Under pressure from Marine Le Pen, who is reducing her delay in the polls, Emmanuel Macron launches the battle for the second round without waiting. A way to forget the failure of his first campaign part. The ghosts of Lionel Jospin and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing hover above the presidential stage. Explanations.
© REMY DE LA MAUVINIERE / AP / SIPA
“I don’t have time to think about this campaign politically.” It was in 2002 a few days before the elimination of Lionel Jospin during this disastrous April 21, 2002. Facing the camera of Stéphane Meunier and Jérôme Caza authors of the documentary “Like a thunderclap”, the Prime Minister-candidate evokes this campaign that goes wrong without him managing to correct what is not working. The socialist does not know it yet but he has lost his footing. Twenty years later and against all odds, France holds its breath as the polls narrow between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. And if the president-candidate was preceded Sunday evening at the time of the verdict of the first round?
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Unimaginable two weeks ago, the prospect of a defeat is no longer taboo. The curves in the polls are getting smaller every day. In the daily Ifop-Fiducial survey for Paris Match alone, the gap fell from 13.5 points on March 13 to 3.5 points on Thursday April 7. Ten points lost in twenty-five days. The flag effect, which, following the outbreak of war in Ukraine, allowed Emmanuel Macron to soar in the same polls, has fizzled. The stored advance was just a flash in the pan. The president-candidate, who barely eased off his campaign launched on March 3, is now taken from the back. And forced to work twice as hard in the home straight before the first lap. Here he is appealing to François Mitterrand’s slogan (“United France”) and drawing on the register of anti-fascist rhetoric to break the Le Pen dynamic. To no avail, so far.
By dint of wanting to step over the first round (refusal of debates, minimal presence in the media, travel to the bare minimum…), Emmanuel Macron missed the first part of his campaign. Overhanging and too sure of himself a bit like Lionel Jospin in 2002 or Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1981, he let his rivals Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon unfold. Fortunately on Monday, the counters will be reset. The revenge – if there is because Jean-Luc Mélenchon is not completely offside – will take place. And the outgoing president has assets and reserves of votes (part of the LRs, ecologists and what remains of the PS) for this second round.
“Thinking the campaign politically”
Still, his brief forays during this first-round campaign exposed weaknesses in the Macron brand. “What amazes me, notes the communicator-philosopher Raphaël Llorca, author of a hard-hitting essay “La marque Macron” (ed by L’Aube), is that there is not really a project, not really of story. There was only a succession of sometimes clever signals (the letter to the French, the web-series) but unfortunately without any real content. We see the media strategy but that says nothing about the project and the story, unlike 2017.” If the Elysée communication team had succeeded in the pre-campaign (the Mc Fly and Carlito sequence which allowed it to attract more 18-24 year olds or even the Tour de France), she obviously did not find the right recipe to start the electoral sequence at the beginning of March.
The objects of his campaign will have cruelly highlighted the faults of the president-candidate: his loneliness staged in the series, his arrogance with the refusal at all costs to debate or the lack of new ideas. An absence of “wow” proposals which highlighted on the contrary those which annoy such as retirement at 65 years old. Obviously, we must add the unforeseen with the war in Ukraine which disrupted the initial plans. At first, this conflict on European soil stunned the French, hijacked the news channels of the campaign and mobilized the candidate for the Elysée. It even gave him a distinct advantage. But in a second time, he led this sluggish action and this campaign on the back foot. As if the president-candidate had never entered it before his only late meeting at the Arena Paris-La Défense. From now on, he has no other choice but to review his strategy, to think politically about his campaign to use the words of Lionel Jospin, in order to avoid a bad surprise. For him. And for the French.