On Sunday, France held a series of regional elections through the nation, and the French President’s party, La Republique en Marche (LREM), finished 5th behind Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.
Opinion surveys project Marine Le Pen will poll highest in the first round of next year’s presidential vote, propelled by a support base fed up with crime, threats to jobs from globalization and a ruling elite viewed as out of touch with ordinary citizens.
These elections are usually seen by many as a predictor of sorts to the upcoming Presidential elections which are months away this year. According to an IPSOS exit poll, the right-center party, Les Republicains is shown to win by 27.2 percent of the national poll, followed by the populist-nationalist right-wing party at 19.3 percent, followed then by the Green Party, the Socialist Party, and then President Emmanuel Macron’s party on 11.2 percent.
One of Macron’s officials, Aurore Berge, an MP at LREM, claimed that the result was a democratic “slap in the face,” and that she is not going to “minimize what happened.”
French voters seem to be increasingly restless with Macron, showed especially when he literally was slapped in the face last week while he was greeting a crowd.
One of the reasons why Macron may be spiraling downwards, is because he has lost nearly all of his support from the political left. This is possibly because when the President ran in 2017, he presented himself as a populist-centrist, but he has shown himself to be a globalist-corporatist since then. Macron has been governing as a globalist-corporatist on one hand, in terms of his economic policies, and lately, he has also alienated the cultural left by being harsh on Muslim enclaves.
France 24, a leading French newspaper, reported that some of their audience has accused Macron, who campaigned as a centrist, has become a President for the rich and has abandoned the French working class.
The report in Liberation newspaper, based on accounts from hundreds of readers, said many left-leaning voters would no longer support Macron to prevent Le Pen taking power. “I’ve blocked (the far right) in the past and this time it’s over,” read Liberation’s shock front-page headline on Saturday — a quote from one of the voters who told the paper they could no longer bring themselves to vote for Macron, whatever the cost.
“Left-wing voters feel hurt and humiliated. They feel they are being forced to vote for a candidate who has not respected them,” Remi Lefebvre, professor of political science at Lille University, told AFP.
These latest results simply showcase how much the French President has lost touch with his voters. An EU expert pointed out that Macron failed to build a real grassroots effort in France. Perhaps he should have focused more on helping the French working class, and not appealing to the migrants, by taking photo-ops with Africans. In many respect, Macron seems very aloof from the French voter, and has become alienated from them; and not just the French voter, but the French military who warned him he was taking France in the direction of a civil war at the hands of militant Islamists.
