The scene is an exhibition hall packed with 4,000 people last Saturday on the outskirts of Reims, the eastern French city where medieval kings used to hold their coronations. Surrounded by bodyguards, Marine Le Pen walks across the floor to loud, slightly mystical music, fist-bumping flag-waving supporters, towards the stage where a floor-to-ceiling blue M is glowing.

The backdrop to the nationalist politician’s presidential launch echoes the giant V erected by Gen Charles De Gaulle in Paris in 1958 to mark the adoption of France’s current constitution (signifying both Victory in that year’s referendum and the dawn of the V^th Republic). It is also an answer to “The Z”, the nickname used by supporters of Eric Zemmour, who is threatening to outflank Le Pen on her far right in April’s election.

Her hour-long speech rolls out the latest iteration of a well-known political platform centred on “localism” instead of “globalism”, protectionism, and tax breaks for low-paid and rural voters, all to be somehow facilitated by a ban on immigration and the eradication of Islamic influence on French society. These themes have been central to her father Jean-Marie’s five presidential bids between 1974 and 2007. She then took the mantle and, after losing to current president Emmanuel Macron in the 2017 election run-off, is running for the third time – probably the last. 

There is, however, an additional dimension to the event. Le Pen, along with the preceding string of male speakers not previously known for their feminist views, repeatedly appeal to women and say that “the time has come” for a female president. She makes specific promises of additional rights and benefits for single parents, disabled citizens and children with special needs.

Le Pen’s speech ends with an expected attack on Macron, which prompts the crowd to chant: “Without him, without him”. Then something changes. She says: “French people expect solutions from us – without excessiveness, without provocation, without hurting anyone, heightening tensions or piling new problems upon old problems.” The remark targets Zemmour, whose own rallies have sparked brawls with anti-racism activists. Le Pen’s rising competitor was convicted three times for incitement to hatred, most recently last month for accusing unaccompanied immigrant minors of being “rapists”, “thieves” and “murderers” on television.

The Reims event ends with Le Pen stepping out of the limelight and walking closer to the edge of the stage for a carefully scripted, more intimate chat with her supporters. She tells them of her childhood, the three children she raised partly alone, and quotes Nelson Mandela: “I never lose. I either win or learn.”

In the crowd, the candidate’s reassuring tone strikes a chord with Stephanie Dibry, who is attending with her daughter on her lap and says she is here “for the future of my children”. “I know Marine does things properly, I know her words are sincere – unlike other candidates’,” she tells me. This includes “helping French people, whereas we as a country are helping foreigners more than the French”.

Le Pen’s unexpected final act illustrates the challenge facing all leading candidates two months from the French presidential election’s first round. Although the pandemic put an end to mass demonstrations and occupations by the gilets jaunes protest movement that plagued the first half of Macron’s term, anti-establishment sentiment continues to run high in the country.

It morphed into vaccine hesitancy for a while, but that subsided once it became clear quintessential French activities such as sitting at a restaurant table were firmly reserved for fully jabbed citizens. Now activists from both the gilets jaunes and opponents to vaccine certs are trying to rekindle the protests against the backdrop of rocketing fuel prices, in a format inspired by the unfolding Canadian truckers’ blockade of Ottawa. They are urging so-called “Freedom Convoys” to converge on Paris this weekend and Brussels next week.

The election will be the next chance for such widespread frustration to find a political outlet.

For Macron, this has meant lying low, or seizing the opportunity of the Russia-Ukraine crisis to fly to Moscow, face up to Vladimir Putin and elevate himself to the rank of international statesman above the domestic political fray. He is, officially, still not a candidate. My request to receive updates on his party’s campaigning activities while reporting from France this week yielded a single press release: The announcement of an alliance with an obscure local party in the overseas territory of French Polynesia “in support of his re-election”. At least this much was admitted. This strategy’s days are numbered as the deadline to register his appearance on the ballot falls on March 4.

The tense French context has squeezed Le Pen, too. Since taking over from her father – himself no stranger to “excessiveness”, “provocation” and convictions for racist slander – she has driven a relentless “dédiabolisation” of her party, literally distancing it from the devil. This included dropping the original National Front brand in favour of the less bellicose National Rally.

She is now doubling down on this strategy after losing her cool in a televised debate before the 2017 election run-off. The clash scared off voters and ensured Macron’s victory as the reasonable, reassuring candidate. In Reims, she also claims support from multiple “experts” in drawing up a realistic political programme, distancing herself from Michael Gove-style populism.

By gravitating towards the centre to offer a credible alternative to the incumbent, she has left a door wide open on her right.

“I can’t stand the sight of the France I grew up in changing so much – and not in a good way.”

José Sanchez, Le Pen voter

In the audience assembled to listen to Le Pen, I meet 61-year-old José Sanchez, a friendly nature lover with Spanish immigrant heritage who previously voted for the Greens but now supports his son’s activism with the National Rally. “I can’t stand the sight of the France I grew up in changing so much – and not in a good way,” he says. “In my childhood, we weren’t afraid to go out at night, in the summer kids were out until midnight.”

He is also worried about core French values such as freedom and “our lifestyle that is the envy of the world”. Then he adds: “When veiled women don’t mix with men, that is not a culture I like. When I see a fully clothed woman go swimming next to me, it shocks me.”

The fear of Islam that permeates this crowd hits me. As someone who moved out of the country between the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the attack on the Bataclan in 2015, I measure how successful terrorists have been in planting fear of the other among so many of my fellow citizens, and turning it against the establishment.

On stage, Le Pen and her backers detail a plan to outlaw Islamist ideology and political activism as a breeding ground for terrorism, carefully avoiding an attack on Muslims in general – dédiabolisation at work. On the same day in Lille, a few hours’ drive to the north, Zemmour has gathered an even larger crowd and is on a mission to undercut Le Pen by doing away with such precautions. Again, his supporters and opponents are clashing on the surrounding streets.

“The cry of peoples that do not want to die”

Every week, national radio France Inter’s breakfast programme carries an hour-long interview with a presidential candidate. There are so many of them that the station started the series on new year’s week to make sure they could fit before April. This week, Zemmour was on the public broadcaster he had just pledged to privatise after describing it as a vector of “immigrationist, woke and decolonial propaganda”.

All considered, the interview went remarkably well.

The first question was to ask Zemmour whether he regarded populist leaders Donald Trump in the US, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Matteo Salvini in Italy as models. He replied: “You have not mentioned Boris Johnson and I’m surprised, because he is the one I feel closest too culturally and intellectually as a fellow European.”

Zemmour claimed the populist label as carrying “the cry of peoples that do not want to die”. He proceeded to outline his ideology, centred on his catchphrase of the “great replacement” of French nationals by Muslim immigrants. Unusually for a populist leader, Zemmour is steeped in books – he has published 14 himself and quotes liberally from those he reads, starting with American political scientist Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations.

He insists that such existential competition is now at play between Christians and Muslims across Europe and equates French neighbourhoods with strong immigrant communities with “Afghanistan”. Zemmour himself is Jewish and his family moved to mainland France from Algeria when the north African country was a French colony.

Beyond that divergence in rhetorical style, there is very little difference in the concrete measures the two far-right candidates have suggested. They both want to restrict benefits and social housing to French nationals, and public procurement to French businesses; ban new immigrants and carry out selective deportations; stop wind power development and cut taxes on fossil fuels while investing further in nuclear power; restore 20th-century teaching methods in schools; accommodate Russia and pull out of Nato’s military command (but not out of the alliance).

For all his admiration for Boris Johnson, Zemmour intends to keep France inside the European Union. Asked about the prospect of labour shortages if he froze immigration, he said: “I’m not getting out of Europe. So if we really need short-term foreign workers, there are Polish people and all of eastern Europe.” 

Le Pen says nothing else when she promises to turn the EU into “an alliance of sovereign European nations” and supports the Polish and Hungarian governments in their open conflicts with the EU over human rights and the rule of law. While Hungarian Prime Minsiter Viktor Orbán sent a support video played in Reims, Polish leaders currently engaged in a settlement of their dispute and a rapprochement with France and Germany in the face of Russian threats were conspicuously absent.

In a seminal 1954 essay still regarded as a masterpiece of political theory, Les droites en France (The Right Wings in France), René Rémond argued that any political movement on the conservative side of the spectrum since the French Revolution had fallen in any of three categories. His analysis is admittedly dated, but still illuminating.

If we apply it to this year’s election, Zemmour has now captured much of the reactionary streak running from armed monarchist resistance to the Revolution to the Vichy government that collaborated with Nazi Germany. Le Pen has been shifting her base away from that space and into the populism inaugurated by Napoleon, which led to De Gaulle’s presidential republic. And the centre-right candidate Valérie Pécresse is attempting to straddle both this Gaullist heritage and the free-market, pro-globalisation line of thought that traces its roots to the bourgeois inspiration behind the early days of the French Revolution – but has now been largely commandeered by Macron.

“I don’t find it normal that there are as many corporation tax bases – I mean bases, not rates – as there are countries, even as we are in the same single market.”

Michel Barnier

This Sunday, Pécresse, the candidate selected by the Republican party last represented in the presidential office by Nicolas Sarkozy, will launch her own campaign at a large rally in Paris. I visited her headquarters at a trendy industrial building conversion on Thursday as a videographer recorded personal stories from her supporters to be screened at Sunday’s event.

There, I met the EU’s former chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, who lost to Pécresse in the Republican primary and is now in charge of international issues in her campaign. In an interview to be published in full by The Currency next week, he point-blanked refused my suggestion to define the position of Pécresse between Macron’s centrist, pro-business stance and the far-right’s claim to issues surrounding immigration and national identity.

Instead, Barnier pointed to a photograph of De Gaulle on the wall of his office and said: “We have our own convictions that came from the movement founded by Gen De Gaulle and we are proud of its beautiful, great history. Our place is very strong at the centre of the French political spectrum as a party that reflects the country in all its hues: There are people who are more national (I’m not saying nationalists), sometimes sovereignists, others are more liberal and progressive. This is our strength.”

He did, however, go on to elaborate on the differences between Pécresse and Macron, criticising what he sees as the outgoing president’s pose as the sole alternative to the far-right. “I think it has been a major mistake on his part to theorise that there are progressives on one side and extremists on the other; the populists on one side and the Europeans on the other. This is not true. We, the European centre-right are here – the European Popular Party, to which Leo Varadkar’s party belongs.”

Asked about changes that would impact Ireland if Pécresse was elected president, Barnier said they would stem from the lessons learned from Brexit, leading to tighter political control over the Brussels administration – for example, in trade negotiations with counterparts like the South American Mercosur bloc, Australia or New Zealand. “We wish to include mirror clauses in trade agreements so that agricultural products entering the European single market respect the same environmental and other constraints we impose on our agricultural producers,” he said. This position, along with Barnier’s support for a proposed EU carbon border tax on imported industrial products, is also on Macron’s agenda.

On corporation tax – a famous angle of attack on Ireland for Sarkozy – Barnier said his party remained set on banning fiscal dumping within the EU. “I don’t find it normal that there are as many corporation tax bases – I mean bases, not rates – as there are countries, even as we are in the same single market and most of these countries have the same currency. We favour harmonisation, not necessarily upwards, and I think there are reasons to use qualified majority on this topic.”

The French government to emerge out of this year’s election will also negotiate the next Common Agricultural Policy applicable from 2027. The scheme is currently worth €1.5 billion in annual payments to Irish farmers from EU funds. “We generally find a lot of common views and interests between French and Irish farmers,” said Barnier. “What we are worried about in the European Commission’s current orientation is the idea of agricultural degrowth – the idea that to pollute less, you should produce less. In my country, I have been minister for both the environment and, later, agriculture and I think that we must pollute less but produce more.” 

He believes that research and innovation will address environmental challenges associated with the increase in production required to feed 9 to 10 billion people worldwide. “If we Europeans produce less, we give up one of our strategic industries and the Brazilians and Americans will immediately take our place. I can’t see why we would do this. The Americans, Brazilians and Chinese are not naive. We must cease being naive.”

This article’s focus so far on the three challengers to Macron on his right owes to the fact that they are simply the ones who currently stand a chance of facing him in the head-to-head run-off on April 24. Consistent polling suggests the far right is the number one political force in France, but its division between Le Pen and Zemmour offers Pécresse a better chance of squeezing through.

The French left held power under previous president François Hollande, but its demise has been spectacular. The consistent point of agreement between voters of all political persuasions I have met in the country this week is that the plethora of candidates fighting for its scraps is bordering on ridicule.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon has been the most active candidate vying for this constituency, yet he has struggled to reach 10 per cent in recent polls – half his score in the 2017 election. A former member of Hollande’s Socialist Party, he led a breakaway leftist faction after a previous presidential defeat in 2007. His party has since rebranded as La France Insoumise – “Unsubmissive France”.

On Monday, a group of around 400 Mélenchon supporters gathered in Montreuil, a suburb just east of Paris that has been historically synonymous with working-class activism, trade unionism and far-left voting. The town is a patchwork of large multicultural social housing blocks, gentrified neighbourhoods of designer homes and rows of townhouses full of hard-working families and retired factory workers.

Local France Insoumise activists met in the town hall to share out posters and leaflets in preparation for the next two months and listen to a panel of frontbenchers. Mélenchon himself wasn’t there and this was a chance to see his well-oiled grassroots campaigning machine at work.

The party maintains multiple conduits to keep voters engaged. Félicien Benoît, a young local supporter who usually follows Mélenchon and party cadres on their hugely successful YouTube channels, said attending the Montreuil rally was a welcome “opportunity to listen to them live, because we spend a lot of time behind screens”. La France Insoumise runs a constant stream of social media activity from Twitch to TikTok and on its own online platforms. Mélenchon, who is publicly scornful of journalists and professional media, routinely pioneers new augmented reality technologies at his rallies – most recently the spraying of scents into the crowd to match the topics he addressed during a speech.

But the good old town hall meeting retains its charm. “Here, we can feel the energy,” Benoît said. He added that he supports Mélenchon for his consistency, his promise to rewrite the constitution through a citizens’ assembly and his “unrivalled understanding of geopolitics” (the candidate vocally opposes alignment with the US in favour of dialogue with controversial regimes such as Russia and Venezuela).

La France Insoumise has also sought to aggregate various protest movements, from gilets jaunes to feminist groups, students’ climate change marches and workers’ rights activists around the country. Mélenchon is now trying to connect with the motorists in the Freedom Convoys. Aurélie Trouvé, who is tasked with channelling these “struggles” into support for Mélenchon through a parallel organisation called the “People’s Parliament”, told the Montreuil crowd how they had contributed to the political programme he has now pledged to implement if elected.

Member of parliament Adrien Quattenens, who runs the France Insoumise party organisation, gave a flavour of the social and economic measures this would include as rising inflation places the cost of living at the centre of the upcoming electoral battle. He promised to lower households’ bills through price freezes and free energy and water allowances funded by higher taxes on utility companies.

The idea does not stop at energy, Quattenens added: “We are fed up with all-day TV and radio exhortations for French people to take care of themselves by eating five fruit and vegtables without anyone asking whether they can afford them. That’s why social emergency legislation will freeze prices to address this exceptional situation and we will implement it by decree as soon as April 2022.” On incomes, he pledged an increase in the minimum wage and guaranteed jobs for all the unemployed in stretched public services.

Where does this leave the social-democratic and green centre-left, for decades the second-largest political force in France? Far, far behind. Green candidate Yannick Jadot and Socialist mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo, whose parties governed together under Hollande, are doggedly maintaining competing campaigns. The historic Communist Party, which backed Mélenchon in 2017 after a fractious internal debate, is now running its own candidate Fabien Roussel. His profile is beginning to rise at the expense of other left-wing candidates.

To try and sort out this mess, a group of left-of-centre activists organised the “primaire populaire”, an unofficial primary in which nearly 400,000 like-minded voters took part last month. The process, run against the will of most candidates, aimed to nominate a grassroots-anointed champion of the left and force the others to drop out. Instead, Christiane Taubira, a former minister of Hollande famous for passing same-sex marriage legislation, threw her hat into the ring at the last minute and won.

None of the existing candidates have dropped out, and the shrinking field of left-leaning voters not yet repulsed by their camp’s infighting is now divided between five main contenders instead of four. Organisers of the primaire populaire did not reply to The Currency’s repeated requests for interviews.

The prospects that none of the left-leaning candidates outside Mélenchon might secure over 5 per cent of the vote, if recent polls were to translate into ballots, would add financial to political ruin. Under French law, the state covers campaigning expenses for candidates and parties above that threshold only.

“I commit not to repeat the mistakes made in the past 20 years and to recover our industrial sovereignty.”

Emmanuel Macron

On Thursday, Macron came as close to open campaigning as he could without declaring himself. Standing in front of a gigantic turbine in a factory making parts for nuclear power plants in the eastern city of Belfort, he outlined the national energy strategy for the next decade. The topic is of direct importance to Ireland as the 700MW Celtic Interconnector now going through the planning process between Youghal, Co Cork and the French coast will offer a steady capacity boost equivalent to a small nuclear plant being built in Ireland (as well as an outlet for excess Irish renewable power).

And yes, it was all about nuclear. When it comes to keeping the lights on, the country is at a crossroads.

In recent years, the French government has given a multi-billion-euro bailout to the beleaguered public nuclear fuels and engineering group Areva (now Orano). The other state-owned industry giant, utility EDF, has pushed through with the Flamanville new-generation European pressurised reactor (EPR) located at the end of the new France-Ireland cable, despite a decade of delays and billions in cost overruns. It is also facing an avalanche of outages and repairs on its ageing fleet of 18 nuclear power plants, while being financially squeezed by government-ordered price freezes to contain inflation. 

Following a half-hearted plan under Hollande to reduce nuclear power’s share to 50 per cent of French electricity generation (currently over 75 per cent), the next president will face the choice of pulling the plug and accelerating the decommissioning of existing reactors, or biting the bullet and replacing them. With the exception of Jadot, all candidates mentioned above are in favour of maintaining nuclear power – Mélenchon recently pushed back his commitment to end it by 15 more years.

This year’s election is turning into a race between candidates to throw most support behind the industry. This week, Macron took the lead. He made state policy a campaign pledge by Pécresse to build six new reactors on the EPR2 model – which he said took account of the lessons learned through the Flamanville overruns. Not only did he promise to start connecting these by 2035, but he launched preliminary studies to roll out eight more by 2050.

He also opened a €1 billion state fund for EDF and private businesses to broaden the French nuclear industry to small modular reactors and more efficient use of radioactive fuels and waste. His speech acknowledged that refurbishments will be needed to keep existing plants afloat in the meantime.

“We need to make this choice today to give EDF and the wider industry the visibility they need and to draw lessons from the past. When such visibility is lost, chains are broken and skills are lost. That’s when we run risks,” Macron said. 

As France lags behind EU renewables targets, he also set an objective of multiplying solar generation by 10 in the next 30 years, using any available space including military bases. Offshore wind is assigned a presidential target of 50 farms by 2050, while the pace of onshore turbine development is set to slow down – Macron wants onshore wind capacity to double by 2050 on a smaller number of more productive sites, instead of achieving this in 10 years under his government’s existing policy. This last point caters to the rising turbine objection movement, which has been increasingly captured by the far-right.

“On all these topics, I commit not to repeat the mistakes made in the past 20 years and to recover our industrial sovereignty,” Macron said. The remark was a hint at the announcement that morning that EDF would acquire the factory where he was speaking. The steam turbine manufacturer had previously been sold to US group General Electric by France’s Alstom with a green light from the French government in 2014. The economy minister at the time was a certain Emmanuel Macron.

*****

If the election took place today, polls suggest Macron would face either Pécresse or Le Pen in the final runoff – and win. Le Pen would be Macron’s favoured option, vindicating his position as the last man standing for democracy against dangerous nationalists, whether they come from Moscow or from his own far-right. Kiteflying so far indicates that this might include a pro-business platform including highly charged measures such as the abolition of the 35-hour working week.

A duel with Pécresse would force him to quickly re-invent himself as a more caring figure and atone for the tone-deaf decisions that defined the start of his presidency, such as the abolition of a popular wealth tax and his comment to a jobseeker that he could simply “cross the street and find [him] a job”. In this case, Macron could harness massive state investment in public health over the pandemic and soften the much-criticised cost-cutting programme he has imposed on public hospitals since he came to power.

If Pécresse makes it through the first round of the election, she would be the first female candidate to do so in the centre-right Gaullist movement’s history. She started a recent television interview with a male journalist facing allegations of sexual assault by highlighting his case and assuring that abused women would no longer be afraid to seek justice if she was elected. “The law of silence is over,” she said. How French women vote in the first election after #MeToo will be interesting to watch. 

But the election is not taking place today, and a lot can happen in two months. In 2017, Republican candidate François Fillon was engulfed in a last-minute embezzlement scandal that destroyed his chances and contributed to Macron’s election. 

Whoever wins their way into the Elysée palace will then fight a legislative election in June. Voters were happy to give Macron a large majority to confirm his presidential victory last time around, but he had no existing party organisation and the hastily selected members of parliament elected to support him lacked experience and discipline. There is no guarantee of a repeat this time.

Despite securing defections from the camps of other right-wing candidates, Zemmour is facing the same issues.

Stronger nationwide organisations backing Pécresse, Le Pen and Mélenchon may yet make a difference in the presidential campaign, and more significantly in the legislative one. As France Insoumise parliamentarians roused the crowd in Montreuil, I remarked to a local organiser that this was their campaign, too, and the next president would need a majority.

He replied: “And also an opposition.”