Emmanuel Macron meets ‘unhappy’ France to counter elitist image

Three days after celebrating his first-round presidential victory in a high-end Parisian brasserie with aides and celebrity friends, Emmanuel Macron came down to earth with a bump far from the capital’s comfortable streets.

Campaigning in his hometown of Amiens, the independent centrist was greeted with whistles and burning tyres as he visited Whirlpool workers protesting about the relocation of their factory to Poland.

Mr Macron, who faces far-right National Front (FN) leader Marine Le Pen in the run-off on May 7, had originally declined to visit the factory gate to avoid inflaming opinion. It did not help when his opponent turned up earlier in the day, hugging and taking selfies with emotional employees.

The two episodes — celebration over champagne and oysters on the Left Bank and an uneasy encounter with disenchanted working-class France — have made for a faltering start to Mr Macron’s second round campaign, playing into his opponent’s narrative that he is a candidate of the elites who cannot engage with real people.

Mr Macron himself recognised the issue when he spoke later to supporters in Arras that sounded like a note to himself.

“Let’s be serious. I was happy the French voters placed us ahead . . . We were nothing a year ago,” the centrist politician explained. “But I looked at the results the following morning. I saw the FN results here. I grasped our responsibility.”

The heated 45 -minute discussion with Whirlpool workers — broadcast live by the candidate’s team — ended with a handshake.

But the tough encounter underlined the deep fracture running through French society that Mr Macron must confront in the next 10 days, and beyond if elected, between those that globalisation has helped to thrive and those it has left behind.

Ms Le Pen has placed blue-collar anxiety at the heart of her second-round campaign, portraying her rival as a member of a privileged technocratic elite. This has forced Mr Macron, a former investment banker, on to uncomfortable terrain.

“Emmanuel Macron is forced to correct the perception that he represents ‘happy’ France,” says Bruno Cautrès, professor at Cevipof, a research centre at Sciences Po university. “He needs to show that if elected, he will be the president of all the French, including the globalisation losers.”

I have one enemy, it’s the divisions, urban France versus rural France, the France that wins, the one that lost

Mr Macron won 24 per cent of the vote in the first round with a promise of boldness, openness and reform that resonated among better-off, highly educated and highly skilled voters in large cities. By comparison, Ms Le Pen appealed to the less educated, working-class voters living in rural and suburban areas.

If the polls are right, Mr Macron does not need to reach out to this latter category of voters to become France’s next president. Surveys indicate he will win about 60 per cent of the vote in the run-off, because a chunk of voters from the mainstream right and left will rally behind him to keep the far-right out of power.

But Mr Macron needs to win by a landslide in order to create momentum before June’s parliamentary elections, and his Sunday night brasserie celebration while Ms Le Pen spent the night in her political fief of Hénin-Beaumont, a poor former coal mining town, was criticised as premature and out of touch. He lost two points in opinions polls.

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The globalisation faultline in French politics will probably define a Macron presidency, says Luc Rouban, a political researcher at CNRS.

“He has no choice but to target an audience that is hardly receptive to his programme because otherwise, he risks becoming a symbol of the elite that doesn’t understand the real people,” Prof Rouban says. “It’s a difficult mission because he’s using rational, technical arguments, whereas Ms Le Pen uses emotions and perceptions.”

In Amiens, surrounded by a few dozen workers, Mr Macron relentlessly made the case for globalisation and free trade, promising to help secure the best conditions for workers and a good buyer for the plant.

“I am begging you, I am begging you, do not believe what Marine Le Pen tells you. Shutting down borders would do no good,” he pleaded, noting that a Procter & Gamble factory nearby would lose export markets. “I am not going to make false promises.”

In Arras later that day he vowed to win back such “abandoned territories” with a “Marshall Plan” involving drastic tax breaks and incentives to attract new technologies.

“I have one enemy, it’s the divisions, urban France versus rural France, the France that wins, the one that lost . . . We must face up to them. I will go into all those territories. I will not give them up to Marine Le Pen.”

Whether that sufficed to convince the Whirlpool workers is far from clear.

Mariano Munoz, who has spent 20 years at the plant, doubted the former investment banker could achieve much to improve his back pain and €1,200 net monthly salary.

Mr Munoz said he voted for Ms Le Pen in the first round to make sure his message of anger was heard loud and clear — but was now thinking of abstaining in the second round.

“I don’t necessarily want to shut down borders, I am not crazy,” Mr Munoz said. “But why will I bother waking up to vote? I’m fed up. I am totally demoralised.”