week before the first
round of the centre-right primary, he seemed the clear front-runner in
the race to secure a place in second round, for a runoff against
Sarkozy. Then Fillon gave a very strong performance in the second
candidates' debate on prime-time national TV, and he was in the race
with a chance. Nobody however predicted that he would romp home in the
first round of the primary with a
lead of 16% over his closest rival Jupp�.
So why did he win ? And what does he offer?
He won largely because he has a reputation as a reformer and as an
honest politician (the two words are not always incompatible). The
Centre-right primary was open to all voters, not just party members, so
Fillon picked up a large proportion of the votes from ordinary moderate
voters determined to ensure that the candidate of the Centre-right in
the 2017 Presidential election was not Nicolas Sarkozy.
As a
candidate
for the Presidency,
he is promising major liberalising reforms to the French economy and
tax system, more reform of pension rules, and the suppression of half a
million public sector jobs. And on past showing, he has the
determination to push them through.
In France, one of the criticisms that has been much leveled
at
him in recent months is that he is an admirer of the legacy of Margaret
Thatcher. Now while in the UK there has been, with hindsight, a general
consensus to the effect that the reforms of the Thatcher period were
fundamentally instrumental in getting the British economy back on the
rails, this is not the case in France. In France to this day "le
thatcherisme" is still caricatured or condemned by a large part of the
political class and the media as being a dictatorial doctrine rather
similar to American neo-conservatism, and thus highly undesirable;
Fillon has not jumped on this bandwaggon.
In many ways he is politically on
the same wavelength as David Cameron; and unlike some recent French
PMs, he is an anglophile. Indeed, if Fillon becomes the next French
president, France will get its first "British" French first lady.
Fillon's wife, Penelope was born in Llanover, Monmouthshire,
of
Welsh English parents.
After
the presidential elections.
The new President will be sworn in and will announce his
team. Then, on 11th and 18th June, come the two rounds of the
legislative elections (parliamentary elections) to choose the Deputies
who will sit in the National Assembly.
If, as seems probable, the new President is the
candidate of the conservative and centrist alliance,
François Fillon, voters are then
likely to vote in a centre-right parliament, and the new President will
be able to govern with little effective opposition. His government will
then introduce fairly rapidly some of the radical reforms that France
desperately needs : economic reforms, labour law reforms,
fiscal reforms, etc.
If, on the other hand, the candidate of the
conservative and centrist alliance were to be eliminated in the first
round of the presidential election, then the future is much harder to
predict. About the only prediction that can be made is that in this
situation, the new President is likely to be a lame duck from day 1.
Neither the Socialist party nor the National Front are currently in a
position to
win a parliamentary election, even if their man or woman were to win
the Presidential race. There just remains the joker in the
pack, Emmanuel Macron. As a "non political" candidate, he might be able
to work with a moderate parliamentary majority from either side of the
house. But we are getting now very much into the realms of
politics fiction.
Archives:
The 2007
French presidential election.
The 2012 Fench
presidential election
Copyright
notice: Text
& images � About-France.com 2003 - 2019
except where otherwise stated
To
contact About-France.com,
use the contact form