‘A populist campaign is one thing, now he needs to do real things as well.’ This could have been an American abroad talking about Donald Trump, except that Trump supporters outside the USA probably keep their sympathies quiet.
The sceptic about the ability of a populist campaigner to tackle ‘real things’ was a young French woman, at a noisy Belfast countdown to Emmanuel Macron’s emergence on Sunday as new French president.
He won by a decent margin, if not the thumping vote that would have made the next month and his first tasks easier. In June’s legislative assembly elections President Macron may well fail to win a supportive majority, experts say, might turn out to have no real power and be hobbled and frustrated as Barack Obama was after similar high-flown rhetoric.
But like a considerable number in other parts of Europe, the young teacher in Belfast was almost giddy with delight that Macron had beaten the National Front’s Marine Le Pen. Even though he is untested, never previously elected, making a party up as he goes along, he offers a less chilling and backward-looking prospectus than Le Pen’s France for the French. What he has strongly opposed is her anti-EU rhetoric, her denial of national responsibility for rounding up French Jews for deportation to concentration camps. What it is that he stands for is still a bit of a puzzle.
These are strange political times. In France the rampagingly right-wing candidate, also a whiz at telling people uncosted and unlikely things they want to hear, failed to win on Sunday, unlike the biggest populist surprise of recent years that was Trump’s triumph. Macron to defeat Le Pen was what the polls firmly predicted. But the best of pollsters failed with Trump.
Queen’s French society and politics department had organised the cheerful gathering to watch Sunday’s results on massive screens, with modest wine and cheese at a fiver a head. (Student life isn’t all about getting hopelessly drunk in the Holyland, as fair thinkers, and those who live elsewhere, have never doubted.) A calm, collected Clare Fegan, president of the French society, started pushing soft settees around with the help of a young brother while in a downstairs space couples – methodically, even gravely - danced the tango. It was the election event that came complete with crashing music and shrieking - music and a 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 countdown not from the well-behaved young audience but from the television coverage. Standard French TV election night practice, apparently, not a special production to welcome the youngest head of state since Napoleon, the first for 60 years from outside the major parties.
Outside the Students’ Union Alasdair McDonnell’s posters went on beaming in the sun, the earliest birds trying to catch the worm of next month’s contest here. The constituency will be one of the most, if not definitely the most tightly fought, seething with bad feeling and unsettled old scores inside both main camps as well as between them. Nothing new there, in truth, whereas French politics is at an unprecedented point. A very different electoral system has produced a very different outcome from the situation and prospects we are closest too; here, in the state across the border, even in fractured, edgy Great Britain.
As the serious young French sceptic put it when the giddy moment passed; ‘the two main parties have been brushed away.’ It became a fight between the National Front’s Le Pen and Macron with his En Marche, On the Move, when they both did better than the representatives of Francois Hollande’s Socialists and the Republican party, never mind lesser candidates.
Macron with his claim to have drawn from the right, the left, the centre, has had the nerve to invoke Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle made his own political fortunes too, but then le Grand Charles did have his war leader reputation.
The young French who have flocked into Britain and Ireland this past decade in search of work are perhaps taken by the young president’s promises to loosen the state’s labour market and reduce unemployment, though others blink at his parallel pledge to cut public service jobs.
Suspend legal immigration, says Le Pen; fluent French to win French nationality, says Macron. He would deepen EU economic integration, Le Pen would take France out of the EU. Some French residents here for decades were sorely disappointed to be denied a vote in the Brexit referendum, made anxious by the result. Sunday’s cheers raised some hearts, whatever the outcome.
