PARIS — The future of democracy in Europe is being decided simultaneously on the battlefields of Ukraine and in the ballot boxes of France.
From afar, France’s presidential elections this month might look like merely a repeat of our last elections in 2017, with the centrist leader Emmanuel Macron once again facing Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally party. But there are major differences that are revealing about France and about Western pluralism, having to do with the return of war in Europe; the uncertainty created by the two candidates running so closely in Sunday’s first-round election; and the widespread disaffection for both candidates.
Indeed, the April 24 runoff election may be France’s most consequential turning point in the past 40 years. It could usher in an entirely new political and social era, in which illiberal democracy, personified in Ms. Le Pen, could gain the upper hand in one of the founding members of the European Union. And regardless of the winner, the country faces a deep paralysis because it’s unclear whether either candidate will gain a majority in legislative elections later this spring. That means neither Ms. Le Pen’s nativist hopes will be met nor will Mr. Macron’s efforts to further liberalize the French economy materialize, a result that could further alienate citizens from politics.
Where the 2017 election was about the hope of reforming France and remaining a liberal democracy, 2022 is a tight contest between two emotions: anger against Mr. Macron, who is perceived as a technocrat out of touch with the people, and fear of Ms. Le Pen, who is still seen by many as a dangerous far-right candidate. In both cases most voters will vote against, rather than for, a candidate. The question of the day remains: Do you hate Mr. Macron more than you fear Ms. Le Pen, or vice versa?
What is yet to be seen is whether Ms. Le Pen will fully capitalize on voters’ anger toward Mr. Macron for his perceived aloofness and closeness to the richest segment of French society, as well as for the contours of his policy. His emphasis on pushing back the retirement age from 62 to 65, even if he has started to retreat on that promise, speaking of 64 as a reasonable compromise, has rankled voters.
In her effort to pick up centrist votes, Ms. Le Pen appeared at times almost moderate, particularly compared with her more radical rival Éric Zemmour. In the run-up to Sunday’s first-round election, Ms. Le Pen benefited from Mr. Zemmour’s penchant for furiously railing about defending French identity and the need to create a ministry charged with expelling foreigners. Meanwhile, she was appearing on social media, speaking of her love for her cats.
That worked for Ms. Le Pen in round one. But to gain enough votes to become president of France, she will most likely have to rally the extreme edges of her party, in part by returning to espousing hard-line views. It may not be that difficult. Behind her reassuring rhetoric, her more extreme policies remain intact. She has promised to ban the hijab in all public places, a nod toward her longstanding public antipathy to Islam; she has long spoken of curbing immigration and has said she will prioritize the native-born French for welfare benefits over immigrants.
To be sure, by appealing to the extreme right, Ms. Le Pen also runs the risk of failing to win over middle-of-the-road French voters who are more likely to vote for Mr. Macron or abstain rather than vote for her.
The dilemma of Mr. Macron is just the reverse. He needs the support of the far left, which now largely means supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon — who came in a very close third in round one — to win. It will be difficult for Mr. Macron to do so without diluting his economic program, which might lose him significant votes on the right.
Complicating matters further, the coming runoff election may prove to be the closest since the victory of our longest-serving president, the socialist François Mitterrand, over the conservative Valery Giscard d’Estaing in 1981. It would be tempting to see the elections of 2022 as a distorted mirror of that fateful year. But 1981 was the triumph of hope bringing the socialists to power, which was, until then, an unheard-of possibility. Should Ms. Le Pen succeed, it would be a victory of anger.
Such an outcome is not impossible. The voices of the extreme-right and extreme-left candidates together now add up to more than 50 percent of the vote. Those strengthening extremes signal that one in two French people no longer believes in classical liberal democracy as this country once knew it or in the future of the European project in which France has played an integral part.
After all, Ms. Le Pen has long expressed her disdain for the European Union, once suggested leaving the common currency and still hopes France might all but abandon NATO.
Then there’s the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. Initially the prospect of war worked in favor of the incumbent president. Mr. Macron’s early efforts at diplomacy and meeting with Vladimir Putin gave him an early advantage with voters. Then he found himself facing the economic consequences of the conflict, including the steep rise in the cost of living across France, the very subject chosen by Ms. Le Pen as her core campaign topic.
Yet it is unclear whether the reality of the war so close to France will discredit Ms. Le Pen (who, despite having denounced the invasion, had close ties with Russia in the past and whose party received loans from a Russian bank). In the end, as they say, all politics is local. The French will not be voting for Ukraine, and a majority of them may not care that much about the future of Europe, either.
For Mr. Macron, however, his fortunes are bound up with Europe’s, and his challenge is energizing the electorate to care enough about both him and the continent. In the coming days, he is likely to try to convince more French voters that a victory for Ms. Le Pen is a victory for Mr. Putin and that Ukraine and democracy will only suffer if she takes up residence in the Élysée Palace. Whether he can do so will be a test of France’s deep polarization. The haves — those with more wealth and education — skew disproportionately toward Mr. Macron, while the have-nots lean toward Ms. Le Pen. But even this doesn’t give the full picture: Beyond anger, we are also seeing a profound disillusionment with politics. More than 26 percent of voters abstained in the first round of elections, the lowest turnout for a presidential election since 2002.
In 2017, after the triumph of Brexit in Britain and the election of Donald Trump in America, the election of Mr. Macron appeared as an oasis of hope in a desert of Anglo-Saxon despair. Now, in 2022, the West is right to remain concerned about the political future of France.
With two weeks left to go, the election of a far-right leader in France remains possible but not probable. But let us be clear. What is at stake on April 24 is nothing less than the future of democracy in France and in Europe.
Dominique Moïsi is a senior adviser at the Institut Montaigne, a Paris-based think tank.
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