Irish Examiner View: Macron faces tough battle in election run-off

The feeling in France is that this is an election president Emmanuel Macron will find considerably more difficult to win than that of five years ago.

French President and centrist presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron. Picture: Lewis Joly/AP.

The late French president, soldier, and statesman Charles de Gaulle once asked: “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” 

This is a pertinent question, especially so following Sunday’s first round of the country’s presidential election, which left the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, and longstanding far-right candidate Marine Le Pen once again facing each other in a run-off for the keys to the Élysée Palace on April 24.

Sunday’s vote left Macron with a 28% share of the vote, against the 23% recorded by Le Pen. That five-point margin is regarded by many as dangerously close and realistic enough for Le Pen to narrow, if not compress completely.

French far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. Picture: Francois Mori/AP

The feeling in France is that this is an election Macron will find considerably more difficult to win than that of five years ago, when he trounced Le Pen by more than 30 percentage points.

Sunday’s poll suggests that, were he to win this time, it would be by a considerably reduced margin of somewhere between four and six points.

Le Pen said the vote later this month would be “a choice of society, a choice of civilization”, but the prospect of her winning the election is once more sending shockwaves around Europe and France. 

For Macron, he wants the public to rally behind a France “that is a strong part of Europe” and not a France which will see “decline for everyone”. 

Many of the defeated candidates on Sunday asked their voters to back Macron. Included among them were leftist candidates Fabien Roussel, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, and Yannick Jadot, but also centre-right contender Valerie Pecresse, whose voters have appeared in the polls to be especially inclined to vote for Le Pen.

The next two weeks are guaranteed to see some brutally rancorous politicking across France. 

So far, the contest has strayed from the ‘predictable remake’ expectation into a thriller. Many are fearful the coming 13 days will see it end up as a horror story. 

Cheese might be the least of their problems.