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Your Monday Briefing: Macron Wins Re-election
Plus an announced visit by top U.S. officials to Kyiv, while New Zealand and Japan announce closer diplomatic ties.Good morning. We’re covering President Emmanuel Macron’s victory in France, an announced visit by top U.S. officials to Kyiv and a power re-calibration in the Pacific.French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron celebrate after his victory in France’s presidential election.Thomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMacron wins re-election in FrancePresident Emmanuel Macron of France has won a second term, defeating the far-right leader Marine Le Pen in a close competition and becoming the first French president to be re-elected in 20 years.Early projections showed Macron, a centrist, gaining 58.5 percent of the vote to Le Pen’s 41.5 percent. His victory was much narrower than in 2017, when the margin was 66.1 percent to 33.9 percent for Le Pen, but wider than appeared likely two weeks ago.The contest hinged on economic issues, and Macron, distracted by his fruitless Russia diplomacy, seldom showed real concern for the financial difficulties many French have faced during the pandemic and the war.But his promise of stability and his effective stewardship over the Covid-19 crisis appear to have prevailed over the strong temptation of an extremist lurch toward nationalism.Analysis: Le Pen, the leader of an anti-immigrant movement, tried to focus on economic policy in an effort to sanitize her image without softening her xenophobic program, and brought the extreme right closer to power than at any time since 1944.Russia: The election has profound effects on the war in Ukraine. Le Pen, who owes millions to a Russian bank, is a longtime Moscow ally and heads a party hostile to NATO. European officials immediately expressed their relief after Macron’s victory.Ukrainian soldiers paused for Orthodox Easter services on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine. David Guttenfelder for The New York TimesMariupol holds, commander saysUkrainian forces are still in full control of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol and have repelled continuous assaults by Russian infantry, a commander told The Times on Sunday.He said his forces were willing to leave the factory and evacuate the city if given guarantees of safe passage for themselves and hundreds of civilians. Satellite images appear to show a growing mass grave on the city’s outskirts, and the mayor said that “at least 15,000 elderly and those with chronic diseases may die.”Diplomatic winds blew strong in Kyiv, as President Volodymyr Zelensky prepared to meet with the U.S. secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and the defense secretary, Lloyd Austin. Details of their trip had not yet been released.Fighting continues to rage in the country’s east. Russia, which has taken more than three dozen small towns in the region, ignored calls for a cease-fire during the Orthodox Easter holiday. Its missiles struck the port city of Odesa — which has been largely spared attacks on its civilians — killing at least eight people. But Ukrainian soldiers are still fighting fiercely. Follow live updates here.Context: Weapons are flowing into Ukraine from the West, and the U.S. has pledged more military aid, including drones that explode on impact. Zelensky said Ukraine had begun to receive the sort of heavy weaponry it needed, and he promised victory. Other updates:Germany’s former chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, has become a pariah because of his work for Russian-controlled energy companies.Warsaw is bursting with refugees.Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in Tokyo on Thursday.Pool photo by Yuichi YamazakiPower shifts in the Pacific regionAs China moves to expand its influence in the Asia-Pacific region, New Zealand and Japan have announced a goal of “seamless” sharing of classified information.In the announcement, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan spoke of “growing strategic challenges” in the Pacific. Two days earlier, the Solomon Islands said it had reached a security agreement with China, which provoked unease among Western-aligned powers in the region.Ardern and Kishida also highlighted their opposition to “unilateral actions that seek to alter the status quo by force” in the East and South China seas, most likely a reference to Beijing’s efforts to construct artificial islands for military use and encroach on disputed territories.Analysis: Tokyo has long tried to join the “Five Eyes” intelligence partnership, through which the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand share intelligence. Members were concerned about the security of the Japanese intelligence community, but the country has overhauled its methods.Background: New Zealand has itself faced questions about its reliability as an intelligence partner because it is so economically dependent on China, by far the largest purchaser of its exports.THE LATEST NEWSAsia and The PacificRescuers shielded a stretcher on Sunday.Jiji Press/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAt least 10 people died after a Japanese tour boat sank off the coast of Hokkaido Island. Sixteen more are missing.An explosion at a Sufi mosque in northern Afghanistan killed at least 33 people on Friday, the latest in a series of bloody attacks reminiscent of the past two decades of war.South Korea’s departing president, Moon Jae-in, urged dialogue with the U.S. in a warm farewell letter to Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s dictator. Kim replied in an exchange the North described as “an expression of their deep trust.”Prime Minister Narendra Modi focused on economic growth, rather than restive politics, when he dedicated a solar plant in northern India on Sunday.World NewsA landmark new law from the European Union would force internet service companies to combat misinformation and restrict certain online ads. Similar efforts in the U.S. have stalled.On Friday, more skirmishes flared up at the Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem, a holy site known to Jews as the Temple Mount.A judicial inquiry in South Africa found that corruption at its tax agency was because of “collusion” between Bain & Company and the country’s former president, Jacob Zuma.The world is falling far short of the goal to vaccinate 70 percent of every country’s population by June.A Morning ReadHo Kew Lee, 85, seated, is part of the older generation trying to find new leaders to keep civic organizations afloat.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesIn New York City, Chinatown’s civic groups have long used their coveted real estate portfolio to hold back encroaching gentrification. But the pandemic introduced new costs, which could force the graying owners to sell and dramatically upend the neighborhood’s delicate balance.ARTS AND IDEASCentral Park, Manhattan.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesOlmstead’s visionDetroit’s Belle Island. Boston’s Emerald Necklace. Stanford University. Central Park. And, of course, the U.S. Capitol.These iconic public spaces, and others, came from the vision of the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, born 200 years ago on April 26. His creations are more essential to American life than ever, Audra D. S. Burch writes in The Times.Olmsted saw parks as an oasis, a haven for fresh air and safety. “The park should, as far as possible, complement the town,” he wrote. “Openness is the one thing you cannot get in buildings.” During the pandemic, Audra writes, “his parks helped sustain Americans’ mental and physical health and social connections.”Some of his parks also became the staging grounds for social justice protests. “Olmsted understood the promise of the park as a social force that would become an amenity in city life over the decades,” Audra writes. He saw parks as sites of healing, “literal common grounds forging communities, unstratified by race or class or faith.”“The young nation that Olmsted served might be unrecognizable to him today,” Audra continues, “except for the rituals preserved and encouraged by his own creations:Restoration and recreation.Wonder and discovery.Solitude and community.And sometimes, simply — sitting still.”I highly encourage you to take a trip through Olmstead’s creations, and view more of Ruth Fremson’s stunning photos, here.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookBobbi Lin for The New York TimesIce cream and a spring of tarragon round out these grape dumplings, a popular recipe among Indigenous nations of the American Southeast.What to WatchStream these five action movies, including an Indonesian fight flick interrogating toxic masculinity, a Punjabi family mob drama and a muscular South Korean gangland film.WellnessCan your diet help prevent dementia?Now Time to PlayPlay today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Head pests (four letters).Here are today’s Wordle and today’s Spelling Bee.You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — AmeliaP.S. Eduardo Medina, a Times fellow, will join the Express desk as a general assignment reporter.The latest episode of “The Daily” is on the French election.You can reach Amelia and the team at briefing@nytimes.com. More
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Marine Le Pen’s Message Finds a Strong Audience in the North
HARDECOURT-AUX-BOIS, France — Marine Le Pen spent the last two days of her campaign in the deindustrialized, economically struggling areas in the north of France that, along with a Mediterranean stretch in the south, form her strongholds.Exhorting her core supporters to vote on Sunday, Ms. Le Pen held events in the Somme department, home to towns and villages where her attacks against her rival, Emmanuel Macron, as an “arrogant” president full of “disdain” for ordinary people resonated powerfully.“To me, Emmanuel Macron is a president who has made the rich richer,” said Gaëtan François, 40, a construction tractor operator and a village councilor, outside the City Hall in Hardecourt-aux-Bois. “Marine Le Pen is the only one to defend the workers.”In Hardecourt-aux-Bois, a village of 85 people in the Somme, only three people voted for Mr. Macron in the first round earlier this month. Ms. Le Pen got 78 percent of the votes, her highest score nationwide.The village, like the rest of the region, has drifted rightward in the past decade.Maurice Clément, 82, a retired truck driver, said he had voted for Socialists most of his life. In 2017, he voted for Ms. Le Pen in the first round, but for Mr. Macron in the runoff because he was worried about the extreme right.This time, he had no such worries. Mr. Macron’s policies, he said, had plunged France in a “hole,” citing the record government debt accumulated during his presidency. He was angry about Mr. Macron’s proposal to raise the retirement age to 65 from 62 as part of his plans to overhaul the pension system. For those who had done hard manual labor all their lives, retiring at 65 was the equivalent of retiring in “crutches,” he said.Ms. Le Pen, he said, “is the only choice.”About 24 miles away, Ham, a town of about 5,000 people, has also shifted rightward in recent years. In the 2012 presidential election, people in Ham voted like the rest of the nation by choosing François Hollande, the Socialist Party candidate, over the center-right Nicolas Sarkozy.But in 2017, Ham picked Ms. Le Pen over Mr. Macron. Ms. Le Pen won 56 percent of the votes in Ham, compared with only 34 percent nationwide.On Sunday, Ms. Le Pen was expected to handily defeat Mr. Macron in Ham once again. In the first round of voting two weeks ago, she had 41 percent of the votes, with Mr. Macron getting only 24 percent.Beyond Ms. Le Pen’s focus on the working class, her longstanding tough talk on crime and immigration appealed to voters like Hubert Bekaert, 68, a retired optician.“I’m sick of using taxpayer money to house terrorists in prison,” he said, adding that he wanted the death penalty restored. “Marine Le Pen is the only one who’s tough on crime.” More
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The French presidential voting system is simple, but also complex.
Presidents in France are elected directly by the people for five-year terms, in a two-round system. This year, the first round was held on April 10, and the second round is being held on Sunday.A candidate who gets an absolute majority of votes in the first round is elected outright, an unlikely outcome that has never come to pass since the French started choosing presidents by direct popular vote in 1965.Instead, a runoff is usually held between the top two candidates. This year, it is a repeat of the most recent contest, in 2017, when Emmanuel Macron defeated Marine Le Pen.The two-round system is simple but has complex implications for voters. They have to choose between a dozen or more candidates in the first round, and then, if their preferred candidate doesn’t make the runoff, between two candidates they might not like.One way to try to avoid that predicament is through “useful” voting. Instead of going with their top choice in the first round, voters might opt to go with their second or third if they believe that candidate has a better chance of getting into the runoff.That mechanism helped fuel a surge by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a fiery politician who came in a strong third place two weeks ago, partly by attracting voters who thought he was the left-wing candidate best positioned to reach the runoff.One common saying is that people vote with their hearts in the first round and with their heads in the runoff; another is that in the first round, voters choose, while in the second, they eliminate.A prime example is the so-called Republican front, when voters cast differences aside to counter the far right. In 2017, many voters who disliked Mr. Macron and hadn’t voted for him in the first round picked him in the runoff, propelling him to a sweeping victory over Ms. Le Pen.But this year, nearly a third of the ballots went to the extreme right in the first round, and many left-wing voters felt betrayed by Mr. Macron’s rightward drift, so he may have a harder time repeating that feat.Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Macron have actively courted the 21.95 percent of voters who picked Mr. Mélenchon in the first round. But polls show that those voters are very split and uncertain about their runoff choice, making it hard to predict which candidate will benefit most. More
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Inside Le Pen Territory as France Votes in a Runoff Election
Whatever happens in the runoff election on Sunday, France has changed, and the winner may face a turbulent season.ST. RÉMY-SUR-AVRE, France — Eternal France, its villages gathered around church spires, its fields etched in a bright patchwork of green and rapeseed yellow, unfolds as if to offer reassurance in troubled times that some things do not change. But the presidential election on Sunday, an earthquake whatever its outcome, suggests otherwise.France has changed. It has eviscerated the center-left and center-right parties that were the chief vehicles of its postwar politics. It has split into three blocs: the hard left, an amorphous center gathered around President Emmanuel Macron, and the extreme right of Marine Le Pen.Above all, with Ms. Le Pen likely to get some 45 percent of the vote, it has buried a tenacious taboo. In a country that for four wartime years lived under the racist Nazi-puppet Vichy government, no xenophobic, nationalist leader would be allowed into the political mainstream, let alone be able to claim the highest office in the land.Unlikely to win, but well within the zone of a potential surprise, Ms. Le Pen has shattered all of that. She is no outlier. She is the new French normal. If Mr. Macron does edge to victory, as polls suggest, he will face a restive, fractured country, where hatred of him is not uncommon. The old nostrum that France is ungovernable may be tested again.In St. Rémy-sur-Avre, Ms. Le Pen took 37.2 percent of the vote in the first round of the election, pushing Mr. Macron into a distant second with 23.6 percent.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesSt. Rémy-sur-Avre, a small town of some 4,000 inhabitants about 60 miles west of Paris, is Le Pen territory. In the Maryland cafe, named for a cigarette brand that is no more, the prevailing view is that something has to give in a France that has lost its way under a president too privileged and remote to know anything of the burden of struggle.Customers buy lottery tickets, or bet on the harness racing on television, in the hope of unlikely relief from hardship. A kir, white wine with a little black current liqueur, is a popular morning drink. The streets are deserted; most stores have disappeared, crushed by the hypermarkets out on the highway. In this town, Ms. Le Pen took 37.2 percent of the vote in the first round of the election on April 10, pushing Mr. Macron into a distant second with 23.6 percent.Jean-Michel Gérard, 66, one of the kir drinkers, worked in the meat business from age 15, as a butcher, in slaughterhouses, or as a trucker hauling beef carcasses. But he had to stop at 60, when his knees gave out from regularly carrying several tons of meat a day on his back, the record being a single 465-pound rear of a bull.“Now we have a generation of slackers,” he said. “When I was young, if you did not work, you did not eat.”The old France of solidarity and fraternity had disappeared, he lamented, gone like the horse butchers where he started work and replaced by a new France of individualism, jealousy and indulgence.The old France of solidarity and fraternity has disappeared and been replaced by a new France of individualism, jealousy and indulgence, said Jean-Michel Gérard, who worked in the meat industry until a few years ago.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesHe voted for the left until François Mitterrand, the former Socialist president, imposed limits on work hours, and then switched his allegiance to the far-right National Front party, now Ms. Le Pen’s National Rally. What infuriated him, he said, was foreigners collecting social benefits and handouts without working.“We didn’t want to work less, we wanted to work more to earn more. What’s the use of free time without money?” he asked. “If foreigners work, they have their place. If not, no.”Mr. Gérard gazed out at the church. That jogged a memory. The other day, he said, he saw a young man from the Maghreb urinating on the church wall. He shouted at the man, who looked about 17. “What would you do if I urinated on a mosque?”The fraught relationship between France and Islam — in the country with the largest Muslim population in Western Europe and a recent history of terrorist attacks — has been one of the themes of the election campaign. Mr. Macron has called Ms. Le Pen’s program racist for wanting to make head scarves illegal on the grounds that they constitute a threatening “Islamist uniform” — on the face of it, an extraordinary claim, given that an overwhelming majority of Muslims in France just want to live peacefully.Muslims attending Friday Prayer this week at a mosque in an eastern suburb of Paris. The fraught relationship between France and Islam has been one of the themes of the election campaign.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times“If women are wearing them just for their religion, OK,” Mr. Gérard said, “but I think in general it’s a provocation.”Maryvonne Duché, another firm supporter of Ms. Le Pen, was seated at a table close by. She started work at 14 as a sales clerk, before spending 34 years on the production line at a nearby Philips electronics factory, which closed 12 years ago.“Apart from two pregnancies, I worked nonstop from age 14 to 60, and now I have a pension of 1,160 euros a month,” she said — or about $1,250. “It’s pathetic, with almost half going in rent, but Macron doesn’t care.”And Ms. Le Pen? “I don’t love her, but I will vote for her to get rid of Macron.”The view of Mr. Macron in this town was of near-universal disdain: a man with no respect for French people, removed from reality, so cerebral he has no idea of “real life,” insensitive to the everyday problems of many people, from a class that has “never changed a kid’s diaper,” in Mr. Gérard’s words.Ms. Le Pen, by contrast, is seen as someone who will protect people from the disruptive onslaught of the modern world.What to Know About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 4Heading to a runoff. More
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Who Will France’s Muslims Choose for President?
In Sunday’s decisive runoff election, they have a distasteful choice between Macron and Le Pen. They won’t necessarily back Macron.BONDY, France — Abdelkrim Bouadla voted enthusiastically for Emmanuel Macron five years ago, drawn by his youth and his message of transforming France. But after a presidency that he believes harmed French Muslims like himself, Mr. Bouadla, a community leader who has long worked with troubled young people, was torn.He likened the choice confronting him in France’s presidential runoff on Sunday — featuring Mr. Macron and Marine Le Pen, whose far-right party has a long history of anti-Muslim positions, racism and xenophobia — as “breaking your ribs or breaking your legs.’’Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen are now fighting over the 7.7 million voters who backed Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist leader who earned a strong third-place finish in the first round of the election. Were they to break strongly for one of the candidates, it could prove decisive.Nearly 70 percent of Muslims voted for Mr. Mélenchon, the only major candidate to have consistently condemned discrimination against Muslims, according to the polling firm, Ifop.By contrast, Mr. Macron garnered only 14 percent of Muslim voters’ support this year, compared to 24 percent in 2017. Ms. Le Pen got 7 percent in the first round this year. Nationwide, according to Ifop, the turnout of Muslim voters was a couple of percentage points higher than the average.As the two candidates battle it out in the closing days of a tight race, Mr. Macron’s prospects may rest partly on whether he can persuade Muslim voters like Mr. Bouadla that he is their best option — and that staying home risks installing a chilling new anti-Muslim leadership.In Mr. Bouadla’s telling, however, that will take some doing.“If I vote for Macron, I’d be participating in all the bad things he’s done against Muslims,’’ Mr. Bouadla, 50, said over the course of a long walk in Bondy, a city just northeast of Paris. He vacillated between abstaining for the first time in his life or reluctantly casting a ballot for Mr. Macron simply to fend off someone he considered “worse and more dangerous.’’Most polls show that Mr. Macron’s lead, about 10 percentage points, provides a comfortable path to re-election, but it is far narrower than his 32 percentage point margin of victory over Ms. Le Pen in 2017.But as Éric Coquerel, a national lawmaker and a close ally of Mr. Mélenchon said, the turnout by Muslim voters could tip the balance if the race “becomes extremely tight.’’Much of Muslim voters’ anger toward Mr. Macron centers on his pushing a widely condemned 2021 law and the subsequent closing of more than 700 Muslim institutions that the authorities say encouraged radicalization, a charge that many Muslims and some human rights groups dispute. But it remains unclear how this resentment might be transformed into a political force.Mr. Bouadla, third from the left, chatting with local residents in northern Bondy in the Seine-Saint-Denis region outside of Paris.James Hill for The New York TimesFrance’s estimated 6 million Muslims account for 10 percent of the population, but their political influence has long been undermined by high abstention rates and divisions based on class and ancestry. Given that history, Mr. Mélenchon’s strong Muslim backing may have signaled a shift, analysts say.Julien Talpin, a sociologist at the National Center for Scientific Research, said that the mobilization by Muslims behind a single candidate was “something entirely new.’’“In the past, there were only vague calls to vote for candidates favorable to Islam,’’ he said.France’s 6 million Muslims, like these praying at a mosque in Angers last year, have felt under attack my both Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen, who are now courting their votes.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesMr. Mélenchon scored his biggest victories nationwide in Bondy and in the rest of Seine-Saint-Denis, the department just north of Paris that has strong concentrations of the capital region’s poor, immigrant and Muslim populations.The source of much of the service workforce of the capital, the department also inspires fear and anxiety especially among older French people, whose feelings about immigration and crime are fanned by the right-wing news media and politicians. Éric Zemmour, the far-right TV pundit who came in fourth in the first round, following a campaign focused on attacking Islam, described the department as a “foreign enclave’’ suffering from “religious colonization.’’In Bondy, a strong turnout was reported in the first round in neighborhoods with historically low voting levels.“The number of young people, families and especially the people waiting in line — something was happening,’’ said Mehmet Ozguner, 22, a local organizer for Mr. Mélenchon’s party.Campaign posters for Mr. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the strong preference of Muslim voters, in Bondy in the Seine-Saint-Denis department. How that vote splits could influence Sunday’s election. James Hill for The New York TimesMany imams, social media influencers and other community leaders called on Muslim voters to unite their ballots in favor of Mr. Mélenchon.“There was no formal organization, but many ad hoc alliances, mobilization by union activists and antiracism activists,’’ said Taha Bouhafs, 24, a journalist with a large online following and an ally of Mr. Mélenchon’s party, who is planning to run in the election for Parliament in June.In 2017, Mr. Macron had reassured many Muslims that he would be more open on issues of French secularism, known as “laïcité, diversity and multiculturalism,’’ said Vincent Tiberj, a sociologist at Sciences Po Bordeaux university who has studied the voting patterns of French Muslims. Mr. Macron even called colonization a “crime against humanity’’ during a visit to Algeria.In a major speech on what Mr. Macron described as an Islamist-driven separatist movement in French society, Mr. Macron acknowledged that successive governments had encouraged the trend by settling immigrants in areas of “abject poverty and difficulties,” like Seine-Saint-Denis.But Mr. Tiberj said that there was a gap “between what he said as president and what his government did in his name.”Mr. Macron hardened his positions after the beheading of a middle-school teacher, Samuel Paty, by an Islamist fanatic angry that the teacher had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class on blasphemy.A memorial to Samuel Paty, who was beheaded by a militant Islamist, at the middle school where he taught. Mr. Macron hardened his position on Islamist separatism after the killing.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesIn response, Mr. Macron pushed forward his anti-separatism law despite widespread criticism from international and national human rights organizations, including the government’s National Human Rights Commission. The law gave the government greater power over religious establishments, schools and other associations.What to Know About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 4Heading to a runoff. More
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What Marine Le Pen Has Already Won
SEMUR-EN-AUXOIS, France — Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally, has worked hard during this election campaign to soften, even detoxify, her image. It seems to be working. “I think she’s full of good ideas,” Cyrielle Bernard, a 19-year-old who lives in this picturesque Burgundy town, told me one afternoon last week, chatting in the tobacconist shop where she works. Of all the candidates, she said, “I think she’s the most logical.”President Emmanuel Macron won in Semur-en-Auxois in the first round of voting this month, but Ms. Le Pen took the larger Burgundy Franche-Comté region, with 27 percent of the vote over Mr. Macron’s 26 percent. Ms. Le Pen’s success comes from casting herself as the defender of the countryside and the working class, focusing on cost-of-living issues and defending social protections. She has also been helped by an image makeover in which she opened up about raising her children as a single mother and now combines tough talk on immigration with social media posts about her cats.The stigma she has long carried in mainstream politics has been quickly wearing off, and people are supporting her more openly than ever before.As I drove around rural Burgundy after the first round of voting this month, I came away with a strong sense that while Mr. Macron may well defeat her in the second round this Sunday, in many ways, Ms. Le Pen has already won. In the first round, she put Mr. Macron on the defensive and convinced almost a quarter of voters that she has their best interests at heart. In the second round, polls predict she could easily win more than 40 percent, potentially 10 points more than in 2017.The election being fought this time is less about change than about protection — who will protect the French: from the rising cost of living, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, immigrants (for some), as well as who will protect France’s generous social welfare system.Other voters are also seeking protection from the elite. The same winds that brought Brexit and helped elect President Donald Trump are also blowing through France. Ms. Le Pen has positioned herself to appear closer to the people than Mr. Macron, the ultimate technocrat, who has spent five years unable to shake his reputation as “president of the rich.”That was largely the impression of the Le Pen voters I spoke with in Balot, a small village in Burgundy, where Ms. Le Pen won the first round of France’s presidential elections by a landslide. In the 2017 election that brought Mr. Macron into office, Balot, a dot on the map amid flat green farmland and fields of canary-yellow rapeseed, about 80 percent of voters supported Ms. Le Pen.“She’s more frank,” Annabelle Germain, 29, told me when I knocked on the door of a house along the main road. Ms. Germain, who works as a house cleaner, dislikes Mr. Macron. “He always has that smirk,” she said. That smirk is a problem for Mr. Macron. He has a tendency to talk down to people — to say “let me explain to you,” rather than listen.Back in Semur-en-Auxois, Ms. Bernard, who told me that she thought Ms. Le Pen had “good ideas,” seemed evidence of how deeply entrenched Ms. Le Pen’s hard-line views on immigrants have become and how she has successfully recast anti-immigrant rhetoric into practical policy recommendations.“There are a lot of lies,” Ms. Bernard said. “Like that she’s ‘like her dad,’ in quotation marks, but she’s totally the opposite. Her father” — Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former presidential candidate and the longtime leader of the far-right National Front party — “was completely racist. She’s not. She wants everyone to respect our ways. If you go to Africa, you respect African law. Her father just wanted to kick them all out.”Such views are not uncommon, especially in small towns in France with little to no immigration. In fact, 15 years after her father’s last run for president, Ms. Le Pen has not significantly diverged from his views on immigration even though she renamed the party, in what has been seen as an attempt to distance herself from him and broaden the base. She wants asylum seekers to be processed abroad and has said her first act as president will be to propose a referendum on immigration.In La Roche-en-Brenil, a town of almost 900 people, I spoke to a 34-year-old mother of five, Chloé Odermatt, who was pushing a stroller with her 3-month-old baby. She said she’d vote for Ms. Le Pen and liked that she proposed stricter controls on giving immigrants access to state services. “A lot of them take advantage of the system and aren’t integrated in France,” she told me.This election has further scrambled the traditional divide between left and right in France. Ms. Le Pen has managed to widen her consensus by combining far-right positions on immigration with a left-leaning defense of public spending and social welfare. Her message resonates, even with younger voters like Ms. Bernard — she has promised to eliminate income tax for people under 30 — and her once extreme positions appear less so now that the center right has also adopted much of the same rhetoric, especially on national-identity issues. Help came as well from Éric Zemmour, whose firebrand declarations made her seem more moderate.Across Burgundy, Le Pen voters kept telling me they wanted Mr. Macron out because prices kept going up and salaries weren’t keeping pace. In La Roche-en-Brenil, I asked a Le Pen supporter whether that was entirely Mr. Macron’s fault. “Well, it’s not mine,” Thierry Chenier, 50, said. “We’ve tried the right, that didn’t work. We’ve tried the left, that didn’t work. Maybe we need to try the far right, with a woman in power.”Mr. Macron won the election in 2017 telling France it needed to change, pushing through labor reform that makes it easier for businesses to hire and fire. The unemployment rate fell to its lowest in 13 years, but Mr. Macron simultaneously signaled that jobs weren’t as secure as they once were. This heightened anxieties. The Le Pen voters I spoke with said they wanted change, but mostly they seemed to want preservation — keeping their lower retirement age, raising pensions, lowering their cost of living. The change they want may actually be a status quo that Mr. Macron has said is no longer sustainable.And yet he has made great efforts to shore up the economy. During the pandemic, the Macron government pledged to spend “whatever it costs” to support businesses. He quickly started reopening schools and helped employers keep workers on furlough so that they could come back to work when the lockdowns ended. Still, it is hard to win saying, “Imagine how much worse things could have been.”Over the past decade, Ms. Le Pen has pulled her party toward a kind of “social populism,” said Gilles Ivaldi, a researcher at Sciences Po and a scholar of the far right in France and the West. She proposes “reducing VAT tax, raising low salaries and pensions, spending more on health and education.”Mr. Macron, by contrast, has become the embodiment of frightening economic trends, even if they predate him and extend far beyond France.“The era of high growth is gone,” Niels Planel, a city councilor in Semur-en-Auxois and the author of a book on French economic inequality, told me. In his view, the government should “worry about mobility, worry about training, delivering a high-quality education,” so that workers are ready for today’s economy, not yesterday’s. Otherwise Ms. Le Pen is likely to maintain her grip on many of France’s rural and deindustrialized areas, while Mr. Macron will continue to win more-prosperous urban areas.Foreign policy is where Mr. Macron has the advantage. Ms. Le Pen has long expressed her respect for Vladimir Putin. She is no longer saying that she wants France to leave the eurozone, however, which scared off voters in 2017.The other factor potentially working in Ms. Le Pen’s favor is the high abstention rate. Voters who supported the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round appear to be particularly up for grabs. Those opting out entirely reflect the crisis of representative democracy that’s been growing in France at least since the Yellow Vest movement, which began in 2018 with a protest over a proposed hike in fuel taxes and evolved into a broader rebellion. People felt ignored.What remains is discontent. The Le Pen voters in Balot and La Roche-en-Brenil aren’t outliers. Ms. Le Pen’s growing consensus combined with strong anti-Macron sentiment have eroded the traditional alliances that have kept the far right from power. “Lots of voters are tired of voting against their own convictions in order to block the far right — that’s the biggest worry,” said Mr. Ivaldi, the scholar of the far-right in France. That anti-far-right alliance, he added, is “much weaker than 10 or 20 years ago.”In their televised debate this week before the second round, Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen offered radically different visions for France. The next day Ms. Bernard told me she thought Ms. Le Pen had won. “Marine knew how to change over the past five years,” she wrote me in a text message. “She understood her mistakes.”“Macron thinks he’s always right,” she added. “And unfortunately in five years he hasn’t changed.” Mr. Macron may not have changed, but France certainly has.Rachel Donadio is a Paris-based writer and journalist, a contributing writer for The Atlantic and a former Rome bureau chief and European culture correspondent for The Times.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More
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France’s Big Decision
Rachelle Bonja, Kaitlin Roberts and Dan Powell and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherWhen they go to the polls on Sunday, voters in France will be faced with the same two presidential candidates as 2017: Emmanuel Macron, the president and a polished centrist, and Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally party.Yet the context is different. There is a war in Europe, and the contest is tight.What are the stakes in the runoff election, and how has the race become so close?On today’s episodeRoger Cohen, Paris bureau chief for The New York Times.President Emmanuel Macron, left, and Marine Le Pen, his far-right challenger, squared off in a debate on Wednesday ahead of the runoff.Pool photo by Ludovic MarinBackground readingPresident Emmanuel Macron will face Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, in the runoff on Sunday. The outcome will be crucial for France and reverberate globally.No French president has been the object of such intense dislike among significant segments of the population as Mr. Macron. How deep that loathing runs will be a critical factor in the election.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page.Roger Cohen contributed reporting.The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Kaitlin Roberts, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Anita Badejo, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Chelsea Daniel, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky and John Ketchum.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Cliff Levy, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Wendy Dorr, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli and Maddy Masiello. More
