FRENCH TWIST — If Marine Le Pen becomes the next president of France, the European Union won’t collapse. Neither will the euro. There isn’t going to be a Frexit.
But the far-right politician is a genuine threat to the liberal Western order. Here’s why you should worry she could win France’s presidential run-off on April 24.
Let’s start with the numbers. In POLITICO’s Poll of Polls, Le Pen is averaging 47 percent to Emmanuel Macron’s 53 percent in head-to-head polling match-ups, and rising. She’s been as high as 49 percent over the past week. The Economist’s forecasting model gives her around a 20 percent chance of victory. People who remember the 2016 presidential election in the United States will recall that a 20 percent chance of something happening is decidedly not a zero percent chance.
The far-right bloc of Le Pen and her even Trumpier rival, Eric Zemmour, is around a third of French voters, as big as the combined votes that are certain to go for Macron.
The race is on to win the votes of the final third of the electorate: some 10 million voters. Left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who nearly outflanked Le Pen in Sunday’s vote, urged his supporters not to vote for her. But he also left the way open for them to stay home. The Green Party will back Macron.
Le Pen has normalized her movement. While she triggered alarm by stating her desire to pull the EU’s only nuclear power out of the alliance’s integrated command structure, Le Pen has strategically softened her views on Europe’s other hot-button issues. National Rally — Le Pen’s party — no longer proposes to leave the EU, the euro currency and the bloc’s visa-free travel zone. These are important policy changes that get lost in knee-jerk coverage of the French election.
She has been a canny campaigner, turning a weak issue — Russia, thanks to her coziness with the Kremlin — into a strength. Le Pen made the necessary statements in support of Ukraine, and swiftly turned her attention to campaigning on cost-of-living issues at home. As Macron tried and failed to show his worth as peacemaker in chief, Le Pen went to bat for the people being hit by higher fuel prices and wider inflation sparked by the war.
These policy shifts give Le Pen a better chance of winning. They make her more palatable and harder to attack. Yet should Le Pen win, she would struggle to form her government, and then would struggle to legislate.
National Rally has never been a factor in the French National Assembly. It would have three weeks to change that: the gap between the presidential run-off and parliamentary elections.
Macron’s En Marche was in the same position in 2017. He was swept into power with the support of 66 percent of voters. That will never happen for Le Pen. A backlash would begin on the first day of a Le Pen presidency. Centrist and left-wing voters that may have sat out the presidential vote would be heavily pressured to turn out to block Le Pen from assuming full control of government.
The first 100 days of a Le Pen presidency: The EU would be attacked and starved through attrition, and eventually might be frozen on key decisions. She would likely be in alliance-building mode with the governments of Poland and Hungary. The current high level of coordination on Russia sanctions, for example, would have been nearly impossible to achieve under Le Pen. But don’t expect a dramatic Frexit-type vote, or sweeping executive orders.
Why might Le Pen lose? “She’s a Putin stooge,” says Eurasia Group’s Mujtaba Rahman, suggesting more scrutiny needs to be applied to the $11 million loan her party took in 2014 from an obscure Russian bank with Kremlin connections. It would be surprising if Macron did not use this to accuse Le Pen of not just being politically cozy with Moscow, but also of being in Russia’s pocket.
Either way, the morning after is the problem. Whoever wins, the next president of France will take office with around 48 percent of the country being dead set against them. Expect American-style polarization and lack of trust coming to Europe.
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OF MICE AND MEDICINE — The Food and Drug Administration is grappling with field mice at its headquarters, an infestation exacerbated by food left behind in offices that have been largely unoccupied during the Covid-19 pandemic, the agency confirmed to POLITICO.
Pest-control problems in Washington-area buildings were not unusual prior to the pandemic; mouse traps are frequently spotted inside the Capitol. And two former FDA officials told POLITICO that mice have long taken refuge inside the agency’s sprawling Silver Spring, Md., campus, known as White Oak, David Lim and Lauren Gardner write.
But the rodent problem worsened during the pandemic, forcing the agency to assign some employees returning to the campus after two years to temporary desks and ask others to continue to telework.
“It is accurate that food products left behind in offices when maximum telework was implemented is a contributing factor to offices with pest control issues,” FDA spokesperson Stephanie Caccomo said.
Maintenance staff cannot enter individual offices on campus due to the agency’s work on “sensitive and national security information,” Caccomo added.
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