Standing in a deep morning fog on the rooftop of Strasbourg’s city hall, Mayor Roland Ries gestures towards the modern buildings and cranes that form the city skyline. In the distance you can see a tram with the slogan “Europtimist” splashed on its doors gliding through the streets as cyclists and pedestrians rush to work.
The cross-border extension of the tram line from France’s seventh-largest city — home of the European Parliament — to the German town of Kehl across the Rhine has spurred a flurry of property developments: a dance theatre, student housing, a library, residential apartments and offices. “This town owes much to the founding fathers of Europe,” the 72-year-old Socialist politician says. “It’s become a cosmopolitan city, immune to the kind of the anti-EU rhetoric we’re hearing these days.”
Vibrant French cities like Strasbourg have placed Emmanuel Macron, a Europhile centrist who has campaigned on optimism, an open economy and pro-business reforms, within touching distance of the presidency. In the northeastern Alsatian city, the 39-year-old candidate attracted 28 per cent of the vote in the first round of the presidential race a fortnight ago, four points above his national score, helping him qualify for Sunday’s run-off. In contrast, Marine Le Pen, the anti-EU, anti-immigration far-right leader and underdog in the second round of voting, attracted just 12 per cent of Strasbourg’s voters.
Yet drive 30 minutes out of town and the optimism vanishes. In Wisches, a village of 2,000 inhabitants nestled in a forested valley, the far-right leader’s plans strike a chord: Ms Le Pen won first place with 34 per cent of the local votes — double Mr Macron’s tally.
Sunday’s presidential duel pits Mr Macron against Ms Le Pen and their clash of visions for the eurozone’s second-largest economy. Opinion polls suggest he will win but the fight for office has exposed a divided country: one part happy, the other unhappy; one urban, the other rural and suburban; one embracing internationalism, the other seeking to erect barriers. They are the same faultlines shaking other western democracies, splitting those who feel they have gained from the far-reaching postwar liberal shift towards an interconnected world, and those who fear they have lost, or will lose out.
“France is divided and polarised,” Laurent Bouvet, professor at Versailles University, says. “Macron has attracted the better-off, Marine Le Pen has attracted those who feel abandoned.”
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The rift has resulted in growing working-class anger in declining industrial bastions and a rise in anxiety over French identity that have largely benefited Ms le Pen’s far-right National Front party. It also fuelled a surge in support for the hard-left anti-capitalist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a Eurosceptic who fell short of qualifying for the run-off but secured nearly 20 per cent of the national vote. The debate over the impact of globalisation is likely to dominate the five-year term of France’s next president. Prof Bouvet says.
With polls suggesting the former economy minister under Socialist president François Hollande could secure as much as 60 per cent of the vote on Sunday, Mr Macron is likely to be the one who will have to pick up the pieces. A relative political novice, he has stormed French politics with En Marche!, his year-old, neither-left-nor-right party.
“These five years will be tough. People are reluctant to trust us, so we must show we can really change things,” says Bruno Studer, the head of En Marche! in Strasbourg. “People have reasons to be scared about the future. It’s a complicated world and people are tempted by politicians who tell them simple things and what to do.”
Domestically a Macron victory is unlikely to be interpreted as a vote of confidence. Rather it will be seen as the product of expediency as centre-right and centre-left voters, whose candidates failed to qualify for the run-off, use their votes to defeat the FN, a party still perceived by many as xenophobic and a threat to democracy despite its efforts at “detoxification”.
Until Mr Macron proves he can win a majority in parliament, some will even see him as an accidental president. The Republican and Socialist parties, annihilated in the first round, are plotting revenge in legislative elections in June to deny the new president the means to implement his, or her, programme.
“Those who voted for Macron, not by default, will make a very narrow base,” Prof Bouvet says. “This is a problem for him: France, a deeply pessimistic country, is about to elect a president whose optimistic views about the future and the EU are only shared by a minority.”
This political reality has already started to sink in. Visiting his hometown of Amiens, north-western France, a few days after winning the first round, Mr Macron was confronted by angry Whirlpool workers facing the prospect of their factory being relocated to Poland. Since the bruising encounter, the run-off favourite has signalled that the message has been received.
“We cannot solely succeed with the France that does well,” Mr Macron said in a radio interview after the visit. “My programme is not for those who have done well.”
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Stéphane Becker, a 42-year-old video game entrepreneur, belongs to this latter category. He jokes that given the rise of the FN in surrounding villages, hipsters like him will soon have to wear armour to venture out of Strasbourg.
Mr Becker fits the description of the typical Macron supporter: urban, educated and with a well-paid job.
He is the president of Alsace Digitale, a body that organises events for local start-ups. “Here, globalisation has not been unhappy,” he says.
Yet, the FN’s resurgent strand of nationalism, in a region at the heart of Europe’s bloody history and annexed by Germany for nearly five decades, has unsettled him. “For a long time, France-Germany wasn’t a football match. It was war,” he says. “Here, kids swim in ponds that marked the Maginot line.”
Born in Lorraine, further north, in a family of coal miners, Mr Becker says he understands the economic malaise that has spread in post-industrial towns plagued by long-term unemployment. But, he says, this is no reason to turn their back on the EU and globalisation.
“The challenge for the next president is to figure out what to do for people whose financial horizon is only a few months or even a few days,” he says. “We need to fix the problems in a system that works well on the whole. But this idea, that the French system works OK and doesn’t have to be torn apart, is a difficult one to spell out these days.”
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In Wisches, the centre-right mayor Alain Ferry, a former movie producer who moved back to his hometown from Paris in the late 1980s, says his constituents’ inclination for Ms Le Pen has left him perplexed.
The EU, he says, has injected millions in subsidies into the area over decades. He points out the many companies that have relocated to the town, the free English lessons he is offering to primary school children and the frequent trains to Strasbourg. “This is a land blessed by the gods,” Mr Ferry says. “Honestly I don’t get it.”
But in Taverne Saint Antoine on the main street, Monique Schmeisser, the 68-year-old bartender, and a group of customers disagree. They tell stories of struggling to make ends meet amid a sense of gradual industrial decline.
The system does not work for Ms Schmeisser, she says. Having started work at 14, she says that she cannot afford to retire because she could not live off her €900 monthly pension.
“This is unfair. We’re standing here like dumb people, when immigrants can get benefits as soon as they arrive,” Ms Schmeisser says. She is not voting for Ms Le Pen because of her plans to exit the euro, but Ms Schmeisser “understands those who do”.
Beatrice Baldovi, a 54-year-old customer, says she suffered a nervous breakdown partly because her employer, a maker of office furniture, sold the plant three years ago to relocate part of its activities to the Czech Republic. The buyer has forced most of the employees to work in its offices in Strasbourg but Ms Baldovi is staying put.
Next to her, Joachim de Oliveira, a Portuguese-born builder who settled in Wisches in the 1980s, proudly says he is “voting for the Marine” and that “Macron is for the rich people”.
“We’re joking that if Marine Le Pen is elected, he will have to take his luggage and go,” Monique laughs. “Maybe we could get a luggage business going here.” But the threat leaves Mr de Oliveira undeterred. “She would never do that,” he says.
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