27 April 2022

Project Syndicate's Pisani-Ferry: Macron’s Post-Election Dilemma

The challenge confronting France's newly re-elected president is how to give his second-round voters valid reasons to believe that he has listened to them. Fortunately, an opening on three related issues is possible.

French President Emmanuel Macron, re-elected with 58% of the vote, received 85% of Parisians’ votes and three-quarters of those of Seine-Saint-Denis, a working-class district at the outskirts of the capital where 30% of the population is foreign-born. But in the Somme district, where Macron was raised, his far-right challenger, Marine Le Pen, was ahead, and in the Pas-de-Calais, where Macron has a home, she got 58%. In this deeply divided country, there seems to be no better predictor of the vote than distance to metropolitan centers.

Occupational and educational (rather than income) cleavages matter, too. Two-thirds of French workers went for Le Pen and three-quarters of its managers for Macron, according to polling by Ipsos, while three-quarters of university graduates went for Macron, against one quarter for Le Pen. Sociological determinants are compounded by location. France is fast becoming a country where people cluster near their peers. Between 2008 and 2018, the share of managers and high-skill workers in cities like Paris, Bordeaux, or Lyon has increased by four or five percentage points, while lower-middle-class and working-class residents moved out. At a deeper, individual level, satisfaction with one’s life was a key determinant of the vote. Some 80% of those dissatisfied with their life voted for Le Pen.

As documented by Yann Algan of HEC Paris business school and his colleagues, social trust or the lack of it significantly influences voters’ choices. These findings seem terribly familiar. As in the United States, how much you studied and where you live seems to determine for whom you vote, and support for far-right candidates is becoming entrenched among working-class voters. But to stop here would be too simple, because the biggest shock in this election was not the Macron-Le Pen run-off, which was expected, but the devastation of the traditional parties that occurred in the first round. Whereas their candidates jointly gained 56% of the vote in 2012, they received only 6.5% of it ten years later. Among major European countries, only Italy has experienced such an overhaul of the political landscape in recent years....

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