Download Has France Really Rejected Populism? Mark Roe is a professor at

Has France Really Rejected Populism? Mark Roe is a professor at Harvard Law School.
Project Syndicate
Mark Roe is a professor at Harvard Law School. He is the author of studies of the impact of
politics on corporate organization and corporate governance in the United States and around
the world.
CAMBRIDGE – The liberal West heaved a collective sigh of relief when the results of the first
round of the French presidential election came in. After leading in the polls for weeks, Marine Le
Pen of the far-right National Front ended up in second place, while Emmanuel Macron, a centrist
political independent, finished first. Macron, the fresh face of Europe’s democratic center at just 39
years old, is expected to prevail handily in the second-round runoff on May 7.
With Macron’s victory in France following Dutch voters’ rejection of the right-wing populist Geert
Wilders earlier this year, most observers are treating the result as another rebuke to the populist
revolt that fueled the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum and US President Donald Trump’s
election in 2016. Many seem convinced that the populist tide has crested.
And yet, below the headlines, the picture is not so bright – or anti-populist. The total number of
votes that went to anti-establishment candidates in the French election indicates that a latent
French populist coalition could still emerge. In fact, the overall first-round vote for populists
comprised almost a majority of the French electorate.
Le Pen led the populist pack with an anti-immigrant, anti-European, economically nationalist
platform and a message of coded racism. She did not fully shake the National Front’s anti-Semitic
past, and in 2017, her party’s bigotry took more of an anti-Muslim form. She remains ready to pull
France out of the eurozone and the EU itself, and – unlike the UK’s Brexiteers – adopt protectionist
trade measures.
Add Le Pen’s 21.3% of the vote to the 19.6% captured by the far-left, anti-establishment candidate
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and you get a very sizeable bloc of disgruntled French voters. Mélenchon has
an appealing personality, a capacity for rousing rhetoric, and a knack for clever campaigning, such
as using holograms of himself to address campaign rallies across France simultaneously. He far
surpassed the mainstream Socialist Party candidate, Benoît Hamon. Before the election, when
polling showed Mélenchon and the other leaders within the polling margin of error, many feared
that the second round could be a runoff between him and Le Pen.
Mélenchon does not share Le Pen’s anti-immigrant animosity or authoritarian tendencies. But he
has been an anti-globalist tribune for many alienated workers and young people who fear for their
economic future. Both he and Le Pen represent angry voters who are ready to overturn the
established order. His supporters are not unlike the blue-collar Americans who voted for Bernie
Sanders in the Democratic primary, and then for Trump in the general election. Mélenchon has so
far refused to endorse Macron for the second round.
If you now add to Le Pen and Mélenchon’s combined 40.9% of the vote the totals for minor farright and anti-capitalist parties, including the Communist Party, the percentage of anti-system
voters reaches the upper 40s. The headlines declaring victory for pro-European liberal democracy
fail to highlight how narrow that victory actually was. The truth is that France has a highly populist
electorate: close to half of French citizens cast a vote on April 23 to disrupt the status quo.
Once again, how votes translate into electoral decisions looms large. In last year’s US presidential
election, Hillary Clinton won the popular-vote count by several million votes, but needed another
100,000 votes across Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to win the Electoral College. In
France this year, the total share of anti-establishment voters is similar to Trump’s own share of the
popular vote in the US, but because of the configuration of the candidates and differences in
election rules, the populist, anti-trade candidates will lose in France.
This is not just a modern quirk: in the US presidential election of 1860 – the most consequential in
American history – Abraham Lincoln received 39.9% of the vote, with the other votes going to
parties that were not anti-slavery. But the rules of the election made him the clear winner; indeed,
he would have won, even if the other parties’ votes had been aggregated behind a single candidate.
Nobel Prizes have gone to academics who have shown how an electorate’s preferences can lead to
sharply differing outcomes, depending on how votes are aggregated into decision rules.
In France, a slight first-round shift of just a few percentage points away from Macron and toward
Mélenchon would have resulted in a fully anti-establishment runoff for the French presidency.
Moreover, if a single candidate had corralled economic-nationalist and anti-immigrant voters, as
Trump did with working- and lower-middle-class voters in the US, that candidate would have won
the first round – and would have been in a strong position to claim the presidency in the second
round.
Even though the French electorate rejected anti-immigrant, anti-trade, anti-finance, and antiglobalist policies this time around, the fact remains that, beneath the surface of France’s election
result is a potential populist coalition. It is too early for those celebrating the triumph of liberal
democracy to declare victory.