Center for European Studies

The campaign to become France’s next president has been filled with unexpected twists and turns, with the field of candidates looking nothing like most electoral observers initially predicted.

What has happened so far?

0n December 1, 2016, incumbent president François Hollande, acknowledging his profound lack of popularity (one poll placed his approval rating at 4 percent), declared that he would not seek a second term; the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic that the incumbent president has not run for reelection.

Parti Socialiste

Battered by a series of horrific terrorist attacks, a stagnant economy, and a hugely unpopular attempt to reform France’s strict labor code, Hollande’s Socialist Party was widely expected to do poorly in the 2017 elections.

Manuel Valls, Hollande’s Prime Minister, promptly resigned from office to run as a candidate for president in the Socialist primary, but he too was tarnished the perception of being a member of the establishment, and he was defeated by the left-wing candidate Benoît Hamon.

Les Républicains

Widely expected to do well in the election, Les Républicains, the center-right party of former president Nicholas Sarkozy, have also defied the expectations of most observers. Sarkozy again ran to become his party’s nominee; his perceived opponent was Alain Juppé, former French prime minister and career politician. However, in November 2016, Sarkozy did not even make the runoff primary election, and the ultimate victor was François Fillon, a socially and fiscally conservative former prime minister.

Fillon is further to the right of Sarkozy and Juppé, and likely capitalized on right-wing tendencies sweeping much of Europe; opinion polls immediately proclaimed him one of the front-runners. However, in January 2017, Le Canard enchaîné published an article claiming that Fillon had placed his wife, Penelope, on his payroll as his parliamentary assistant, paying her over 800,000 euros over fifteen years. It is legal to hire family members in France; however, it was alleged that Penelope’s job was a fictitious one, and that she had never showed up to work or performed any functions whatsoever. The newspaper later claimed that Fillon had done the same with two of his adult children; he claimed that he had hired them in their capacities as lawyers, but neither were licensed to practice law at that time.

In March 2017, Fillon was formally charged in an embezzlement investigation, but he refuses to step down from the ticket. Needless to say, his popularity has plummeted.

This implosion of France’s most mainstream political parties has opened the door to two outsiders.

Front National & Marine Le Pen

Many are familiar with Marine Le Pen, the head of the far-right National Front, a populist, anti-European Union party whose anti-Muslim and nationalistic rhetoric has been both condemned and embraced. Le Pen, despite a corruption scandal of her own, is widely considered to be one of the candidates who will move on to the second round of elections, where, some hope, supporters of the center-right, center-left, and far-left will all come together to block her.

En Marche! & Emmanuel Macron

Less well known is the man now considered to be the frontrunner in joining her in the run-off: Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker and the Minister of Economy, Industry, and Digital Affairs from 2014 to 2016. Despite serving in a Socialist government, Macron is not a Socialist, and is running under the banner of a party he founded, known as En Marche! Macron is positioning himself as the centrist alternative to the leftist Hamon, the conservative Fillon, and the far-right Le Pen; he is a staunch defender of the European Union, of free markets and free trade, and of an open-door policy toward immigrants and refugees. Macron is now widely expected to face Le Pen in the runoff.

Attend the Panel on April 6th at 5pm to Hear Expert Opinion on What Will Happen Next!