Will the French elections reveal a shift to the right?

An election that hardly seemed to be on the UK, or even the European, radar has suddenly sprung into life, with opinion polls suggesting that Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate, could be a lot closer to evicting Emmanuel Macron from the Elysee than anyone had thought.

News that she had narrowed the gap to below four percentage points for the first round and less than two points in the likely run-off, sparked alarm in financial markets and is ensuring that many more eyes will be turned to Paris when the real first-round polls close on Sunday evening.

For months, Macron’s reelection had increasingly been seen as a foregone conclusion, which was surely one reason why the election was attracting far less attention abroad than it deserved. There was a general awareness that Macron had his election prospects in mind when he did something unpopular abroad – imposing new Covid travel restrictions just before Christmas, being so cross about the new US-UK-Australia defence grouping, not doing more to curb small boats crossing the Channel, and seeming determined to keep talking to Moscow, even after Russia invaded Ukraine.

But the election itself seemed to vanish from view even as it approached. It was all over, bar the triumphant singing of the Marseillaise. Now, it might not be. One explanation could be that the electoral boost that Macron received as a safe pair of hands in the early days of the Ukraine war could be wearing off, while his reluctance to cut ties with Moscow might have become an electoral turn-off.

Fears about living standards – now the main theme of this campaign – could also be seen as needing something more drastic than the attentions of a reasonably competent technocrat, such as Macron.

There are many reasons, however, why it is probably still best for outsiders to keep calm and carry on. Opinion polls can be fickle, especially in the last week before an election. It is not just the Le Pen camp that has an interest in talking up her chances of reaching the run-off, which will take place on 24 April, in the likely event that no candidate receives more than 50 per cent on Sunday. A Le Pen scare could be just what is needed to get Macron’s vote out, with worries that overconfidence could keep his voters at home.

In practically every French election that I can remember, the first-round vote is also complicated in other ways: the number of voters who remain undecided, the reluctance of some to divulge their intention to vote for the far-right, and the number of other candidates. This time there are no fewer than 12, including one for the hard left, Jean-Luc Melenchon, who trails Le Pen, but still hopes that he could reach the run-off.

A gruff and shouty champion of social justice, Melanchon has something of Jeremy Corbyn in being a man of the left of a certain age whose particular appeal is to his country’s urban and ethnically diverse youth. Their flag-waving enthusiasm was evident at a big rally in the northern city of Lille on Tuesday night, as was the fact that his rhetoric was directed less at Macron or any rivals on the left, but against Le Pen. It is, after all, Le Pen who he probably has to beat for a second-round place.

And a further complicating factor with the polling is the way just two topics – the cost of living and the war in Ukraine (in that order) – have been dominating the latter stages of the campaign, to the point where most other points of political differentiation have been squeezed out. The 70-point manifesto of the socialist candidate, Anne Hidalgo, who has served eight years as mayor of Paris, seems particularly irrelevant in such circumstances.

Macron, for his part, can boast a reasonable economic record, with record low unemployment and an energy policy that stacks up well against most other European countries, even if trade ties with Russia are cut. So relatively confident was he at the start of the campaign that he even risked some contentious proposals, including a rise in the state pension age to 65, and incentives for recipients of state benefits also to work or accept training. If he is losing support, it could be not only that the war leadership effect is starting to wear off, but that these “right-wing” proposals are partly to blame.

Perhaps the narrowing of the polls, if that is happening, however, has less to do with Macron than with the change in Le Pen that has been registering with the French public as the campaign has gone on. This is also a reason why – although a Le Pen presidency remains unthinkable and indeed repellent to many French voters – it may hold fewer fears than it did, in France or abroad.

And the change in Le Pen over five years since the last election has been truly astounding. She comes across as softer, friendlier, less strident, less dogmatic – and a lot more human than before. In his speeches, Melanchon ridicules the way she has used her pets – seven cats – as part of her new image, but it has done her no harm whatsoever

There are institutional and policy changes, too. The National Front has been renamed the National Rally (which strikes more positive chords in French than it does in English) and the social conservatism and overt racism of her father are no longer in evidence (and were always more part of his pitch than hers). She has also dropped her opposition to French membership of the European Union and the euro, and modified her opposition to French membership of Nato – shifts that have stood her in good stead amid the new-found western solidarity.

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Of course, much of the old National Front remains – not least its hostility to immigration and its attachment to what it would see as a traditional French way of life. But it is no longer impossible to imagine Le Pen as holding national office, even becoming president.

Many erstwhile enemies have noted something akin to statesmanship in the way she held back from any attack on Macron’s response to the war in Ukraine. All this may help to explain why, although the markets were troubled by her rise in the polls, there was nothing like the horrified shock that marked her father’s reaching the second round of the presidential election in 2002.

Both the changes in Le Pen and the narrowing of the polls should also perhaps be seen in a wider context. When Macron won the presidency five years ago, he created a movement, En Marche, which graduated into a party which in many respects spans left and right. There was much scepticism at the time that this remaking of the French electoral landscape would last, even for the five years of Macron’s presidential mandate.

Not only has it lasted, but Macron’s dominance of French politics has pushed most opposition further to the left and right, emasculating the mainstream centre-left and centre-right in the process. Anne Hidalgo for the Socialist party and Valerie Pecresse for the Gaullists are polling at only 2 per cent and 10 per cent respectively. This could be seen as a catastrophe for traditional French politics, marking as it does also a rightward shift in where the centre of French politics might seem to lie.

If, as it looks likely, Macron becomes the first two-term French president for a generation, it could be that the change he inaugurated in 2017 becomes permanent. And if this is so, then the world may have to get used to a France in which the right has more influence than it did, and where that influence is articulated by a certain Marine Le Pen.