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    How Hated Is Macron? It Could Decide the French Election.

    Given the choice between a president they suspect of despising ordinary people and a far-right candidate they detest, many French voters may stay home.LE HAVRE, France — As an ardent supporter of President Emmanuel Macron of France, Nicole Liot was all smiles after seeing him at a recent campaign stop. But she was also worried about the final round of the French election this Sunday. In her lifetime, she had never seen such intense dislike for a president among some French.“There are presidents who weren’t hated like this even though they weren’t saints,” Ms. Liot, 80, said, positing that what has become known as Mr. Macron’s “little phrases” fueled the aversion. “Like when he told someone, ‘You’re searching for a job? Just cross the street and you’ll find one.’”As anti-Macron protesters burned tires and blotted the sky with smoke over the northwestern city of Le Havre, Ms. Liot added, “Maybe people won’t forgive him for these mistakes of language and attitude.”No French president has been the object of such intense dislike among significant segments of the population as Mr. Macron — the result, experts say, of his image as an elitist out of touch with the ordinary French people whose pensions and work protections he has threatened in his efforts to make the economy more investor-friendly.Just how deep that loathing runs will be a critical factor — perhaps even the decisive one — in the election against his far-right rival, Marine Le Pen. Recent polls give Mr. Macron a lead of around 10 percentage points — wider than at some points in the campaign, but only a third of his winning margin five years ago.“Macron and the hatred he arouses is unprecedented,” said Nicolas Domenach, a veteran political journalist who has covered the past five French presidents and is the co-author of “Macron: Why So Much Hatred?,” a recently published book. “It stems from a particular alignment. He is the president of the rich and the president of disdain.”Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate, at a meeting in Avignon.Daniel Cole/Associated PressNo doubt Mr. Macron could end up winning re-election despite his unpopularity. Even if a groundswell of voters does not turn out to vote for him, what matters for him is that enough voters come out to vote against her — to build a “dam” against the far right.It is a long-established strategy to erect a so-called “Republican front” against a political force — her party, the National Rally, formerly the National Front — that is seen as a threat to France’s democratic foundations.But given the choice between a president they find disdainful and a far-right candidate they find detestable, many French voters may just stay home, or even vote for Ms. Le Pen, tipping the scales in a close election.Every chance she gets, Ms. Le Pen has done her best to remind voters of “these terrible words” — “these words of disdain” — that now stick to Mr. Macron, as she did at a big campaign rally in the southern city of Avignon last week.“They are the words of a power without empathy,” she said as the crowd booed.Both she and Mr. Macron are now vying in the campaign’s closing days for the voters who cast ballots for other candidates in the first round of the presidential election on April 10, on whom the election now hinges.Waiting for Mr. Macron, while smoke from from tires set on fire as part of a protest against the president rose in the distance.James Hill for The New York TimesThe most critical bloc voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the veteran leftist who came in a strong third. On the left, many feel betrayed by Mr. Macron’s rightward tilt over the course of his presidency.Ms. Le Pen is trying especially to appeal to voters who feel the same emotions of hate and disdain so often heard among Ms. Le Pen’s core backers — many in Mr. Mélenchon’s camp.Roland Lescure, a lawmaker and spokesman for Mr. Macron’s party, La République en Marche, said he was convinced that “rejection for Marine Le Pen” would prove more potent than the dislike for the president, which he recognized.The rejection was not just of the person of Ms. Le Pen, he said, “but above all of an ideology, of a political history and of a platform, which, when one reads it, is extremely harmful.”But Ms. Le Pen has grown so confident in her widening appeal after taking calculated steps to soften her image that she has even dared seize the term “dam” for herself — beseeching voters six times in her rally to build a “dam against Macron.”The calls for dams on both sides underscored how the final vote boils down to an unpopularity contest: The less-disliked candidate wins.It is especially true in this race, which features the same finalists as in 2017. But if Ms. Le Pen was seen as a bulldozer of far-right ideology back then, in the current campaign she has tried to present a softer, more personable side.Mr. Macron meeting with voters on his way to the Museum of Modern Art André Malraux in Le Havre.James Hill for The New York TimesAnd if Mr. Macron was once seen as a fresh face who inspired many with his promises to change an ossified France, this time he has been cast by his haters as a kind of malign king.A former investment banker, whose tax policies have favored the wealthy, Mr. Macron has been unable to shake off his image as the president of the rich, even after his government provided massive subsidies during the pandemic.His “little phrases” over the years to or about regular folk have cemented that unsympathetic image, creating the kind of political and cultural schism opened by Hillary Clinton’s description of Donald J. Trump’s supporters in 2016 as “deplorables.”It has also not helped Mr. Macron that he barely bothered to campaign initially, absorbed in diplomacy around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but also as part of a strategy to hold himself out of reach of his opponents.For many French, the approach only reinforced the impression of aloofness from a president who has concentrated powers in his own hands and considered campaigning beneath him.Voting in the first round of the presidential election in the Paris suburb of Trappes. Polls give Mr. Macron around a 10 percentage point lead in the second round.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesAs Mr. Macron finally engages the race, he is now being confronted with the raw emotions that have shaped much of his presidency.What to Know About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 4Heading to a runoff. More

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    French Candidates’ Economic Programs Hold Key to the Election

    Promising tax cuts, higher wages and changes in the retirement age, President Macron and Marine Le Pen vie for undecided voters.PARIS — As President Emmanuel Macron wove through crowds during a campaign stop in northern France last week, an elderly voter got in his face to protest one of his most unpopular economic proposals: raising the retirement age to 65 from 62 to fund France’s national pension system.“Retirement at 65, no, no!” the woman shouted, jabbing a finger at Mr. Macron’s chest as he tried to assuage her. The boisterous exchange was caught on camera. Two hours later, he retreated, saying he would consider tweaking the age to 64. “I don’t want to divide the country,” he said on French television.Mr. Macron’s reversal on a key element of his economic platform, in an industrial region backing the far-right firebrand Marine Le Pen ahead of France’s presidential election next Sunday, was a reminder of the social distress dominating the minds of voters. He and Ms. Le Pen have starkly divergent visions of how to address these concerns.As they cross the country in a whirlwind of last-minute campaigning, their runoff will hinge to a large extent on perceptions of the economy. Worries about widening economic insecurity, and the surging cost of living amid the fallout from Russia’s war on Ukraine, have become top issues in the race, ahead of security and immigration.Ms. Le Pen won by a comfortable margin in the first round of voting last Sunday in places that have lost jobs to deindustrialization, where she has found a ready audience for her pledges to bolster purchasing power, create employment through “intelligent” protectionism and shield France from European policies that expanded globalization.An open-air produce market in Paris, in December. Economic insecurity and the cost of living have become top issues for voters in the presidential runoff.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesWhile Mr. Macron is still expected to win in a tight race, workers in restless blue-collar bastions may yet prove a liability. Despite a robust recovery in France from Covid lockdowns — the economy is now growing at around 7 percent, and unemployment has fallen to a 10-year low of 7.4 percent — many feel inequality has widened, rather than narrowed, as he pledged, in the five years since Mr. Macron took office.After France’s traditional left-wing and right-wing parties collapsed in the first round of voting, both candidates are scrambling to lure the undecided and voters who gravitated to their opponents — especially the far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon — in large part by recasting major planks of their economic programs to appeal to those struggling to get by.Pensions is a case in point. Mr. Macron has worked to recalibrate his image as a president who favors France’s wealthy classes, the business establishment and white-collar voters as he set about overhauling the economy to bolster competitiveness.In 2019 he was forced to set aside plans to raise the retirement age to 65 after raucous nationwide strikes shut down much of France. He had sought to streamline France’s complex system of public and private pension schemes into one state-managed plan to close a shortfall of 18 billion euros, or about $19 billion.Following his confrontation in northern France last week, Mr. Macron insisted that he would continue to push back the retirement age incrementally — by four months per year starting next year — but that he was open to discussing an easing of the plan in its later stages.“It’s not dogma,” he said of the policy. “I have to listen to what people are saying to me.” Mr. Macron has struggled to achieve his goal of raising the retirement age to 65.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesMs. Le Pen accused Mr. Macron of engaging in a policy of “social wreckage” and of blowing with the wind to capture votes, although she has also shifted gears after the protectionist economic platform she advanced five years ago spooked businesses. She dropped plans to withdraw from the European Union and the eurozone.Today, Ms. Le Pen favors maintaining the current retirement age of 62, abandoning a previous push to reduce it to 60 — although certain workers engaged in intensive manual labor like construction could retire at the lower age.As Ms. Le Pen seeks to rebrand her far-right National Rally party as a kinder, gentler party than the one she steered in 2017, albeit with a clear anti-immigrant message, she has focused on economic issues close to blue-collar voters’ hearts.She got out front on one of the biggest issues of the campaign: a surge in the cost of living.While Mr. Macron was trying to broker a cease-fire in Ukraine, Ms. Le Pen was visiting towns and rural areas across France, promising increased subsidies for vulnerable households.She has pledged a 10 percent hike in France’s monthly minimum wage of 1,603 euros. She is also vowing to slash sales taxes to 5.5 percent from 20 percent on fuel, oil, gas and electricity, and to cut them altogether on 100 “essential” goods. Workers under 30 would be exempt from income tax, and young couples would get interest-free housing loans.Her France-first policy extends even further: To make up for increased spending on social programs, she has said she would slash billions in social spending on “foreigners.”Marine Le Pen speaking to supporters on April 10 after the first round of the French election. She has tried to recast her far-right party in a kinder, gentler form.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesShe has also vowed to create jobs and re-industrialize the country by prioritizing French companies for government contracts over foreign investors and dangling a host of expensive tax incentives to encourage French companies that have branched out overseas to return to France.While she has abandoned talk of a so-called Frexit — a French exit from the European Union — some of her proposals to protect the economy would amount to essentially that, including a pledge to ignore some European Union laws, including on internal free trade. She has said she would withhold some French payments to the bloc.Mr. Macron has branded such promises “pure fantasy” and is proposing to retain many of his pro-business policies, with modifications.Having vowed to lure jobs and investment, under his watch foreign companies have poured billions of euros into industrial projects and research and development, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, many in tech start-ups, in a country that has not easily embraced change.At the same time, he has faced a challenge in discarding the image of an aloof president whose policies tended to benefit the most affluent. His abolition of a wealth tax and the introduction of a 30 percent flat tax on capital gains has mainly lifted incomes for the richest 0.1 percent and increased the distribution of dividends, according to the government’s own analysis.After a growing wealth divide helped set off the Yellow Vest movement in 2019, bringing struggling working-class people into the streets, Mr. Macron increased the minimum wage and made it easier for companies to give workers “purchasing power bonuses” of up to 3,000 euros annually without being taxed, a policy he has pledged to beef up.The candidates have tried to address concerns about rising fuel prices in blue-collar areas like Stiring-Wendel, a former coal mining town in France’s northeast.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesAs inflation has surged recently, Mr. Macron has also authorized billions of euros in subsidies for energy bills and at the gas pump and has promised to peg pension payments to inflation starting this summer. He has vowed new tax cuts for both households and businesses.His economic platform also aims for “full employment,” in part by pressing ahead with a series of pro-business reforms that has continued to lure the support of France’s biggest employers’ organization, Medef.“Emmanuel Macron’s program is the most favorable to ensure the growth of the economy and employment,” the group said last week, adding that Ms. Le Pen’s platform “would lead the country to stall compared to its neighbors and to put it on the sidelines of the European Union.”For all the differences, the pledges by Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen have one thing in common: more public spending, and less savings. According to estimates by the Institut Montaigne, a French economic think tank, Mr. Macron’s economic plan would worsen the public deficit by 44 billion euros, while Ms. Le Pen’s would widen it by 102 billion euros.“These shifts are significant enough to think that some of their proposals cannot actually be applied — except if they put in place budget austerity measures that they are not talking about,” Victor Poirier, director of publications at the Institut Montaigne, said. More

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    Elecciones presidenciales en Francia: lo que debes saber

    Los franceses eligen a su presidente en abril, una votación crucial para Francia y clave para Europa. El presidente Emmanuel Macron es el favorito para ganar, pero la carrera se ha puesto reñida.PARÍS — Los franceses acuden a las urnas este mes para elegir a su presidente, el cargo más poderoso de Francia y que tiene un control considerable de la política interior y exterior, en uno de los Estados miembro más poblados e influyentes de la Unión Europea.La guerra en Ucrania ha dominado la cobertura informativa en Francia y ha eclipsado en gran medida la campaña. El presidente Emmanuel Macron ha sido acusado de utilizar su condición de líder en tiempos de guerra y de diplomático en jefe de Europa para evitar enfrentarse a sus oponentes y llegar a un segundo mandato, y algunos críticos se preocupan de que la campaña desigual haya carecido de un debate sustantivo.Sin embargo, la carrera se ha abierto recientemente con el auge de su principal contrincante, Marine Le Pen, la líder de extrema derecha con una plataforma anti-UE, anti-OTAN y pro-Rusia que repercutiría globalmente si llega a ganar.Esto es lo que hay que saber sobre la votación, que se celebrará en dos rondas el 10 y el 24 de abril.¿Qué está en juego?Francia, una nación de más de 67 millones de habitantes, es la séptima economía del mundo, el país más visitado, uno de los cinco miembros permanentes del Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas y una potencia nuclear. Es miembro fundador de la Unión Europea y un motor clave de su política.El próximo presidente de Francia tendrá que ayudar al país a sortear dos fuerzas que actualmente azotan a Europa: la brutal invasión rusa a Ucrania, que ha desplazado a millones de personas a las puertas del continente, y una recuperación económica relacionada con una pandemia que está tensando las cadenas de suministro.Una familia de refugiados ucranianos esperando para subir a un tren a Budapest desde una ciudad del este de Hungría en marzo.Mauricio Lima para The New York TimesAunque las fuerzas de la derecha han ganado en gran medida las guerras culturales de Francia en los últimos años, las encuestas muestran que los votantes franceses están ahora preocupados principalmente por el creciente costo de la vida. El próximo presidente tendrá que compaginar estas preocupaciones con otras cuestiones a largo plazo en la mente de los votantes, como la transición de Francia a energías limpias, la sostenibilidad de su generoso modelo de bienestar, el temor a la inmigración y el nerviosismo por el lugar que ocupa el Islam en el país.La desilusión generalizada con la política también se ha convertido en una fuente importante de preocupación, y se teme que estas elecciones puedan ser las de menor participación en una elección presidencial en décadas.Learn More About France’s Presidential ElectionThe run-up to the first round of the election has been dominated by issues such as security, immigration and national identity.On the Scene: A Times reporter attended a rally held by Marine Le Pen, the far-right French presidential candidate. Here is what he saw.Challenges to Re-election: A troubled factory in President Emmanuel Macron’s hometown shows his struggle in winning the confidence of French workers.A Late Surge: After recently rising in voter surveys, Jean-Luc Mélenchon could become the first left-wing candidate since 2012 to reach the second round of the election.A Political Bellwether: Auxerre has backed the winner in the presidential race for 40 years. This time, many residents see little to vote for.¿Cuáles son los poderes de la presidencia francesa?Los presidentes franceses disponen de poderes extraordinarios, más que la mayoría de los líderes occidentales, con menos controles y equilibrios que limitan el poder ejecutivo en otros países.A diferencia de los primeros ministros británicos o los cancilleres alemanes, que son elegidos por los partidos que controlan el mayor número de escaños en sus parlamentos, los presidentes franceses son elegidos directamente por los ciudadanos para mandatos de cinco años. Poco después de esas elecciones, Francia vuelve a las urnas para elegir a los representantes de la Asamblea Nacional, la cámara más poderosa del Parlamento, cuyos mandatos también duran cinco años.El hecho de que ambas elecciones se celebren en el mismo ciclo de cinco años aumenta considerablemente la probabilidad de que Francia vote por legisladores que apoyen al presidente recién elegido, lo que significa que los presidentes franceses no tienen que preocuparse tanto como otros líderes por la agitación interna de los partidos o las elecciones de mitad de mandato. El primer ministro de Francia, como jefe de gobierno, desempeña un papel importante en el sistema constitucional, al igual que el Parlamento. Pero el presidente, que nombra al primer ministro, establece gran parte de la agenda de Francia¿Quiénes son los candidatos?Hay 12 candidatos oficiales, pero las encuestas sugieren que solo unos pocos tienen posibilidades de ganar.El actual favorito es Macron, de 44 años, un exbanquero de inversión que fue elegido en 2017 con poca experiencia política y que se presenta a un segundo mandato. Fue elegido sobre las ruinas de los partidos políticos tradicionales de Francia con una fuerte plataforma proempresarial. Reformó el código laboral, eliminó un impuesto sobre el patrimonio y reformó la compañía nacional de ferrocarriles. Pero su afán reformista ha sido atenuado por las huelgas masivas a raíz de sus planes de reforma de las pensiones, las protestas de los “chalecos amarillos” y la pandemia de coronavirus. La guerra de Ucrania lo puso por delante en las encuestas, pero su ventaja se ha reducido recientemente, hasta aproximadamente el 25 por ciento en los sondeos.El presidente Emmanuel Macron este mes en Nanterre, cerca de ParísDmitry Kostyukov para The New York TimesLa principal contrincante de Macron es Le Pen, de 53 años, la eterna líder de extrema derecha que se presenta por tercera vez y que perdió ante él en 2017. Lidera la Agrupación Nacional, un movimiento conocido desde hace mucho por su antisemitismo, su nostalgia nazi y su postura antiinmigrante, que ella ha tratado de sanear y convertir en un partido creíble y capaz de gobernar. Le Pen se ha enfrentado a las críticas por su anterior simpatía por el presidente ruso, Vladimir Putin, pero la inflación y el aumento de los precios de la energía encajan bien en su plataforma proteccionista. Actualmente ocupa el segundo lugar en las encuestas, con un 20 por ciento de apoyo.Marine Le Pen el año pasado en La Trinité-sur-MerDmitry Kostyukov para The New York TimesVarios candidatos, que tienen entre el diez y el 15 por ciento de los votos, se disputan el tercer puesto con la esperanza de lograr un aumento de última hora que los haga pasar a la segunda vuelta.Jean-Luc Mélenchon, de 70 años, es el líder del partido de extrema izquierda Francia Insumisa y el candidato de izquierda mejor posicionado para llegar a la segunda vuelta. Político veterano y hábil orador, conocido por su retórica apasionada y su personalidad divisiva, ha prometido invertir en energía verde, reducir la edad legal de jubilación, aumentar el salario mínimo mensual y redistribuir la riqueza poniendo impuestos a los ricos. También quiere reformar radicalmente la Constitución francesa para reducir los poderes presidenciales.Jean-Luc Mélenchon en enero en BurdeosPhilippe Lopez/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesValérie Pécresse, de 54 años, es una política que preside la región francesa de Île-de-France, una potencia económica y demográfica que incluye a París. Es la candidata de Les Républicains, el principal partido conservador francés. Varias de sus propuestas económicas, como el aumento de la edad legal de jubilación a los 65 años, son similares a las de Macron. Pero en unas elecciones en las que las voces más radicales han marcado el tono del debate en la derecha, ella ha dado un giro duro en temas como la inmigración y la delincuencia, lo que la deja con problemas para sobresalir entre los otros candidatos de la derecha.Valérie Pécresse, en el centro y a la derecha, en febrero en Mouilleron-en-ParedsLoic Venance/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesÉric Zemmour, de 63 años, es un escritor, comentarista y estrella de la televisión de extrema derecha que lleva años en los medios de comunicación franceses, pero cuya campaña, con ecos de Donald Trump, ha revuelto la política francesa. Es un nacionalista que evoca imágenes de una Francia en franca decadencia a causa de la inmigración y el islam, y ha sido condenado en múltiples ocasiones por infringir las leyes que castigan la difamación o los actos que provocan el odio o la violencia por motivos de raza y religión. Últimamente, sus perspectivas se han ido desvaneciendo.Éric Zemmour el domingo en ParísYoan Valat/EPA vía ShutterstockEl resto de los candidatos tienen un porcentaje de votos de un solo dígito y tienen pocas posibilidades de llegar a la segunda vuelta. Entre ellos se encuentran Anne Hidalgo, de 62 años, alcaldesa de París y candidata del moribundo Partido Socialista, y Yannick Jadot, de 54 años, candidato del Partido Verde, que ha tenido dificultades para avanzar a pesar del creciente apoyo a las causas medioambientales en Francia.¿Cómo funciona?El candidato que obtiene la mayoría absoluta de los votos en la primera vuelta es elegido directamente, un resultado improbable que no se produce desde 1965, la primera vez que un presidente francés fue elegido por votación popular directa. En su lugar, suele celebrarse una segunda vuelta entre los dos primeros candidatos.Las normas electorales francesas son estrictas, con rigurosos límites a la financiación de las campañas y al tiempo de emisión, y con un apoyo financiero y logístico del Estado que pretende igualar las condiciones. (Aun así, muchos medios de comunicación son propiedad de personas adineradas, lo que les da una vía para influir en las elecciones).Los gastos de campaña tienen un tope de unos 16,9 millones de euros para los candidatos en la primera vuelta, o sea, unos 18,5 millones de dólares, y de unos 22,5 millones de euros para los que llegan a la segunda. Los que se saltan las normas —como Nicolas Sarkozy, expresidente de derecha— enfrentan multas y sanciones penales.Las empresas privadas no pueden hacer donaciones de campaña, y los particulares únicamente pueden donar hasta 4600 euros para toda la elección. Los candidatos reciben el reembolso de una parte de sus costos de campaña, y el Estado paga algunos gastos.El tiempo de emisión está estrechamente regulado por el organismo de control de los medios de comunicación de Francia. En un primer momento, las televisiones y radios deben garantizar que los candidatos tengan una exposición que se corresponda aproximadamente con su importancia política, basándose en factores como los sondeos, la representación en el Parlamento y los resultados de las elecciones anteriores. Cuando la campaña comienza oficialmente, dos semanas antes de la votación, todos los candidatos tienen el mismo tiempo de emisión. Está prohibido hacer campaña los fines de semana de votación.Preparando los sobres con las boletas de los candidatos presidenciales y los folletos del programa el mes pasado en Matoury, Guayana FrancesaJody Amiet/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images¿Qué sucede después?A las 8 p. m. del día de las elecciones, el 10 de abril, los medios de comunicación franceses colaborarán con las encuestadoras para publicar los resultados previstos, basados en el recuento preliminar de votos. Eso dará una buena indicación de quién se espera que pase a la segunda vuelta, pero si la elección está reñida, las proyecciones podrían no estar claras hasta más tarde. Los resultados oficiales estarán disponibles en el sitio web del Ministerio del Interior.Los dos candidatos a la segunda vuelta se enfrentarán en un debate por televisión antes de la nueva votación, el 24 de abril. Si Macron no es reelegido, el nuevo presidente tendrá hasta el 13 de mayo para tomar posesión. La atención se centrará entonces en las elecciones para la Asamblea Nacional. Todos los escaños estarán en juego, en un sistema similar de dos rondas de votación, el 12 y el 19 de junio.Aurélien Breeden cubre Francia desde la oficina de París desde 2014. Ha informado sobre algunos de los peores atentados terroristas que ha sufrido el país, el desmantelamiento del campamento de migrantes en Calais y las tumultuosas elecciones presidenciales de Francia en 2017. @aurelienbrd More

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    France’s Presidential Election 2022: Your Questions, Answered

    The French are choosing their president in April, an election that is crucial for France and key for Europe. President Emmanuel Macron is favored to win, but the race has gotten closer.PARIS — The French are going to the polls this month to choose their president, who holds the most powerful office in France and has considerable control of domestic and foreign policy, in one of the European Union’s most populous and influential member states.The war in Ukraine has dominated news coverage in France and largely overshadowed the campaign. President Emmanuel Macron has been accused of using his status as a wartime leader and Europe’s diplomat in chief to avoid facing his opponents and cruise into a second term, with some critics worrying that the lopsided campaign has lacked substantive debate.But the race has opened up recently with a surge from his main challenger, Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader with an anti-E.U., anti-NATO and pro-Russia platform that would reverberate globally if she won.Here is what you need to know about the vote, which will be held over two rounds on April 10 and April 24.What’s at stake?France, a nation of over 67 million people, is the world’s seventh-largest economy, the world’s most visited country, one of five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and a nuclear power. It is a founding member of the European Union and a key driver of its policy. France’s next president will have to help the country navigate two forces currently buffeting Europe: a brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine that has displaced millions on the continent’s doorstep, and a pandemic-related economic recovery that is straining supply chains.A refugee family from Ukraine waiting to board a train to Budapest from a town in eastern Hungary in March.Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesWhile right-wing forces have largely won France’s culture wars in recent years, voter surveys show that French voters are now primarily concerned with the growing cost of living. The next president will have to juggle those worries with other long-term issues on voters’ minds, like France’s clean energy transition, the sustainability of its generous welfare model, fears of immigration and hand-wringing over the place of Islam in the country.Broad disillusionment with politics has also become a major source of concern, with worries that this election could see the lowest voter turnout for a presidential race in decades.What are the powers of the French presidency?French presidents have formidable powers at their disposal — more than most Western leaders, with fewer of the checks and balances that limit the executive branch in other countries.Learn More About France’s Presidential ElectionThe run-up to the first round of the election has been dominated by issues such as security, immigration and national identity.On the Scene: A Times reporter attended a rally held by Marine Le Pen, the far-right French presidential candidate. Here is what he saw.Challenges to Re-election: A troubled factory in President Emmanuel Macron’s hometown shows his struggle in winning the confidence of French workers.A Late Surge: After recently rising in voter surveys, Jean-Luc Mélenchon could become the first left-wing candidate since 2012 to reach the second round of the election.A Political Bellwether: Auxerre has backed the winner in the presidential race for 40 years. This time, many residents see little to vote for.Unlike British prime ministers or German chancellors, who are chosen by the parties that control the most seats in Parliament, French presidents are elected directly by the people for five-year terms. Shortly after that election, France returns to the polls to vote for representatives in the National Assembly, the more powerful house of Parliament, where terms also last five years.Having both of those elections on the same five-year cycle strongly increases the likelihood that France will vote in lawmakers who back their newly elected president, meaning French presidents do not need to worry as much as some other leaders about internal party turmoil or midterm elections. France’s prime minister, as the head of government, plays an important role in the constitutional system, as does Parliament. But the president, who appoints the prime minister, sets much of France’s agenda.Who is running?There are 12 official candidates, but polls suggest that only a handful have a shot at winning.The current favorite is Mr. Macron, 44, a former investment banker who was elected in 2017 with little political experience and is running for a second term. He was elected on the ruins of France’s traditional political parties with a strong pro-business platform. He overhauled the labor code, eliminated a wealth tax and reformed the national railway company. But his reformist zeal was tempered by massive strikes over his pension reform plans, Yellow Vest protests and the coronavirus pandemic. The war in Ukraine put him ahead in the polls but his lead has dwindled recently, to roughly 25 percent in voter surveys.President Emmanuel Macron this month in Nanterre, near Paris.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesMr. Macron’s main challenger is Ms. Le Pen, 53, the perennial far-right leader who is running for the third time and who lost to him in 2017. She leads the National Rally, a movement long known for antisemitism, Nazi nostalgia and anti-immigrant bigotry that she has tried to sanitize and turn into a credible, governing party. Ms. Le Pen has faced criticism of her past sympathy for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, but inflation and rising energy prices play well into her protectionist platform. She is currently polling in second place, with about 20 percent support in voter surveys.Marine Le Pen last year in La Trinité-sur-Mer.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesSeveral candidates are jostling for third place and polling between 10 and 15 percent, hoping for a last-minute surge that would send them into the second round of voting.Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 70, is the leader of the far-left France Unbowed party, and the left-wing candidate best positioned to reach the runoff. A veteran politician and skilled orator known for his fiery rhetoric and divisive personality, he has vowed to invest in green energy, lower the legal retirement age, raise the monthly minimum wage and redistribute wealth by taxing the rich. He also wants to radically overhaul France’s Constitution to reduce presidential powers.Jean-Luc Mélenchon in January in Bordeaux.Philippe Lopez/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesValérie Pécresse, 54, is a politician who presides over the Ile-de-France region of France, an economic and demographic powerhouse that includes Paris. She is the candidate for Les Républicains, the mainstream French conservative party. Several of her economic proposals, like raising the legal retirement age to 65, are similar to Mr. Macron’s. But in an election where more radical voices have set the tone of the debate on the right, she has taken a hard turn on issues like immigration and crime, leaving her struggling to stand out from other right-wing candidates.Valérie Pécresse, center right, in February in Mouilleron-en-Pareds.Loic Venance/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesÉric Zemmour, 63, is a far-right writer, pundit and television star who has been a fixture in the French media for years but whose campaign, with echoes of Donald J. Trump, has scrambled French politics. He is a nationalist who conjures images of a France in steep decline because of immigration and Islam, and he has been convicted multiple times for running afoul of laws that punish defamation or acts provoking hatred or violence on the basis of race and religion. His prospects have recently been fading.Éric Zemmour on Sunday in Paris.Yoan Valat/EPA, via ShutterstockThe remaining candidates are polling in the single digits and have little chance of reaching the runoff. Among them are Anne Hidalgo, 62, the mayor of Paris and the candidate for the moribund Socialist Party, and Yannick Jadot, 54, the candidate for the Green party, which has struggled to make headway despite growing support in France for environmental causes.How does it work?A candidate who gets an absolute majority of votes in the first round of voting is elected outright, an unlikely outcome that has not occurred since 1965 — the first time a French president was chosen by direct popular vote. Instead, a runoff is usually held between the top two candidates.French election regulations are strict, with stringent limits on campaign finances and airtime, and with financial and logistical support from the state that is intended to level the playing field. (Still, many news outlets are owned by the rich, giving them an avenue to influence elections.)Campaign spending is capped to roughly 16.9 million euros for candidates in the first round, or about $18.5 million, and roughly €22.5 million for those who reach the second one. Those who flout the rules — like Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s former right-wing president — face fines and criminal penalties.Private companies cannot make campaign donations, and individuals can only donate up to €4,600 for the entire election. Candidates are reimbursed for a portion of their campaign expenditures, and the state pays for some expenses.Airtime is closely regulated by France’s media watchdog. At first, television and radio stations must ensure candidates are given exposure that roughly matches their political importance, based on factors like polling, representation in Parliament and prior election results. When the campaign officially starts, two weeks before the vote, all candidates get equal airtime. Campaigning on voting weekends is banned.Preparing envelopes with the presidential candidates’ ballot papers and program leaflets last month in Matoury, French Guiana.Jody Amiet/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat comes next?At 8 p.m. on Election Day, April 10, the French news media will work with pollsters to publish projected results based on preliminary vote counts. That will give a good indication of who is expected to make it into the second round, but if the race is close, projections might not become clear until later. Official results will be available on the Interior Ministry website.The two runoff candidates will face off in a televised debate before the second round of voting, on April 24. If Mr. Macron isn’t re-elected, the new president will have until May 13 to take office. Attention will then shift to the elections for the National Assembly. All seats there will be up for grabs, in a similar two-round system of voting, on June 12 and June 19. More

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    Your Wednesday Briefing: Zelensky Addressed the U.N.

    Plus a change in Shanghai’s controversial family Covid policy and the tense build-up to the French presidential election.Good morning. We’re covering President Volodymyr Zelensky’s address to the U.N., a modification to Shanghai’s controversial family Covid policy and political tensions ahead of the French presidential election.President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday.Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesZelensky addresses the U.N.President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine delivered a fiery speech to the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday, a day after visiting Bucha, where images have surfaced of civilian bodies in the wake of Russia’s retreat.Zelensky said that more than 300 people had been tortured and killed in the town north of Kyiv and that soldiers raped women in front of children. He lamented the organization’s inability to stop the bloodshed: “Where is the Security Council?” he asked. “It is obvious that the key institution of the world to protect peace cannot work effectively.” Follow live updates here.His speech came as the E.U. moved to ban Russian coal imports and the bloc said it was working on soon banning Russian oil. But energy remains a tense issue: Germany, the E.U.’s largest economy, is heavily reliant on Russian energy and can’t simply pull the plug.The war is moving east as Russia shifts its attention to regions led by separatist governments in Donetsk and Luhansk. Military analysts said supply issues and declining morale had stymied Russian progress and that the “next pivotal battle” would happen in the eastern city of Sloviansk.Context: It was virtually certain that the Security Council would not agree on any measures against the Kremlin: Russia and its ally China have veto power.State of the war:As many as 200 people are missing and presumed dead in Borodyanka, a town northwest of Kyiv, after intense aerial bombing.Residents of Nova Basan, about 60 miles east of Kyiv, described beatings and mock executions as part of a monthlong occupation.Economy:The E.U. is putting forward a fifth package of sanctions against Moscow, which would cut off Russian vessels from E.U. ports and target two of President Vladimir Putin’s daughters.The U.S. blocked Russia’s access to dollars for bond payments, heightening its risk of default and endangering its international currency reserves.Other developments:Italy and Spain expelled Russian diplomats on Tuesday, citing security concerns.Hackers are invading Ukrainian websites, broadcasting fake claims that the military has surrendered.Spanish and U.S. authorities seized another yacht owned by a Russian oligarch.Shanghai is battling its worst outbreak since the pandemic began.Chen Si/Associated PressShanghai modifies Covid policyIn a reversal, Shanghai officials will allow parents who test positive for the coronavirus to stay with their children who have also tested positive. Those families will be sent to centralized isolation facilities.But parents who test negative will still be separated from their infected children, authorities said, citing China’s national virus-control guidelines.The policy change follows days of widespread outcry and online fury: Photos and video began circulating of young children crying at a Shanghai hospital. Some photos showed multiple children sharing a crib in what appeared to be a hallway of the hospital. Many said that the response to the virus was worse than the virus itself.Learn More About France’s Presidential ElectionThe run-up to the first round of the election has been dominated by issues such as security, immigration and national identity.Suddenly Wide Open: An election that had seemed almost assured to return President Emmanuel Macron to power now appears to be anything but certain as the far-right leader Marine Le Pen surges.The New French Right: A rising nationalist faction has grown its coalition by appealing to Catholic identity and anti-immigrant sentiment.Challenges to Re-election: A troubled factory in Mr. Macron’s hometown shows his struggle in winning the confidence of French workers.Behind the Scene: In France, where political finance laws are strict, control over the media has provided an avenue for billionaires to influence the election.A Political Bellwether: Auxerre has backed the winner in the presidential race for 40 years. This time, many residents see little to vote for.Private Consultants: A report showing that firms like McKinsey earned large sums of money to do work for his government has put Mr. Macron on the defensive.Officials called the response a clarification of their parental-accompaniment policy, but the hospital acknowledged the photos and video were real and did not deny that Covid-positive families were being separated.Reaction: Many Weibo users were not appeased, sharing frustrations under a hashtag viewed more than 80 million times. Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.After two years, South Africa ended its national “state of disaster” over the virus.U.S. senators dropped a proposal for $5 billion in global vaccine funding from a coronavirus aid package that is now focused on the domestic response.The presidential campaign is heating up, days before the first round of voting begins.Philippe Lopez/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTensions precede French voteThe February death of a Jewish man, Jérémy Cohen, has become a political flashpoint days before French citizens head to the polls to cast their initial ballots for president on Sunday.The death was initially reported as an accident — Cohen, 31, died after being hit by a tram. But this week new video surfaced, showing Cohen running across the tracks in a Paris suburb to escape a violent assault by a group of young men.The video raised suspicions that an antisemitic assault had precipitated his death, which some see as a symbol of the problems facing France. Politicians on the far right have been the most vocal; Éric Zemmour, an anti-immigrant pundit whose campaign has recently flagged, brushed over the unknowns, using the incident to depict France as a crime-ridden country.Background: In 2017, weeks before President Emmanuel Macron’s election, a man threw a 65-year-old Jewish woman named Sarah Halimi out of her window. The drawn-out case exacerbated longstanding concerns in the French Jewish community that authorities minimize or mishandle attacks against Jews.What’s next: Macron is widely expected to make it past the first round of voting, but the latest polls show that his lead in a potential runoff against Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, is dwindling and his promises to revitalize industrial areas have yet to materialize.Context: Zemmour is Jewish, although his rise — propelled by attempts to rehabilitate France’s Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis during World War II — has split France’s Jewish community.THE LATEST NEWSWorld NewsRights groups say Ali Kushayb, on trial at The Hague, led the brutal campaign in Darfur. International Criminal Court/EPA, via ShutterstockTwo decades after a brutal campaign against a rebellion in the Darfur region of western Sudan displaced millions, the first and only war crimes trial is underway in The Hague.French, American and European officials condemned a reported civilian massacre in Mali, carried out by Malian soldiers and Russian mercenaries.The U.S. economy is booming, but economists are worried about a recession.What Else Is HappeningElon Musk will join Twitter’s board of directors after becoming the company’s largest shareholder.March Madness is over: Kansas won its fourth men’s N.C.A.A. basketball championship with a 72-69 comeback victory over North Carolina.A Morning ReadStarling murmurations can consist of hundreds of thousands of birds.Soeren SolkaerEach spring and autumn, swirling flocks of starlings fill the skies in southern Denmark, an event known locally as “sort sol,” or “black sun.” The photographer Søren Solkær captured the transfixing patterns.Who Is Running for President of France?Card 1 of 6The campaign begins. 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    France’s Far Right Turn

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.With only one month to go until France’s presidential election in April, the office of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French far-right party the National Rally, sent the usual Sunday email outlining her schedule for the coming week as “candidate for the presidency of the Republic.” Unfortunately for Le Pen, many of its recipients were at that moment en route to a rally for her rival, where several formerly trusted members of her inner circle would fill the front row. Ever since Éric Zemmour, a far-right pundit and former newspaper columnist, declared his own candidacy for president last November, members of Le Pen’s party had been departing in a steady trickle for his. And yet there was something particularly plaintive in Le Pen’s notification. A final defection was expected that day — that of her niece, Marion Maréchal, quite likely spelling the end of Le Pen and of her party’s hold over the far right.Emmanuel Macron’s presidential victory as an independent five years ago shook up France’s multiparty system. As parties on the right and left fractured and regrouped, the National Rally remained largely constant. Now Zemmour and Maréchal’s alliance, with its “anti-wokisme” and its appeals to anti-immigrant sentiments, has forged a revanchist politics that captures a notable shift in the public mood. As the far right enjoys its greatest cultural primacy in France in 75 years, it is Zemmour and his followers, not the National Rally, who are defining the future of the French right wing, even if no one expects him — or any other right-wing candidate — to wrest the presidency from Macron.For the last half-century, French nationalism has operated as a family business. Marine’s father (Maréchal’s grandfather), Jean-Marie Le Pen, helped found the party, which until recently was known as the National Front, in 1972 and led it until Marine took over in 2011. In 1992, Maréchal appeared in a campaign poster as a startled blond toddler held aloft in her grandfather’s arms. Twenty years later, Maréchal was elected to the National Assembly as a representative of the party. At 22, she was the youngest member of Parliament in the history of the modern French Republic. “The Le Pen name is a brand,” Maréchal, now 32, told me last fall. “It has been both my handicap and my advantage. I wouldn’t have been elected without it.”Maréchal’s impending betrayal of her aunt, with its tantalizing mix of political ambition and familial wounds, had been a subject of media speculation for weeks. Le Pen alliances are famously rocky, and the family’s treacheries have for decades delighted the French media. In 1984, Jean-Marie’s wife left him, later sharing their private frictions in the pages of French Playboy. And in the late ’90s, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s deputy, who believed the boss’s taste for Holocaust jokes was preventing the party from becoming a serious political force, attempted to depose him. In 2015, Marine kicked her father out of the National Front for the same reason. They didn’t speak for months. (Eventually, they reconciled.)On that early March Sunday, Maréchal chose to announce her support for Zemmour and his party, Reconquête (Reconquest), in Toulon, a small, luminous city with an important naval base on the French Riviera. I had previously attended Zemmour’s rallies only in the north of France, and those were high-security affairs, where the gendarmerie marked off a wide perimeter around the venue and formed riot lines behind the barriers against potentially violent protesters. In the south, you could walk freely up to the entrance of the stadium. Cliques of young people streamed across town to the arena, joining the other well-dressed attendees — tailored coats, red Dockers, boat shoes, in sharp contrast to a National Rally event, where black leather jackets and tattoos are the norm. Zemmour, who is 63, had no prior political experience, but as a best-selling author he was used to giving sold-out book talks and knew how to make people feel as if they were at an exclusive event.Maréchal left the National Rally in 2017, taking time out from politics to work in the private sector. There had long been reports that she was being sidelined, partly because her popularity was seen as a threat, but also because her positions differed from the party line. Still, her retreat from the National Rally was based on a calculation shared by many: that her aunt, having lost in the two previous presidential elections, was incapable of winning. As Zemmour’s candidacy evolved, it became clear that a primary goal was to end Marine Le Pen’s control over far-right politics in France, by breaking through the cordon sanitaire that the mainstream political establishment had erected around the Le Pen family for decades, and ultimately to remake the French right.Le Pen, who is 53, has positioned herself as an economic populist, seeking to attract working-class voters from across the political spectrum, caring little if they identify as right or left. Zemmour and Maréchal reject not only the tactic but also the principle behind it. Conservatism, they assert, is still an organizing social force, reflecting a timeless understanding of how we live. In a world of liberal overreach, they believe, the appeal of their hard reactionism is broader than ever. “Despite everything, these currents continue to direct French political life,” Maréchal told me. “In people’s minds, it’s the nation, authority, family, heritage, preservation. Broadly speaking, that’s our identity.” That evening in Toulon, wearing white and six months pregnant, she blew kisses from the stage to an enthralled crowd and delivered a 20-minute declaration on the meaning of the nation. It was her first stump speech in five years, meant without any doubt to symbolize a rebirth, not only personal but also of a new nationalist movement.In France, political identities tend to coalesce around views of the past and, on the right in particular, around the father of modern France, Charles de Gaulle. Some of the original members of the National Front collaborated during World War II with Nazi Germany, as de Gaulle fought from exile to liberate the country. And in the 1970s, one of the party’s founding principles was a rejection of de Gaulle’s decision as president to withdraw France from colonial Algeria. This history has always put the National Rally at odds with the urban conservative bourgeoisie, which sees itself as heir to the Gaullist tradition — nationalist, out of an old-fashioned sense of pride and duty; republican, despite a certain nostalgia for the aristocracy — and would never vote for a Le Pen. These are Zemmour’s people, and increasingly, despite her lineage, Maréchal’s.Maréchal, who has continued to dodge precise questions about her political future as she campaigns full-time for Zemmour, is sometimes called the “fantasy” of the right, a double entendre that captures her political currency and symbolic importance. One meaning refers to what some regard as her unique potential to draw the bourgeois voters that have flocked to Zemmour and the working-class voters that back Marine Le Pen, both of which are needed to win. The other is usually invoked obliquely, with the word “photogenic.” If it’s taboo to remark on the sex appeal of a female politician in 2022, it would also be disingenuous to pretend that it isn’t a strategic element of Maréchal’s public persona. In Toulon, every supporter I spoke to offered up some euphemism when asked what they thought of her presence there that evening, then, when pressed, said what they really meant: “So young! So pretty!” Maréchal plays it both ways. By all accounts she is a serious and studious person. But she was 22 when she was elected to the National Assembly in 2012, and photos of her from that time, long blond hair swept to one side or, better yet, blowing in the wind against a backdrop of pastoral France, her face fixed in an expression of concern or confident command, are still used frequently by right-wing groups.Éric ZemmourPhoto illustration by Matthieu BourelAfter she left the party, Maréchal co-founded a new school based in Lyon, the Institute for Social Sciences, Economics and Politics (ISSEP), and became its director. ISSEP, an unaccredited private institution offering advanced degrees in business administration and public policy with a conservative orientation, opened its doors in 2018. (Around that time, Maréchal dropped “Le Pen” from her hyphenated last name.)ISSEP operates inside a small commercial building across the street from a funky urban-renewal project near the river at the southern edge of Lyon. When I went there to meet Maréchal, I was prepared to be greeted coolly, the usual reaction of a Le Pen to a journalist from what would be regarded in France as a mainstream, center-left publication. But Maréchal met me at the door with a smile. She introduced me to the administrative staff and to a handful of students working at cafe tables in the back. She was extremely casual, in gray skinny jeans and a white cable-knit sweater, her hair in a low ponytail. I’d attended several events where she was on the program, and I never saw her ill at ease. “Distance creates prestige,” Maréchal said, echoing de Gaulle, when I remarked that she had been out of politics for five years but everyone was still talking about her. “They’re projecting their fantasies onto me.”Early on, Maréchal established a reputation not only as a nationalist but also as a Catholic. The Le Pen dynasty had always been secular, a tradition that Maréchal bucked after spending two years at a Catholic school in Saint-Cloud, the upscale western suburb of Paris where Jean-Marie Le Pen owns an estate. Maréchal went on to study law at the University of Paris but was unable to complete her degree after she was elected to the National Assembly.In 2015, she enrolled in a seminar at a private institute in the Seventh Arrondissement of Paris, a neighborhood populated by “tradis,” traditional Catholic bourgeois families. Two years earlier, many of the students at the institute had joined young Catholic conservatives organizing against a law that legalized same-sex marriage. More than 150,000 people mobilized in the streets of Paris in protest, in a demonstration called Manif Pour Tous, or Protest for All. Maréchal supported Manif Pour Tous right away. By contrast, Marine Le Pen did not join in. Le Pen “always said that she wasn’t on the right or the left,” Maréchal told me. Maréchal saw things differently, and this made her welcome in conservative Parisian circles in a way that Le Pen was not. She became particularly good friends with Jacques de Guillebon, a Catholic writer with Corsican roots and a talent for skewering liberal conventions.De Guillebon was also friendly with a cohort of young right-wing intellectuals who became prominent media figures in the aftermath of Manif Pour Tous.“At that moment, we realized that our beliefs were shared by a large number of people, and there was a need to go and defend those beliefs in the media,” Geoffroy Lejeune, the 33-year-old editor of the far-right weekly magazine Valeurs Actuelles, told me. “And the media, the big television networks, realized that this represented something in the country, and they needed to allow us to speak.” Lejeune and other young conservatives staked out their positions on TV and in magazines. Maréchal, who had been in the National Assembly for about a year, became a political patron.De Guillebon, who was enjoying the perks of success, introduced Maréchal into networks where Zemmour was also a frequent V.I.P. “Paris is the center of everything,” Maréchal told me. “It’s not that way in every European country, but Paris is the economic, cultural and political center of the country. And when you’re politically nonexistent in Paris, it’s very complicated to succeed.”Maréchal thrived in this milieu; unlike her grandfather, who came from a small fishing village, she was not an arriviste but the scion of an entrenched dynasty. “She knows the codes,” Charlotte d’Ornellas, a journalist at Valeurs Actuelles, told me. Crucially, Maréchal also “had a hunger for intellectual questions,” says Eugénie Bastié, another young conservative journalist who worked with Zemmour. “She cultivated that dimension of herself, a depth that her aunt doesn’t have.” Le Pen famously floundered in a debate against Emmanuel Macron in 2017, an embarrassment from which she struggled to recover. “We have this need for our political figures to be intellectuals,” Bastié said. “Someone who doesn’t make us ashamed.”Yet Maréchal still possesses the Le Pen hardness. She can rally the masses with the kind of primal emotion that can only be credibly acquired from a sense of grievance, from the experience of being treated as a social pariah as the Le Pens still are in some circles. This was the elusive ideal: to be both intellectual and woman of the people. The speech that Maréchal delivered in Toulon displayed an ability to wrap the words of the nativist in elegant rhetoric. She observed that, of the three traits of the French Republican trinity, “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” only the last couldn’t be imposed by law. “Fraternité is a sentiment of attachment,” she said, and concluded, “it is fragile.”During last fall’s primaries, nearly 40 percent of French voters expressed a preference for a candidate promoting far-right ideas. Remarkably, nearly everyone I spoke with agreed, more or less, on how France had arrived at this point. “If public opinion is at this level, it’s because Zemmour has been talking about it for such a long time,” Erik Tegnér, a 28-year-old who runs Livre Noir, a new right-wing media outlet on YouTube, told me.Like their American counterparts, Zemmour and Maréchal like to denounce the liberalism of cultural institutions, namely the media and academia. Paradoxically, they cite Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist philosopher, and his theory of “cultural hegemony” to explain how beliefs expressed by the ruling class trickle down to become cultural norms. They have taken up the battle of ideas within mainstream institutions with zeal. Zemmour, the son of North African Jewish immigrants, has long had a platform from which to trumpet the importance of assimilation and being French: He was formerly a columnist at France’s most important conservative daily newspaper, Le Figaro, as well as a longtime TV talk-show host and a regular radio commentator. In 2019, he was given a prime-time spot on CNews, the Fox News-like channel owned by the magnate Vincent Bolloré.Last October, CNews invited Renaud Camus, the source of the “grand remplacement,” or “great replacement,” conspiracy theory (which has been picked up across the Atlantic by commentators like Tucker Carlson), onto its Sunday evening show. Camus’s argument holds that the white French population is being replaced by a nonwhite, non-French population. “More and more these last few years, thinkers and polemicists, people with a huge impact, have contributed to an opening of what we call the Overton window,” Tegnér said, referring to a shift in what’s considered acceptable discourse. D’Ornellas, of Valeurs Actuelles, agreed, pointing out that 15 years ago, the term “ ‘identity’ was absolutely a dirty word. Now it’s pretty much normal to talk about it.”Some of this shift in French public life can be traced to the Islamist terror attacks that have devastated France, beginning in 2015. In January of that year, 12 people were murdered at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, which regularly published cartoons of Muhammad, by two brothers who regarded these depictions as violations of the Islamic strictures forbidding representations of the prophet. Ten months later, a group of young Muslim men, many of whom had traveled to the Middle East to join the Islamic State, staged a coordinated assault on the Bataclan concert hall and other venues in and around Paris that left 130 people dead. In the emotional aftermath, there was a public outcry about young Muslims not integrating into French society.Many of those “who were supposed to be on the left decided that fighting for the Republic, for laïcité, goes beyond right and left,” says Éric Fassin, a sociologist at the University of Paris 8 and a frequent left-wing commentator. Prominent left-leaning intellectuals formed a collective to battle Islamist extremism. This was to be done, they argued, by reinforcing the principle of laïcité, commonly translated as “secularism,” the French legal doctrine that protects private religious practice from state interference — and that, since the 1980s, as French Muslims became a more visible public presence, has been interpreted to mean that public life should be free from overt religious expression.Fassin argues that in recent decades, ostensibly left-leaning governments have taken up these battles and allied themselves with the right. Last fall, Macron’s education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, founded the Laboratory of the Republic, a government-organized think tank meant to further the ideals of laïcité, proclaiming that “The veil itself is not desirable in French society” and decrying “le wokisme” as an American import. In 2013, Manuel Valls, interior minister to the Socialist president François Hollande, called for systematically deporting Roma, who are European Union citizens, from the country. Under Valls, the state was successfully sued for racial profiling in policing, but Valls appealed the decision by arguing that the practice was justified because Black people and Arabs are more likely to be foreign and therefore in the country illegally. This is not so far from what Zemmour was saying, Fassin noted. (In 2011, Zemmour was convicted in court of incitement to racial hatred for stating on TV that the police disproportionately stop minorities because “most dealers are Blacks and Arabs.”) Fassin went on: “So if we want to understand why Zemmour can say what he’s saying, you have to look at that.”The left claimed upholding laïcité was necessary to oppose Islamist extremism, while the right stopped pretending that laïcité was neutral at all. Conservatives like Zemmour openly use the doctrine as a tool to delegitimize Islam. He tells his audiences that under his presidency, he would “not want to hear the voice of the muezzin,” the person who issues the Islamic call to prayer, while simultaneously extolling France’s “Christian heritage.” Part of the waning enthusiasm for Marine Le Pen has been because of her insistence that “Islam doesn’t have the right to express itself in the public sphere, but neither does Christianity,” de Guillebon, now the editor of the right-wing magazine L’Incorrect, told me.As leftist politicians have shifted rightward, the right has become practically indistinguishable from the far right. In early November, Les Républicains, the supposedly center-right mainstream party, held its first primary debate. Opening a segment on immigration, the moderator asked the candidates if they would use the term “grand remplacement.” Some hesitated, but not a single candidate dismissed the idea. “Sixty-seven percent of the French use it,” Éric Ciotti, a member of Parliament from the south, which tends to be more conservative, said with a shrug. “It’s useless to deny reality.” The moderator continued to press the point: Was France witnessing the replacement of one population by another population? “I don’t like that expression,” Michel Barnier, the former Brexit negotiator for the E.U., said, but he allowed that the French sometimes had a feeling of no longer being “at home.” Valérie Pécresse, who went on to win the nomination of Les Républicains, said she didn’t like the phrase because it “implies that we’re already screwed.”The trauma of ongoing terror attacks has created a highly-charged environment. In October 2020, Samuel Paty, a middle-school teacher in a Paris suburb who in a class on freedom of expression showed his students Charlie Hebdo’s Muhammad cartoons, was beheaded by an 18-year-old Chechen Muslim refugee who had recently been given permission to stay in France for 10 years. A few weeks later, a Tunisian man fatally stabbed three people in a church in Nice; the man entered France days earlier carrying documents that identified him as a refugee. It was an environment in which “reasonable people decided that to be reasonable, you had to agree with unreasonable people,” Fassin said. They were made to feel that if they weren’t against the so-called Islamo-leftists, a way of branding those on the left as Islamophilic for cautioning against anti-Muslim bigotry, then they were “complicit with terrorism,” Fassin said. “And, of course, that has consequences. Intimidation, basically.”The left had failed to articulate what it meant to be on the left, Fassin said, to offer a different vision in response to real challenges. “The ideas of humanism and solidarity have weakened in the public debate,” Vincent Martigny, a professor of political science at the University of Nice, told me. Of the left, d’Ornellas said: “They have refused to get into any questions of security, immigration or Islam. Every time those topics come up, they say, ‘Those are right-wing topics.’ So people say to themselves, ‘OK, then I’m on the right.’” For the left, Fassin said, the lack of boundaries is fatal: “If you’re on the left, you have to make sure that people see that the left is different from the right. If you’re on the right, you don’t need that. On the contrary, it’s better if it’s blurred.” As a result, the far right has been able to set the terms of debate. “We are still far from dominant,” d’Ornellas told me. “But you could say at least that for the first time, we are in a position to contest the liberal cultural hegemony.”Maréchal and Zemmour have long proselytized for what they call the union des droites, the joining of disparate right-wing factions behind a single leader. This could happen either by fusing the center-right party and far-right parties, though that is considered highly unlikely, or, more probably, by joining the most right-wing voters of the center to those on the far right.Polling suggests that the way to appeal to all conservative voters, urban and bourgeois as well as working class, is by talking about, or more precisely railing against, immigration. This is something that Zemmour has always done. He is an ideologue, and he built his career on a singular obsession. It is hard to say what is electoral strategy and what is Zemmour being Zemmour.Most of the supporters I’ve spoken to at Zemmour’s events since last fall have tried to convince me that he is a mainstream conservative, as if by virtue of not being a Le Pen, he couldn’t possibly be on the far right. In reality, Zemmour is one of the most prominent promoters of grand remplacement. He has asked whether “young French people will accept to live as a minority on the land of their ancestors,” a concern Maréchal shares. Recently, she noted that it was possible that “in 2060 the historic native people could be minorities on French territory.” Maréchal told me that the identity question is central to the election, that “for the French it is a vital question, they feel it in their flesh, a vital threat that gives them anxiety.” She explained that it was “because they have the feeling that in several years France will no longer be France, because the population will have largely changed, it will be majority-Muslim, it will no longer be France as we’ve known it.” She went on: “Often, Muslim women who wear the full-body veil or burqa are reproached: ‘If you want so much to live like in Afghanistan or in Iraq, then go live in Afghanistan or Iraq.’“This kind of provocation,” she continued, “gives the French the feeling that they’re trying to impose a foreign culture, against the most basic traditions, the visibility of the face in public, and the equality of men and women. So, if you want to attack that on the pretext of individual liberty, it’s an insult to what we are, to our way of life, to our country.”Officially, France promotes an “assimilationist” model. This means that anyone can be French, so long as they adopt French cultural norms. The origins of this code date to the 19th century, when the French government, in order to form a cohesive nation-state, imposed unifying measures on different regional identities. “French culture,” in other words, was created. This history has made the French more willing to accept that the state should play a role in countering fragmentation and individualism. This helps explain why centrists like Macron inveigh against American “identity politics” even when they don’t embrace far-right talking points. “We have a need for unity,” Bastié, the conservative journalist, told me, noting that the role of the Catholic church in public life had also been reduced in the name of these principles. In this context, the fact that Zemmour is of North African Jewish heritage works to his advantage. “He knows what he’s talking about,” Maréchal told me. “He has legitimacy. He is the son of immigrants, he knows what it means to assimilate, to give up part of your identity in order to become French.”But it would be a mistake to conclude from this that the emerging French right is interested in neutral statism; on the contrary, it wants to assert the primacy of a particular notion of Frenchness — part historical, part phantasmagorical. “I think people on the right are exasperated by the idea that we put all the religions on the same level,” Bastié said. “The right has turned the page on this kind of relativism. We have a specific Judeo-Christian heritage that we must assume. Only Europe and the West refuse to assume their own heritage. A Muslim country would never say that its heritage isn’t Muslim.”The French far right, like its American counterparts, has taken an interest in the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban. Orban’s calls for a Europe that rejects multiculturalism and asserts its “Christian heritage” were always meant to attract the attention of Western European conservatives. Zemmour and Maréchal visited Budapest together last fall, and Marine Le Pen made a showy campaign stop there. But their support for Orban and his allies in the Polish government goes beyond rhetoric. On matters of immigration and asylum, E.U. law, which regulates the qualifications for asylum in member states, takes precedence over the laws of nations. The right claims that this prevents France from enacting the kinds of immigration controls it believes are necessary. As a result, many right-wing politicians support the Central European governments’ refusal to abide by E.U. directives on immigration and their fight to assert their sovereignty, currently playing out in E.U. courts. Right-wing candidates have promised that, if elected, their first move would be a referendum to insert a national-sovereignty clause into the Constitution. “We need to offer a democratic response to people on all these questions of immigration, security, crime,” Bastié told me. “If there’s no democratic response, there could be a temptation to topple over into something else — a refusal of democracy.”The French electoral system is set up in such a way that Zemmour almost certainly cannot win. If no candidate gains an outright majority in the first round of voting, the two top candidates move on to a second round of voting, in which the winner must clear 50 percent. It is highly unlikely that Zemmour, or any far-right candidate, can cross that threshold. But he may accomplish his goals nonetheless. The real reason for Zemmour’s candidacy, Lejeune, the editor of Valeurs Actuelles, told me, was to lay the foundation for a future movement. The defections from Le Pen’s party were happening because “they think that even if Zemmour loses, Le Pen is going to lose no matter what,” Lejeune told me. “So he will leave behind a base that’s much more inclusive than the National Front on its own.” Pécresse’s center-right party has also been sinking in the polls and is at risk of becoming obsolete. Which makes it even more likely that Zemmour and Maréchal, whether she runs again for public office or not, and regardless of vote tallies, are setting the tone for whatever comes next.Marine Le Pen.Photo illustration by Matthieu BourelMost French Muslims would most likely say that they are not surprised by the harsh turn in the national mood, but they are no less disturbed by it. Some have been trying to mount an organized response. Last fall, Felix Marquardt — a half-American, half-Austrian Paris-born author, former media strategy consultant and semiprofessional networker who converted to Islam when he married a Tunisian woman — decided to bring together prominent French writers and artists who are Muslim to counter the frenzy over immigration.Marquardt persuaded an acquaintance to host a gathering of French Muslim intellectuals and a few other guests at his flat in the Seventh Arrondissement. The top-floor apartment sits in an immense amphitheater-shaped building across the street from Les Invalides, the palatial monument housing the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose golden dome filled the living-room window.Marquardt had invited a young philosopher and historian named Mohamed Amer Meziane to give a presentation on his recently published book, in which he argued that Europe, and France specifically, give themselves credit for having modernized during the 19th century. But this was the period of France’s imperial adventures in the Muslim world, which — not coincidentally, he argued — racialized the concept of “religiosity,” rendering it “uncivilized.” After Meziane finished, Marquardt opened up the discussion. Yassine Belattar, a well-known Paris comedian, observed that he thought the upcoming election would break relations among the French. “It’s a referendum for or against Muslims,” he said.Marquardt had also invited to his dinner some non-Muslim friends he thought would be sympathetic to this group. That turned out to be not quite right — they weren’t unsympathetic, but they were defensive. In response to Meziane and Belattar, one such guest stated that there was only one question to be answered, with a simple yes or no: Was being Muslim more important to them than being French? Everyone was citing a survey from 2020 which suggested that 57 percent of young Muslims believed that the law of God was superior to the law of the French Republic. The salon erupted. Marquardt became defensive, feeling, as he later told me, responsible for having invited his Muslim friends there only to see them treated with a standard that would never be applied to Catholics. “If you were a believer, would it be Jesus or Macron, the decisive influence in your life?” he shouted. “Answer that!” From there the evening unraveled. Another of Marquardt’s invitees, a young Muslim academic, stood up and left the room.For all that the French declare that their system, which claims to be race-blind, offers a defense against the kind of tribal identity politics they condemn in the United States, it is rare to hear Muslims spoken of as part of an “us.” As the French political scientist Patrick Weil wrote recently, in the aftermath of World War II, many of those residing in the French colonies came to France as workers. Some were already French citizens, but they were not treated as such. They “discovered that their part in French history was neither known nor shared,” Weil wrote. “Even though they were fully French, they and their children were often discriminated against. Their citizenship was no guarantee.” In the postcolonial era, when ideas about social hierarchy have been overturned, a generation whose ancestors were born under colonialism but who are themselves French-born and highly educated are not keen to be instructed on how to be “French.”Zemmour, a self-styled historian, has nonetheless continued to do so. In many of his books, pop histories whose conclusions have been vigorously contested by academic historians, he displays a famously juvenile fandom of Napoleon and promotes an imperial conception of power. In 2018, he said that he dreams of a French Vladimir Putin, a man who “takes a country that was an empire, that could have been a great power, and tries to restore it.” He also wrote in his 2016 book that “Ukraine does not exist.” At a reading of Zemmour’s that I attended last fall, before he officially declared his candidacy, he gave a long, wide-ranging address, in which one of his many applause-provoking lines was that “Russia is not our enemy.” After Putin invaded Ukraine in late February, however, Zemmour condemned the war and even acknowledged that, in predicting it would never happen, he had been wrong.Putin’s Russia has always been the model for the kind of conservative Christian civilizational state that Zemmour and Maréchal espouse, one ruled by a strong leader who patronizes the church, enforces traditional values and unapologetically rebuffs any kind of rights-based progressivism. In 2019, Maréchal condemned European sanctions imposed on Russia after it illegally annexed Crimea in 2014 and traveled to a Moscow-organized forum there. Le Pen’s party has taken loans from a Russian bank; in 2017, in an attempt to bolster her standing, she met with Putin. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Le Pen’s campaign moved quickly to trash a trove of campaign leaflets that featured a picture of Le Pen and Putin shaking hands at the Kremlin.There is a long antidemocratic history in France, and the extent to which it persists as a political force is underappreciated by Americans. The French Revolution of 1789 overthrew both the monarchy and the aristocratic order that preceded it; but there is a deep-rooted reactionary right that never fully accepted the new republic. It is a sentiment that still resonates in the bourgeois Parisian circles that Maréchal and Zemmour frequent. Maréchal has remarked that France and the Republic are not necessarily the same thing, that the Republic is just one regime, and “France preceded the Republic.”There is nothing to suggest that Maréchal or Zemmour, or Le Pen for that matter, in any way support the recent actions of the Russian government. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Maréchal said that Putin had caused the war. But French voters are clearly questioning their judgment and their loyalties. In March, the polls shifted significantly as prospective voters flocked to Macron.Zemmour has always claimed that to be French means to own, to absorb, to love France’s history. At the rally in Toulon, the speakers who introduced Zemmour and Maréchal, some of them former National Rally members, spoke of France’s past “imperial grandeur” and the war in Algeria.The spirit seemed to carry out into the street. After the event was over, along the palm-lined boulevard in front of the stadium, a small altercation broke out. A couple of young men who tried to get into the event had been turned away. They were jousting with an elderly woman who had attended, and somehow they all ended up taking out their identity cards. She looked white; the young man who was talking to her looked Arab. She was born in Algeria; he was born in France. Yet she told him that though she ate couscous and knew rai, a genre of North African pop music, she was still more assimilated into French culture than he was.The woman wandered away, shaking her head. I stayed to talk to the young man, Salahedin Hamzi, who is 17. He showed me his ID, marked “République Française.” “I have to prove 10 times a day that I’m French,” he said, gesturing to his face. “When I was little, everyone was the same, but as I got older I was made to understand that I wasn’t French.” He was excited and a little agitated from the encounter, and he launched into a long but thoughtful explanation of why Zemmour’s diagnoses were wrong and dangerous and showed that he didn’t understand France’s problems at all.As I stood talking with Hamzi and recording him on my phone, every few minutes someone — a police officer or a male attendee from the event — came over to ask me if I was OK. “You see?” Hamzi said to me. I did. At one point, he was telling me about how, when France was liberated from Nazi occupation in 1944, many of the soldiers that freed Toulon were from the French colonies. What people didn’t understand was that colonial history was French history, he said. As he talked, another Zemmour supporter walked up to check on us. “Did you know about the liberation of Toulon?” Hamzi asked him. The man did not. “It’s OK, it’s not your fault,” Hamzi said. “But you should look it up.” The man said he would. He suggested that Hamzi come to one of Zemmour’s rallies, that they weren’t what he might expect. Hamzi muttered something about being familiar with Zemmour already. I wondered what would happen if they each did what the other had suggested. But I doubted that either of them would.Elisabeth Zerofsky is a contributing writer for the magazine who has reported across Europe. Her features include articles about politics in the banlieues of France and on American conservatives’ infatuation with the prime minister of Hungary. More

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    Éric Zemmour, French Far-Right Candidate, Convicted for Inciting Racial Hatred

    Éric Zemmour, a pundit whose presidential run has upended French politics, had called unaccompanied migrant children “assassins” and “rapists” on television.PARIS — Éric Zemmour, the anti-immigrant far-right pundit who is running in France’s presidential elections, was convicted on Monday on charges of inciting racial hatred after saying on television in 2020 that unaccompanied child migrants were “thieves,” “rapists,” and “assassins.”Mr. Zemmour, who had stood by his comments and said courts should not police political speech, was fined 10,000 euros, or $11,400, by a criminal court in Paris.The verdict represented the third conviction and fine for Mr. Zemmour, who has a long history of incendiary comments, mostly about immigration, over the past decade, though he has been acquitted on other occasions.Mr. Zemmour has repeatedly run afoul of French laws that punish defamation or acts provoking hatred or violence on the basis of race, religion and other factors over the past decade, and he still faces several trials on similar charges.In a statement announcing that he would appeal Thursday’s conviction, Mr. Zemmour said that the court had issued an “ideological and stupid” ruling against a “free spirit.”“We want the end of this system that tightens the noose around freedom of expression and democratic debate a bit more each day,” he added.Mr. Zemmour surged in the polls before even announcing his presidential bid in November, and he has scrambled mainstream French politics with his fiery nationalist rhetoric and apocalyptic tone, but his campaign has lost momentum in recent weeks.With the elections about three months away, Mr. Zemmour has struggled to get the official backing of at least 500 elected representatives — a requirement to appear on the ballot in the presidential election. He now stands at about 13 percent in the polls, in fourth place, while President Emmanuel Macron, who was elected in 2017 and is widely expected to run to stay in office, is polling first.Mr. Zemmour has explicitly fashioned himself as a French-style Donald J. Trump, with inflammatory comments and attacks against the news media and French elites that have repeatedly drawn outrage and have fueled his rise to prominence.The case was rooted in comments that Mr. Zemmour made in September 2020. Appearing on CNews — a Fox-style television network that has grown by giving airtime to right-wing pundits to rail on issues like crime, immigration, climate and Covid — Mr. Zemmour was asked about minors who immigrate to France from Africa or the Middle East without parents or guardians and often end up isolated as they face the hardships of city streets or squalid camps.“They don’t belong here, they are thieves, they are assassins, they are rapists, that’s all they are,” Mr. Zemmour said. “They should be sent back, they shouldn’t even come.”Politicians and antiracism groups quickly condemned the comments, and prosecutors opened an investigation based on the laws that prohibit defamation and provocation.Mr. Zemmour’s lawyer had moved to dismiss the charges, arguing during the trial, held in November, that unaccompanied children migrants were not an ethnic or racial group.Arié Alimi, a lawyer for the French Human Rights League, a plaintiff in the case, told reporters at the courthouse that Mr. Zemmour’s politics were based on “hatred” and the stigmatizing of people “because of their origins, their religion or their race.”“It’s an important ruling, because he has to understand that we won’t let it stand,” Mr. Alimi said.Learn More About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 6The campaign begins. More

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    Macron and Scholz Meet and Call for More ‘European Sovereignty’

    The new German chancellor made his first foreign stop in Paris, where the two leaders discussed a more independent, bolder Europe.PARIS — On the face of it, President Emmanuel Macron, a showman, and Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a study in reserve, would not be natural companions. But the world has changed, and for France and Germany the imperative of building what they call a “sovereign Europe” has become overwhelming.So Mr. Scholz, who took over from Angela Merkel on Wednesday, chose France as his first foreign destination, not only because that tends to be what newly installed German chancellors do, but also because, as he said standing beside Mr. Macron in Paris on Friday, “We want to reinforce Europe, work together for European sovereignty.”The two men, who first met in Hamburg, Germany, in 2014, held a working lunch at the presidential palace that reflected “the essential need to meet quickly,” as Mr. Scholz put it afterward at a 20-minute news conference. “Our first exchanges demonstrated a solid convergence of views,” Mr. Macron said.Their tone was serious but convivial, with Mr. Macron referring repeatedly to “dear Olaf” and using the less formal “tu,” rather than “vous,” when addressing the chancellor. At the end of the news conference they fist-bumped — a far cry from the image of President François Mitterrand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl holding hands on the battlefield of Verdun in 1984, but a Covid-era indication of friendship.Mr. Scholz’s embrace of “European sovereignty” was surely music to Mr. Macron’s ears, as the French president prepares to take over the rotating six-month presidency of the European Union on Jan. 1. The bloc faces an immediate crisis as Russia builds up troops on the Ukrainian border and the pandemic refuses to wane.Asked about the Russian buildup, Mr. Scholz said, “It is clear to all of us that there is no alternative to de-escalation.” Mr. Macron, who seemed skeptical of any imminent Russian threat, said, “We must avoid all useless tension.”Mr. Macron’s vision for a Europe of “power,” backed by real European military and technological capacity, tends toward the grandiose. Mr. Scholz may not like that style — his German government coalition prefers the more prosaic “enhancing European capacity to act” — but the general goal is intensely shared, perhaps more so than in the later Merkel years or at any time since the Cold War.The distance from shared goals to shared action in the European Union is always great because 27 countries have to be aligned. Still, the trauma of Covid-19 and its accompanying economic challenges have brought urgency, as has a sense of European vulnerability in a more unstable world where American leadership is no longer assured.Demonstrations in Frankfurt last week after Germany imposed new Covid regulations.Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters“I’m more optimistic than I was with Ms. Merkel toward the end,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, a veteran German diplomat. “We have a window of opportunity.”That window may be narrow. Any joint Franco-German plans could be rudely interrupted in April if Mr. Macron is defeated in the French presidential election. He is the favorite, but if France lurched toward the ascendant nationalist hard right, all bets would be off.A German priority in the coming months will be to avoid that outcome, making accommodating gestures toward Mr. Macron more likely.France and Germany have always been the motor of European integration; when they stall, so does the whole project. Although the need to confront the pandemic brought budgetary breakthroughs, Europe has found itself in the shadow of Brexit and internal division while China rose and the United States turned its attention elsewhere.The 177-page coalition agreement of Mr. Scholz’s three-party government alludes to ultimate evolution toward a “federal European state.” Mr. Macron, with the election in mind, has not gone that far — the French attachment to the nation is fierce — but the mere German mention of a United States of Europe suggests new boldness and revived ambition.Still, there are differences. Where Mr. Macron speaks of European “strategic autonomy,” Mr. Scholz prefers “strategic sovereignty.” The difference is not small.“Germans do not want strategic autonomy if that means independence from the United States,” said Cathryn Clüver, the director of the German Council on Foreign Relations.The French president offered some de rigueur praise of NATO when laying out his European presidency program on Thursday. He said it had proved its “usefulness.” But he broadly views European independence as an emancipation from the United States.Germany, intensely attached for historical reasons to the American anchor of European security, is wary of any strategic distancing from Washington. This view is broadly shared in several European Union states, including Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, especially at a time when Russian troops are massed on the Ukrainian border.All this complicates both the meaning and the attainability of whatever European sovereignty may be.A Christmas market in Paris last week as virus cases were rising in Europe.Ian Langsdon/EPA, via ShutterstockFrance and Germany share the view that they preserved a multilateral global system based on the rule of law and Western values while the United States, under former President Donald J. Trump, embraced nationalism and disparaged Europe.Understand Germany’s New GovernmentCard 1 of 6The post-Merkel era begins. More