Defeated French Presidential Candidates Line Up to Prevent Le Pen of Winning the Presidency

After the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen reached the second round of the French presidential elections, on 10 April, the losing candidates in the elections called for a halt to her advance in favor of the incumbent president Emmanuel Macron.

The left-wing leader Jean-Luc Melenchon, who came third according to voting results, with 22% behind Macron (27.8%) and Le Pen (23.1%), said that "not even one vote should be given to Le Pen," as he put it.

"I will vote for Macron to prevent Le Pen from taking power and the chaos that will result," said conservative candidate Valerie Pecresse, who tied with environmentalist Yannick Jadot.

"I do not own the votes, but I ask those who voted for me to give me their confidence in the coming days," Pecresse added in the same statement, as the second round of the elections will take place in two weeks.

French Communist Party candidate Fabien Roussel said he would call his supporters to vote for Macron in the second round, and Greens candidate Yannick Jadot expressed his support for Macron in the run-off.

Socialist Anne Hidalgo, whose party was subjected to a "historic blow" by obtaining about 1.7%, conceded its defeat during the first round of the presidential elections, and asked for support in favor of Macron.

"These results and the high rate of abstention from voting show a divided France, and the extreme right is on the cusp of power," she said.

(Al Jazeera)

 

Terrible Void

In an interview with Al-Estiklal the political analyst and expert on international relations in France Smail Khalafallah said: “The outcome of the elections was expected, but what is new is the rapprochement between Macron and Le Pen. Le Pen became a threat to Macron and to classical and well-established parties.”

He explained that Le Pen took advantage of the radicalism shown by Zemmour, because her rhetoric seemed moderate compared to him. However, the most important thing that should be emphasized is that the French political map today encounters a terrible void.

He added: “Today we are witnessing the decline of the old classical parties in contrast to the rise of parties such as Eric Zemmour's, that didn’t even exist a few months ago. We note the disappearance of the Republican Party and the Socialist, who endured a harsh defeat in 2017, and the same thing was repeated in these elections. These classical parties may disappear completely from the French political scene in the future. Against parties that rise through populist rhetoric and through feeding hatred against immigrants and minorities. The disappearance of the old parties and Macron's failures are what helped Le Pen getting those result.”

 

Against the Worst

Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the France Proud movement, received 43.12 % of the votes of the French residing in Morocco in the French presidential elections, followed by current President Emmanuel Macron with 37.41 percent.

According to French media, Eric Zemmour of the far-right came third with 5.49 percent, followed by the leader of the National Front, Marine Le Pen, with 3.85 percent, then the former Minister Valérie Pecresse with 3.16 percent, and Yannick Jadot in sixth place with 3.05 percent.

Jean-Luc Melenchon, was born in 1951 in the Moroccan city Tangiers, of a Spanish mother and a French father. The family was constantly traveling, Melenchon’s two older brothers were born in Algeria, which made the family members have a special appreciation for the Maghreb region, highlighted through their statements, and through the marriage of Melenchon to a Moroccan wife.

Yasser Louati, the French political analyst and head of the Committee for Justice & Liberties, explained that, aiming to counter Macron’s reelection or Le Pen replacing him, Muslim and migrants’ organizations have managed to overcome their differences to work together in a campaign for left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon. Even if he was in the past spreading anti-Muslim racism, the logic behind choosing Melenchon was to opt for the “lesser evil” option.

However, he emphasized, the same rationale was adopted 20 years ago, when people voted for Jacques Chirac in the 2002 elections to block the historic far-right leader Jean Marie Le Pen during the second round. “But to what end? Jacques Chirac passed the law against the Muslim headscarf in public schools and set the stage for the next twenty years of legal Islamophobia. Again in 2017, people rushed to vote for Macron to block Marine Le Pen, with the results we see in front of us.”

 

Deteriorating Democracy

A high rate of abstention was recorded, ranging between 26.2 and 29.1%, according to the estimates of two French institutes, which indicates the increasing alienation of the French from their political elite.

More than one in four voters called to the polls on Sunday April 10 preferred not to vote. By reaching 26.31%, abstention did not finally beat its historical record for a presidential election, but it remains at a very high level.

This percentage exceeds that recorded in 2017, when it reached 22.2%, while the record percentage of abstentions was 28.4%, recorded in 2002.

Just weeks ago, opinion polls pointed to an easy victory for the pro-EU Macron, whose position has been bolstered by his active diplomacy on Ukraine and a robust economic recovery, as well as the weakening and fragmentation of the opposition.

Yasin Aktay the head of the Turkish Group of Inter-Parliamentary Union wrote an opinion article in Yeni Şafak pointing out that despite all the good aspects of democracy as the best model for governance, it has at the same time significant drawbacks.

He stressed that among the most prominent of these obstacles is the high temptation to achieve a gain through populist rhetoric and populist policies, without realizing that attachment to this temptation can eliminate all the good gains of democracy, or make it empty.

He explained that this is the case of France democracy, with the far right populist rise. Especially since the map is too open for those failed politicians with no clear horizon to adopt populist rhetoric as a dirty attempt to appeal to the masses.