Even if Macron wins the election, Le Pen has won the ideological war

It was exactly halfway through the nearly three-hour-long TV debate on Wednesday when I noted in the margin of my notebook: “10.25pm – Marine Le Pen knows she has lost.”

Not that Marine Le Pen – despite all she has done to soften her image and rename her party the National Rally, rather than the National Front – was ever likely to win the French election debate. Emmanuel Macron is good at television and knows it. He clearly relishes the cut and thrust of debate, and he had all the advantages of incumbency; the debate was his to lose – and he didn’t.

The turning point came after some pointed exchanges on the economy. Macron had delivered a lecture on the difficult budgetary choices any responsible leader has to make and asked how she proposed to balance the books, before quipping that she should go back to her Russian friends (a reference to the loan the National Front took out with a Moscow bank five years ago). Macron then opened his response to the next question – about healthcare – with an oh-so-presidential expression of thanking workers in the sector. By then it was game, set and match, but still another hour and a half to go.

The surprise, in fact, might not be that Macron won the debate – polls taken immediately afterwards declared him the winner by 59 to Le Pen’s 39 per cent – but that Le Pen looked as credible a contender as she did. And this might be the bigger conclusion to be drawn from the duel.

Debates have been a setpiece of French presidential elections for nearly 50 years, but this was only the second time the same two candidates had faced off twice, which made for some telling comparisons.

Macron has grown up (a bit) while keeping much of his youthful arrogance. In the first hour of the debate, his bored expressions and eye-rolling risked alienating viewers, as some on his side admitted. Meanwhile, Le Pen came across as a normal human being with her conversational style, smile and affability. Macron in contrast seemed arrogant, uninterested and aloof.

Gradually though, he showed a new authority, as he drew on his experience and engaged with the questions he appeared to find more interesting – on the nuts and bolts of economic decisions, foreign affairs, and Islam in France. But it has also to be said that aloofness and arrogance (at least to a degree) are not in themselves disqualifications for a French president.

The same traits helped offset Macron’s youthfulness five years ago: the head of state in France is expected to keep a certain detachment, a certain aura, that sets him – so far not her – apart from the ordinary. Le Pen’s achievement in five years has been different: she has managed to make herself into a more acceptable – or maybe less unacceptable – candidate. She may have lost this year’s debate, but she no longer seems a pretender at the table.

Another contrast between now and then surely reflects the additional years of experience on either side. In 2017, the debate was fought as much on principles as policy issues. As such, it was a classic encounter that deserves a place in courses on politics and civics around the world. Nor was it, as I recall, as one-sided in favour of Macron as has been judged with hindsight. This year’s debate focused more on policy specifics than the big questions. Given today’s challenges, from the aftermath of Covid to rising prices to the war in Ukraine, that is probably no bad thing.

Something else stood out from this year’s French presidential debate: the extent to which the far-right – or at least Le Pen’s brand of far-right politics – is now embedded in the French mainstream.

Twenty years ago, all of France – or so it seemed to non-National Front voters – was shocked to the core when Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, reached the run-off against Jacques Chirac, after relegating the Socialist Party candidate Lionel Jospin to third place. There was no debate that year, 2002, because Chirac refused to sit at the same table as the National Front, called for unity against what he regarded as the threat from the far-right, and ended up winning a landslide. That was then.

The response, when Marine Le Pen reached the run-off five years ago, was calmer, but still more than tinged with alarm. This year, even the hint of alarm has almost vanished. Le Pen’s main rival for the run-off slot was not the Gaullist candidate, but Jean-Luc Melenchon of the hard-left, and it is his votes that are in contention in the last days of this campaign.

The change may be explained in part by Marine Le Pen’s – largely superficial – makeover. But it also reflects how far the erstwhile National Front has become a “normal” strand of French politics. And nowhere was this normality more evident than in what was perhaps the most compelling part of the debate: on Islam and women in France wearing the headscarf, which Le Pen wants to discourage, if not ban.

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This is not a new discussion in France. Headscarves, among other religious symbols, were banned in French schools to much controversy in 2004. Full-face veils were banned in public spaces in 2010. Macron and Le Pen clashed in their 2017 debate over claims by Le Pen about meetings between Macron and the umbrella organisation for Muslims in France. But the cool, calm way in which the pair debated the significance of the veil, the secular nature of the French state, and acts of terrorism committed in the name of fundamentalist Islam, could presage a lasting change.

What that might be is harder to gauge. Does it mean France is becoming more reconciled than it was to the presence of Islam? Or does it mean, on the contrary, that Le Pen’s brand of right-wing politics has entered the political mainstream and that France as a whole has swung to the right?

And if Le Penism has become acceptable in a way it was not 20 years ago, is that a permanent change, or will it last only so long as a Macron figure dominates the centre-ground, pushing the right and left further to the extremes? For the time being, these are imponderables. But some of the answers should start to emerge in what now looks certain to be Macron’s second term as French president.