Emmanuel Macron’s rival detects weakness after the French regional vote

The first round of French regional elections left many of the country’s politicians defeated and deflated. But not Xavier Bertrand, who this week had a lush mood as he gathered supporters in a wind-swept Dunkirk neighborhood.

The politician won a large number of votes in the northern Hauts-de-France region which increased his chances of being the main center-right candidate to run against President Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in the presidential election. next year. contest for which it has already been declared.

By contrast, Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National did worse than expected last weekend, and La Macarella’s ruling party, La République en Marche, performed so poorly that it failed to achieve even to qualify for voting in the second round this Sunday in four of the 13 regions of the French European territories.

Bertrand is the current leader of an industrialized region that includes Lille, Calais and Amiens, a position he won six years ago with the help of left-wing parties after being defeated by Le Pen in the first round. This time he neatly reversed the results of the first round, getting 41% of the vote against 24% of the RN.

“We have managed to push back the National Front,” he told the Financial Times after a meeting Monday night with local mayors and other supporters in the rainy Téteghem, near Dunkirk. “I know I have a special responsibility, to get them to withdraw, to loosen their jaws, to destroy the jaws of the National Front.”

With an eye on the Elysée Palace in 2022, Bertrand, 56, is determined to overthrow the idea that Macron is the best bulwark against Le Pen. He also wants to counter the pollsters ’predictions that will likely culminate in the presidential election with the same Macron-Le Pen elimination that Macron finally won in 2017.

Like many opponents on the far right, he calls the anti-immigration party by the old and more sinister name of “National Front” given by its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, instead of using the “National Rally”. since he was renamed by his daughter. Marine, who has tried to reform an organization with a reputation for racism and anti-Semitism.

“There is no ‘new-looking’ Front National in France. They are exactly the same,” Bertrand said. “I know they are incompetent in economic matters. Lies, defamation and deception: these are the methods of the far right.”

However, even a convincing victory this Sunday will not guarantee Bertrand an easy path to the French presidency.

Bertrand has government experience as a former national health minister and labor minister, as well as having been mayor of St Quentin and headed one of the regional councils, whose main responsibility is transportation policy rather than annoying national issues. of health or law and order.

However, he already faces stiff opposition from other ambitious politicians in his own center-right party Les Républicains, who has so far technically left because he wanted to run for the Elysee without going through primaries.

Among his rivals are Valérie Pécresse, who also left the LR to pursue her ambitions, and Laurent Wauquiez, each with the chance to win again on Sunday in their respective regions of the Ile-de-France around Paris and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes to the southeast.

Bertrand said Christèle Lagier, an assistant professor of politics at the University of Avignon, had “strengthened her position, her legitimacy” after the first round. “But the competition between Les Républicains will be very, very tough. . . I hope his political family leaves a lot of banana skins. They will not give it away. ”

Vincent Martigny, a professor of politics at the University of Nice, accepted that Bertrand had strengthened his position, but emphasized the upcoming struggle between possible presidential candidates in the center-right ranks.

“The problem is that one thing has not been solved: how to organize primaries between different leaders who are anti-Macron on the right,” he said.

“There is a possibility that Pécresse and Wauquiez will do well in next Sunday’s election, and they may also want to be candidates, among others. One has to wonder how the right-wing leader will be appointed.”

Macron, meanwhile, is already on the campaign trail and unlikely to abandon his candidacy to become the first French president re-elected since Jacques Chirac in 2002.

In terms of politics, Macron and Bertrand are extraordinarily close, especially since Macron – who used to campaign as “neither right nor left” – has shifted to the right in the last two years, repressing Islamists, emphasizing law and order and announcing limits on immigration. Both men have also advocated industrial investment in northern France, especially for batteries used in electric vehicles, to reduce dependence on Asia.

Analysts say that while Macron was weakened by the poor performance of Sunday’s party, which was founded only in 2016, it would not be prudent to draw too many conclusions from the results of such a low-key regional election. Only a third of voters – and less than a fifth of those under 35 – bothered to vote.

“It’s not clear that this is detrimental to Macron, as the presidential election is a national event and very much focused on the personality of the candidates,” Lagier said.

This is one of the reasons why Bertrand, robust and combative, portrays himself as a man with his feet on the ground in the provinces, implicitly making a comparison with the hyperintellectual Macron. “I bring a lot of common sense,” he said.