29 March 2024

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MOZART OF THE ÉLYSÉE PALACE

Emmanuel Macron became the youngest and the first self-nominated French president

Author:

15.05.2017

The recent presidential elections in France not only violated the traditions laid back in 1959 when the Fifth Republic was created but also became a detonator of a radical change in the political landscape of the country.

The routine electoral process effective for over 50 years, when one of the representatives of the two main political parties, Socialist or Republican (the Gaullist party had changed the name several times) would become the head of the state, was violated when the leader of the National Front, Marine Le Pen, and the founder of En Marche, Emmanuel Macron, stepped into the second tour of elections.

 

Mozart

It is said that for the past half year, the French press wrote about Macron several times more than about the other presidential candidates. Obviously, this is largely due to the interest in the young politician, who turned 39 in December and managed to create a political organisation in the spring of 2016 that made him a favourite of the presidential race.

It's not just about the curiosity, however. Macron has correctly sensed the prevailing mood in the society willing to escape from the economic and political stagnation caused by the leaders of the classical parties during the previous years.

Macron’s career is indeed impressive. He has received education in the most prestigious institutions of the country - Lycée Henri-IV and the National School of Administration (ENA), the latter being the alma mater for three more French presidents.

Immediately after his studies, the young politician began working in the Ministry of Economy followed by a two-year tenure at the Rothschild Bank earning a nickname of the Mozart of Finance for his role advising Nestlé on its $12bn acquisition of a unit of Pfizer in 2012.

In 2012, he returned to the Ministry of Economy becoming its head after two years, at 36 years of age. Actively engaged in mergers and acquisitions of state companies, Mr. Macron earned another nickname, Mozart of the Élysée Palace.

 

No chance of success

Deciding to run for president, Macron did not change his habit of acting on a grand scale. Realising that in the absence of a sufficient number of supporters he cannot do without modern political technologies, he hires three consultants who had gained an experience during the presidential campaign of Barack Obama.

The strategy of the invited political technologists worked – the volunteers of En Marche would visit the homes of voters without campaigning for their candidate (this is prohibited by the French laws) and asked what people were most concerned about. Then, based on the results of interviews, individual pre-election campaign programs were compiled for a given region.

But of course, this cannot explain 24.01% of the votes cast for Emmanuel Macron, which enabled him to enter the second round of the elections. The failure of the Socialist François Hollande (10-12%) and the corruption scandals of the Republican candidate François Fillon have left these parties no chance of success. Thus, the leader of the National Front, Marine Le Pen, has unexpectedly found herself in the second round repeating the success of her father, the founder of the party, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who lost to Jacques Chirac in the second round in 2002.

In the end, Emmanuel Macron became the youngest president in the history of the French Republic with 66.06% of the votes. The previous record holder was Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who came to power in 1848 at the age of 40 years.

It is amazing that as early as September 2016, 53% of the French people polled by the Institute for the Study of Public Opinion (Ifop) did not want Macron even to run for presidency.

 

Cyber ​​war

It seems that fake news and hacker attacks have become mandatory attributes of modern election campaigns. Last year, they influenced the election of the U.S. president. This year, they will perhaps affect the French-Russian interstate relations. With all the similarities of tools used by cyberattackers, the consequences are different and this is quite understandable.

Mrs. Clinton claims that the "Russian WikiLeaks" was behind her failure during the elections but the same and absolutely identical actions against Macron could not prevent him from winning with a clear advantage.

What is the reason? Well, firstly, over the long years of Clinton's political activity, the Americans have already developed a fairly stable opinion about her, and not necessarily a positive one. That is why they believed in compromising materials right away. Macron is a newcomer in politics, although he has worked for two years as the Minister of Economy. Both in the U.S. and in France, the electorate wants changes. Macron promises these changes while Clinton did not have much to say in this respect.

The second reason is that the French voters are more sophisticated and politically educated than the American ones. This is the conclusion of the experts from the Oxford University. According to their research, participants of the French social networks, unlike the American ones, use political sources of information in political discussions. The links that French users shared during the pre-election period were twice as likely to lead to materials from respectable publications than to counterfeits and the yellow press. Last year, this ration in the U.S. was almost 1:1.

As an example of high political culture in France, the turnout rate for the second round of voting was small by local standards (74.56%) but still more than in the USA, which would have been a record since 1896.

But the relationship with Russia can be a bit spoiled, since there are suggestions that hacker attacks were organized by the structures controlled by the Kremlin. And although the well-known Wired website specialised in publications about cybercrimes does not exclude the possibility that "somebody has set up the Russians", the French media reports that the Russian attack worsened Makcon's opinion of Putin and Russia.

 

Positive for France

Introducing his program, Macron promised the French not only the modernisation of the economy but also reforms in education, health, security, and international cooperation.

In particular, he intends to reduce unemployment from the current 10 to 7.7% by 2022, to reduce taxes on corporate income from 33.3 to 25%, to prohibit officials from hiring relatives, to free 80% of households from a fixed income tax and to review the taxes on the rich.

120 thousand civil servants will be dismissed as part of the budget reform to reduce government spending by 60 billion euros. At the same time, there will be 10,000 additional jobs in the police and up to 5,000 in schools.

Macron excludes stricter laws relating to religious garments and offers tax relief to companies hiring young employees from "problematic" urban areas, mostly populated by migrants.

A convinced supporter of a united Europe, Macron at the same time promised to insist on radical reforms in the EU. To this end, he proposes to strengthen the Eurozone, in which France is the second largest after Germany. The ex-banker would like to create a parliament, ministry of finance and separate budget for the Eurozone countries. He also supports raising tariffs to protect European industry from unfair competition, in particular from China.

At present, France's national debt is almost 100% of GDP and is unlikely to significantly decline until the end of this decade, reports the international rating agency Moody's. The potential for economic growth in France is relatively small: growth rates are unlikely to be above 1.5% without significant reforms.

"The new political platform of French President-elect Emmanuel Macron is generally positive for France because it is aimed at economic growth, but the results of the French legislative elections in June will be decisive in determining whether the new president will be able to fulfill his political plans, concludes the agency.

 

All for the elections

On June 11 and 18, the French people will again go to polling stations in order to vote for 577 deputies of the French National Assembly. The political forces will determine whether the En Marche movement, renamed to the Republic on the march, is able to form its own government or has to share power with someone else.

"We will have to form a coalition," suggested the economist Alain Mink in his interview with the BBC. "I do not believe that he can get 280 deputies from En Marche, especially considering that half of them are absolute newcomers to politics and were chosen out of 14,000 candidates who sent their resumes through email."

However, it is still unclear who is the second side of the coalition-to-be. Internal contradictions among the main competitors - Republicans and Socialists are so strong that these parties face the threat of a split, perhaps even into several parts. There are, however, supporters in both parties who are ready to join him, but he does not really want this, as one of his main pre-election promises was the policy of attracting fresh forces to the government.

So, Marine Le Pen, going to meet the requests of the voters, decided not only to seriously redraw the image of the National Front but even to change its name. The former French presidential candidate for socialists, Benois Hamon, also announced an establishment of a new political movement. Mayors of Paris and Lille, Anne Hidalgo and Martin Aubry, started the creation of the European Ecological and Social Democracy Movement...

There was no such political activity in France for a long time. The forthcoming parliamentary elections are going to be no less interesting than the presidential elections in terms of their heat and unpredictability. The promises of Emmanuel Macron depend on the results of these elections.



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