© REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes

France’s election has laid bare a deep divide along geographical and social lines on how voters see the future of their country. The run-off between an urban pro-Europe electorate backing Emmanuel Macron and an anti-EU working class supporting Marine Le Pen represents a clash of France’s two faces.

The map has been split into two, with overwhelming support for Le Pen in the northern and eastern regions of France that have been hard hit by unemployment and de-industrialization. She also swayed voters among the disenfranchised working class on the southern Mediterranean coast and poorer Paris suburbs.

Macron, meanwhile, secured big cities such as Paris, Lyon, and Bordeaux, as well as the west of the country, winning nearly 24 percent of the vote. Le Pen came in just behind Macron with 21.5 percent, a record high for her Front National party.

Despite Le Pen’s significant gains, this might well be the end of the road for her. Not only is her centrist rival Macron already the front-runner, he is also seen as the ideal candidate to unify the right and the left in a Republican Front – an unwritten agreement between France’s mainstream parties to band together and prevent the far-right FN from winning.

As in past elections, analysts expect French voters to strategically gang up against the far-right contender in support of her rival candidate Macron. Political leaders of all mainstream parties have already called to form a firewall against Le Pen in the May 7 run-off.

Has Le Pen Hit a Ceiling?

The large swathe of voters who did not support her in the first round are unlikely to swing behind her now. Le Pen might just have hit a ceiling. That is likely why she announced she was temporarily stepping down as head of the Front National, in a bid to win over a broader base.

She has built her platform on an anti-Europe agenda, calling for a “Frexit” – an exit from the eurozone and the European Union – a message that far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon has also championed. He scored a surprising 19.6 percent of the vote, nearly doubling his 2012 result. Mélenchon, 65, is a former Trotskyite; he ran a campaign denouncing banks, globalization, and the EU – just like Le Pen.

That means the populist vote on both ends of the spectrum adds up to an astonishing 40 percent. Mélenchon and his party “La France Insoumise” (“Rebellious France”) refused to endorse Macron after the first round. He did, however, launch an online appeal to his supporters, calling on them to choose between abstention, a blank vote, or a vote for Macron – with a specification saying: “voting for the extreme right candidate is not an option.” It is indeed unlikely for Le Pen to gain much traction with far-left voters.

Yet analysts warn that turnout will be key to the outcome. If it is expected that supporters loyal to Le Pen will vote en masse, it is not necessarily the case for those who are not convinced by Macron. Should a large number abstain in the final round, Le Pen would benefit.

Despite a marked surge of anti-Europe sentiment, the majority of French voters still fear the Front National; some 58 percent see in it a danger for democracy.  Many believe Le Pen’s nationalist ideas and her anti-immigration stance as based on xenophobia and fanaticism.

Since Le Pen took the reins of the party from her father, Jean-Marie, in 2011, she has worked hard to sanitize its image and rid it of deep-rooted anti-Semitism and revisionist claims.

But her efforts were tarnished by her recent claim that France was not responsible when French police rounded up around 13,000 Jews from occupied Paris in July of 1942 and led them to an indoor stadium, the Vel d’Hiv, before deportation to the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz. Few survived.

Macron for Europe?

A Macron victory, meanwhile, would make him the country’s youngest president ever at 39 and shatter the political mold of the Fifth Republic, which has been ruled by presidents who hail from either the conservative or socialist parties.

Macron is a polished former investment banker who turned to politics under François Hollande’s presidency in 2012. He stepped down from his post as economy minister and formed a new political movement “En Marche!” (“On the Move”) last year to shake up the country’s traditional right-left divide.

His critics argue Macron is still an obvious product of the establishment, but he has won over voters with vows to rebuild the “failed” and “vacuous” French political system “that has been incapable of responding to our country’s problems for 30 years.”

His platform combines socially left policies with a liberal economy. If elected, he has vowed to invest in job training, extend unemployment benefits to all, reduce the number of students per classroom in working-class neighborhoods, and boost teacher’s salaries. He also would cut business taxes, relax labor laws, and shrink the public sector.

Macron is an ardent supporter of the EU and has indicated he wants to forge a new Franco-German partnership to lead the 27 countries of the EU. He has called for efforts to reinvigorate the eurozone and give a new impulse for the single market, which he said should be vigorously defended in Brexit talks with the United Kingdom.

His goal is to reinforce border control cooperation, establish a European defense fund to finance common military equipment, and to set up a shared intelligence information system. He also said he would expand Erasmus programs, supporting Europe student exchanges, to help the new generations build a European identity.

But if Macron is expected to benefit from the consensus vote against Le Pen on May 7, his presidency will face a huge test in June’s legislative elections. With his movement still in its infancy, he is unlikely to secure a majority in parliament and might be left to juggle with the very constellation he defeated: the traditional left-right bloc that has held sway in the National Assembly for 60 years.

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© REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

In the days and weeks after Donald Trump’s surprise election to America’s top job, France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen could hardly contain her glee. Trump’s victory was proof that she was in the right, she claimed, as his lines echoed those of her Front National party. Like the new US president, the FN has built its success on an anti-immigration, anti-elite platform that champions national sovereignty and law and order. She hailed Trump’s win as the start of a new international order.

“We are living through the end of one world, and the birth of another,” Le Pen told crowds at a meeting of Europe’s far-right leaders in Germany this January, which included Frauke Petry of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the Netherlands’ right-wing Geert Wilders. “I am sure that 2017 will be the year that the continent rises up,” Le Pen added. (Germany and the Netherlands are all headed to the polls this year.)

If elected, Le Pen, who applauded Britain’s vote for Brexit, has vowed to take the country out of the euro, to seek revised terms for France’s EU membership, and put exit up for referendum. For her, EU membership has stripped France of its autonomy on immigration, monetary, and fiscal policy.

“I will give back to you, the French people, your currency because there is no free country that does not control its currency, your borders, because no free country does not control its borders,” she said during a TV interview in late February.

And with his first moves in the White House, Trump has amplified Le Pen’s anti-immigration, anti-Islam plea. His measures “are compatible with Le Pen’s,” says political commentator Christophe Barbier. “She is able to say, ‘You can see the same thing even in America’s democracy! Trump is building a wall on the Mexican border, so if I reestablish border checks to stop migrants from entering, I am part of the norm.’”

But many French analysts don’t actually believe that Le Pen can really capitalize on Trump’s victory. She has not seen a surge in popularity since he took office – at best, her supporters have been comforted in their choice and have been allowed to shake off any sense of guilt.

“When they see Trump’s anti-Muslim comments, it clears their conscience,” says Barbier. “They think that to be against Islam might be unpopular among intellectuals here, but it is popular in the US.”

West Wing Calling?

Meanwhile, Le Pen’s relationship with Trump and his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has yet to be clarified. Bannon has openly thrown his support behind nationalist, anti-EU movements across the continent. And Trump himself cheered the Brexit vote, saying the United Kingdom has been doing “great” since its choice to leave the bloc. But that might be as far as the commonalities go.

A few days before Trump’s inauguration, Le Pen was seen sipping coffee at the bar in Trump Tower in New York. It is open to the public, and Le Pen claimed she was on a private visit. Critics said she could have put a picture of herself with the future US leader to good use. But after a three-hour wait, the then president-elect’s spokesman Sean Spicer told the press she would not meet with anyone from the Trump team.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, the FN’s chief economic strategist, Bernard Monot, admitted the main reason Le Pen had traveled to New York was to raise funds for her campaign, but that she had been unsuccessful so far.

“I don’t believe Trump thinks anything of Marine Le Pen,” says Barbier. “He doesn’t think anything of France. We are a bit of confetti; we don’t exist because he is a president who believes Europe has become an insignificant part of the world.”

Yet according to reporters from the The Daily Beast, Le Pen did meet Guido Lombardi, an influential Trump supporter (he is listed as a co-founder of the Citizens for Trump group on their website); he describes himself as a go-between for Europe’s far-right parties looking to establish links to the Trump administration. Reports also emerged after Trump’s election victory that Bannon called Marine Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal Le Pen – considered the fresh face of the far-right – a “rising star” and expressed interest in working with the Le Pen family. Those reports have yet to be confirmed.

Marine Le Pen did meet with two Republican lawmakers from the US, Dana Rohrabacher of California and Steve King of Iowa, who were in France to discuss “liberty and shared values,” as King tweeted.

But now in office, Trump has not proven himself a role model for French voters, says Barbier – in fact quite the opposite. “Trump is so odious, so vulgar, that he really gives the impression he is incompetent. There are no voters in France saying, ‘We need a Trump, give us a Trump!’”

The roots of populism in France also lie further back than Trump’s rise to the White House. The issues of immigration and globalization that drove some voters to the polls in the US have long been part of a heated debate in France.

“France is one of the countries most exposed to challenges of the world today. There is a feeling that we don’t really know where Europe is heading,” says Bruno Cautres, a researcher at the Center for Political Research at Sciences Po. “The level of social anxiety is very high; people are expressing their need to feel protected.”

An Uphill Battle

The FN has gained more votes with every new election, while successive governments have floundered in their attempts to set the French economy back on track and tackle security issues amid a spate of Islamist terror attacks. But lately, the the far-right party’s numbers have stagnated.
And even if Le Pen’s anti-immigration and anti-Islam discourse resembles Trump’s, they have little else in common. While Le Pen wants to halt the flow of immigrants into France, she does not advocate actually building a wall along France’s borders.

“I think Donald Trump and his intelligence services wanted to set up criteria and conditions to avoid having potential terrorists enter the United States where they might commit attacks, the same way France was the victim of attacks,” she told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview. She avoided answering the question of whether she would introduce a similar ban in France.

Also, in contrast to Trump’s fiscal politics, Le Pen backs a socially oriented program that favors public spending, rolls back the retirement age to sixty, maintains the 35-hour-workweek, and introduces a raise for low-paid workers.

“Marine Le Pen is not Donald Trump. She is not a billionaire, she is not ultra-liberal, she really does not have the same political software,” says Barbier. “There are some common points, she is as pro-Putin as Trump can be and as anti-immigrant as Trump can be, but they are not a copy of each other, and we shouldn’t see her as a little Trump-like Frenchwoman.”

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