Macron seeks to fire up voters, coax leftists onside amid far-right challenge

Some 30,000 supporters, many bussed in from all over France, braved the cold and icy roads to cheer on the incumbent centrist at Paris La Défense Arena, in the shadow of the capital’s glassy business towers, flanked, improbably, by a cemetery. Europe’s largest covered venue, the arena was built for rugby and concerts. But Macron fans – who were promised a show worthy of an American Super Bowl halftime – were more than happy to mix sport metaphors as they anxiously awaited their champ.

Paraphrasing a classic France football chant, fresh-faced Young People with Macron acolytes, spread across three stadium sections in red, white and blue campaign t-shirts, shouted: “And one, and two, and five more years!” A brass band belted out stadium classics. Banners boasted “Team Manu” or “Droit au but” (Straight to the goal), the motto of Macron’s beloved Olympique Marseille football club. A warm-up man led hands-in-the-air Iceland-style football claps and enlisted Prime Minister Jean Castex to start a Mexican wave.

With a beer in one hand and twinned Macron and France flags in the other, 23-year-old Baptiste Cornuau wouldn’t have missed it. His bus to Paris left Bordeaux at 5am on Saturday morning. “There are very, very few rallies, very, very little chance to see our candidate, and today we’re all here,” said the wine dealer, sporting an “Emmanuel Macron With You” t-shirt. “We’re the only [campaign] to have risked hiring a big hall,” he said, after rivals opted for outdoor venues. “We’re doing it. We can be counted. We know how many of us are here tonight.”

Seventeen-year-old Cédric Lallouet and his friend Basile made the trip from Deauville, on the Normandy coast, to rally for their favourite candidate. “There will probably only be one, so we’re here for support,” said Lallouet. “He’s still president, so he does have other tasks. I think doing a rally as gigantic as this one is already wonderful.” The pair won’t be old enough to vote in either round of this election on April 10 or 24, but they figure showing up is good enough – as long as everyone else in the arena casts a Macron ballot on their behalf.

Civil servant Anne Trippette, 59, travelled from Toulouse for the event. “I’ve followed him for five years, but this is the first time I’ve come to see him in person. This is the place to be, that’s for sure,” she said. Her candidate needs five more years to wrap up his reforms, she said. But she’s anxious about voter turnout. “It’s like a football match. As long as the final whistle hasn’t blown, there is everything left to play for,” she said. “Abstention and the extremes rising will hurt us. The polls are in our favour, but you can’t rely on that. People have to vote and vote Macron.”

All the fanfare was only prelude to Macron’s arrival in a spray of pyrotechnics, the blue-suited president clutching every extended hand as he made his way to a boxing-ring-style stage set up under six jumbo screens. “Do you hear the passion?!” Macron bellowed as he took the mic. Then the candidate launched into an address that lasted a full 130 minutes, nearly without pause. It did not go straight to the goal. But having settled for a single rally appearance and now suddenly on the defensive, the candidate has a lot to accomplish and little time left.

Night and day, five years on

Macron’s 2017 campaign was the stuff of legend: a 39-year-old independent centrist, never before elected to any public office, founding his own party, poaching talent literally left, right and centre, and then beating all the odds to become France’s youngest-ever president. A meteoric rise full of swagger and le goût du risque. Flash forward five years on and the incumbent’s re-election bid is a study in contrasts.

Running to win a new term, Macron, distracted by his diplomatic efforts to end a war in Ukraine, has run a strikingly minimal campaign, vanishingly short on risk: A late start, few unscripted moments, a firm refusal to debate any of his 11 first-round rivals face-to-face, and cabinet ministers enlisted as stand-ins on rally stages. Macron did hold a marathon four-hour press conference to lay out his platform for the media. But predictably, only tiny snippets stuck – the ones his rivals left and right could paint as brutish during their own prolific campaign appearances: raising the retirement age to 65 and conditioning welfare payments on up to 20 hours of work.

And yet for months – with rivals divided left and right and a Ukraine-inflected rally-round-the-flag bounce giving him a comfortable cushion in the polls – Macron looked set to coast to the finish regardless. Until a poll by the Elabe firm last week focused minds sharpish. It showed Marine Le Pen at 47.5 percent for the April 24 run-off, a margin-of-error away from winning the Élysée Palace for the far right.

Polls, of course, are at best only snapshots in time, not predictions. But drastic recent shifts are bound to give the incumbent pause for thought. Over two short weeks, Macron’s lead over Le Pen in the first round next Sunday has narrowed from 15 points to just five – 26 percent for Macron versus 21 for Le Pen – according to Ipsos, another pollster. The Ifop firm, for its part, similarly had Macron at 27 to Le Pen at 22 on Sunday. Every pollster has the pair remaining comfortable frontrunners to advance to the second round. But Macron’s lead has faded even more starkly for that critical run-off. He was 24 points up on Le Pen just two weeks ago (62 percent to 38) on Ipsos’s rolling daily survey. The gap on Saturday had narrowed to six.

>> Closing in on Macron: Could Le Pen’s blandest campaign be her most successful yet?

In elections past, France could count on voters across the political mainstream to join together and vote out any far-right presidential finalist en masse, a phenomenon dubbed the Republican front. But 2022 is different. A newcomer on the far right, hardline pundit-turned-politician Éric Zemmour has made Le Pen more palatable by comparison. Le Pen herself has learned from her decisive 2017 defeat to Macron and led a campaign in tune with French voters’ top worry, purchasing power. Meanwhile Macron, who ran as a centrist in 2017 only to govern to the right of centre, suddenly finds himself needing leftist support to beat Le Pen in a run-off. But many left-leaning voters, exasperated by a leader they nicknamed “the president of the rich”, are tempted to abstain this time, sitting out the run-off in the name of “fool me once, shame on you….”

Macron’s odes to socialists, communists

And so Macron had his work cut out on Saturday, mounting his defence at La Défense. He had to convince left-leaning voters he remains a sound choice, while reminding his own supporters and voters writ large that Le Pen’s far right remains a real and present danger.

Ticking through his record and platform for a full hour in granular detail, Macron time and again underlined his commitment to social justice. He emphasised reforms that played well on the left, like smaller classroom sizes in underprivileged neighbourhoods and single women and lesbian couples gaining access to medically assisted pregnancy. He made pointed allusions to Socialist former president François Mitterrand, vaunting “the tranquil force of fraternity” and a “France united”, transparent references to the leftist hero’s winning 1981 and 1988 campaign slogans, respectively. And curiously, Macron ventured even further left when, lamenting abuse revelations in privately run senior care homes, the onetime investment banker quoted a classic slogan of the Trotskyite New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA): “Our lives, their lives, are worth more than any profits.”

And yet, covering his bases with an array of his cabinet ministers poached from the conservative Les Républicains looking on, Macron reminded the rapt crowd that his brand of social welfare takes root in trickle-down economics. “There is no magic money,” he said. “Not more than there was five years ago,” he added, touting his plan to put France to work, pledging he won’t raise taxes or add to France’s debt burden. “There is no welfare state if there isn’t a strong productive state that creates wealth so it can be redistributed,” he said.

>> Five years of Macron: France’s economy trickles down in drips and drops (Part 2 of 4)

Over more than two hours on stage, Macron never cited Le Pen or Zemmour by name. But in the closing minutes of his speech he railed against “abject politics” and warned against complacency over extremes that have become “commonplace”.

“Don’t believe the pollsters or the pundits who tell you that it’s impossible, unthinkable, that the election is over, that all will be fine,” he warned. “Look at us! Look at yourselves! Five years ago, they said it was impossible [we would win],” he recalled. “Look at Brexit and so many elections, all that seemed improbable and yet came to pass. Nothing is impossible.”

“The extremist danger today is all the greater in that, for months, for years, alternative truths have been trivialised,” he said, lambasting those who spout “filthy lies and nauseating theories”, “the worst conspiracy theories on the Covid-19 vaccine”, and the media who air them time and again, unquestioningly.

In a thinly veiled reference to Le Pen, whose party has once sought campaign financing in Russia and more recently reportedly in Hungary, he slammed “candidates that call themselves patriots while financing their platforms and parties abroad”. He alluded to far-right parties’ Nazi heritage and warned voters tempted by their purchasing power promises that they would send low-income earners to the poorhouse and bankrupt their pensions.

“The fight is now!” Macron roared at the pulpit. “It’s the battle between progress and retreat, of patriotism and Europe against the nationalists. The choices in April are simple. Do you want a France of equality, of ecology, of progress? Then help us! Join us!” he cried out, calling on “all those from social democrats to Gaullist [conservatives], and the ecologists who have yet to join us, to do so”.

‘He’s got mojo’

Will that sundry assortment of voters hear Macron’s message in the home stretch of this election? Ironically, Macron waited so long to deliver his first campaign rally speech that, through the quirk of French election regulations that decree all 12 candidates get perfectly equal airtime down the stretch, most broadcasters only aired short excerpts of the president’s two-hour appeal.

But inside the arena on Saturday, before heading back out into the unseasonable cold, Macron enthusiasts were elated. “It was extraordinary. A real speech about progress,” said retired bank employee Alain Andrien, 73, from La Meuse, in eastern France. “I wasn’t a Macronist from the start. But I am now, all the way,” added Andrien, who “comes from the left” and volunteers pasting posters for Macron’s re-election campaign. “He spoke about united France. That’s not unfamiliar for people who voted for Mitterrand,” he smiled.

“He mobilised the troops and that’s important,” said Patricia Rodriguez, 68, a retired teacher from the greater Paris area. Rodriguez, who’d always voted centrist, explained she only got involved with politics five years ago, for Macron. “He’s got mojo,” she said after the first and last rally of her candidate’s campaign. “We hope he wins because he’s the only one who can save France. Because who knows where we’re headed, with the Russians. We don’t know how it will degenerate,” she said. “And there are still reforms to do. We need five more years to see them through.”

But Rodriguez, too, frets about turnout. “Some people no longer believe in anything. Others will swing into action so Macron goes away. So it’s true that Macron’s election isn’t at all for sure.”

Irony of ironies, if Macron manages to convince France he could lose in April, he’ll be halfway to the goal of another term.