Bruno is not hesitant at all. He’s had it with Islamists, including the one who killed a fellow policemen a few days earlier on the Champs-Élysées. He’s had it with overstretched hospitals. He’s “all fired up”.
Macron has taken a commanding lead without having to grapple seriously with the concerns of people like Valerie and Bruno. The French centre-left was demoralised enough to embrace such a fluent alternative to machine politics and big enough to sweep him to 24 per cent of the vote on Sunday. But he cannot take even moderate conservatives for granted in round two.
“He’s a talented guy, but he doesn’t know the country,” says Julien Hubert, a Republican deputy in the national assembly who has known Macron for 16 years, including two when they were students at the École Nationale d’Administration in Paris. “He minimises the difficulties of the path the country is on and problems with globalisation. His programme consists of happiness and a positive attitude. It doesn’t offer anything to those left by the wayside.
“Le Pen could win 45 per cent of the vote because the elites already think everything’s going to be fine, like normal. The problem is that this country is boiling, and it loves to kill the favourite.”
This is a political rival’s caricature, but a knowing one. Hubert will vote “blank” on May 7, but he doesn’t want Macron to fail. His worry is that his old student chum, who is scrambling to field candidates for his En Marche movement in June’s parliamentary elections, will be forced into an impractical coalition that succumbs to France’s familiar political paralysis. And that leads to the deeper fear, shared by many, that the National Front “could win the next election”.
Hubert represents a rural constituency in the hills of Provence, the sixth poorest in France. It is centred on Carpentras, population 30,000, with a grand gothic cathedral and a dark place in recent history. In 1990 its ancient Jewish cemetery was attacked by thugs. Thirty-four graves were desecrated and a recently buried man was dragged from his tomb, left to look as if he had been impaled with an umbrella. L’affaire Carpentras prompted a protest march through Paris attended by 200,000 people, President Mitterrand among them. It went unsolved for seven years, blamed without proof on the National Front, which turned it into a parable of its own persecution.
In 1997 one of the perpetrators died and another came forward. They belonged to an extreme nationalist group with links to the National Front that the party denies to this day. It’s not hard to find members who offer the standard line. “I was here when they accused us of it,” says Jacques Dibastian, an 82-year-old veteran of the Algerian war soaking up the sunshine on a bench in the market square. “It was just delinquents, and you get delinquents anywhere.”
In fact Carpentras is a National Front fiefdom, says Philippe Aldrin, a political science professor at Sciences Po in Aix-en-Provence. It is also an illustration of how the front’s long march towards the mainstream is changing France. Half an hour’s drive by smooth dual carriageway from Avignon and the TGV, it should be prospering but isn’t.
This is la France profonde, although Aldrin prefers the less pejorative and slightly more urban France périphérique — one of hundreds of middle-sized towns with no economic growth engine of their own, too many under-qualified young people and more immigrants seeking work than jobs vacant.
The town divides naturally in two. The better-off north side falls into Hubert’s constituency although even there his majority over a socialist challenger at the last parliamentary election was wafer thin. The southside houses blue-collar locals and most of the immigrants who make up 40 per cent of the population. It has a different MP: Marion Maréchal Le Pen, Marine’s niece, more strident than her aunt and much closer to her grandfather, Jean-Marie.
Since Marine’s decision this week to relinquish leadership of the party to focus on the election, “MMLP” has become, for some, the new, true tribune of the hard right. For now that tension has been put on hold. A spokeswoman denies any policy differences between the women and focuses on the contest at hand.
Marine won 19,000 of France’s 39,000 communes in round one to just 7,000 for Macron, she says. “Marine defends the people. She’s our hope for our children. Macron is the candidate of the banks, of Merkel, of ultra-globalisation. He defends only power.”
Macron is supremely confident, with a good grasp of what ails France after two years as President Hollande’s economy minister. The outlines of this illness are easy to sketch: unemployment stuck at 10 per cent, public spending at 57 per cent of GDP, a tax base that cannot fund this spending because of a labour code that makes hiring too expensive, and unions so powerful that in 40 years the code has never been substantively reformed.
This macro-economic mess has been neatly illustrated throughout the campaign by a showdown outside a tumble-dryer factory in Macron’s home town of Amiens.
On Wednesday it flared up. Macron was on the back foot politically having taken his staff to a meal costing €7,000 last Sunday night in what looked like a premature victory celebration for an election barely half won. He had promised to visit the Whirlpool factory at Amiens, whose American owners plan to shut it down and open a cheaper one in Poland. Instead, bizarrely, he arranged a closed-door meeting with union representatives in the centre of town.
Le Pen pounced. She showed up unannounced at the plant to ridicule the former Rothschild banker and spent 20 minutes basking in the affection of striking workers against a backdrop of burning tyres. Then she left. It was a challenge that Macron could not ignore. Within an hour he had left his meeting and was heading for the plant.
I met him there and asked why he had changed his mind. His answer was revealing: “The union asked me to come.” It was not, he tried to suggest, his own idea. This was a clash in which the candidate who promises to embrace free markets and deregulation had decided he could not be seen to take sides.
For more than an hour he told angry workers everything that they did not want to hear. He would not try to tell a private company what to do. He would not make promises to save their jobs. “I don’t propose nationalisation and you don’t want me to suppress globalisation. The closure of our frontiers would mean the destruction of millions of jobs. In Belgium and the Netherlands there are factories like this that could have moved and haven’t. Ask yourselves why.”
He arrived to boos and left in silence. He had won the Whirlpool workers’ attention, if not their respect. For someone mocked as eager to offer all things to everyone, it was a surprising and impressive performance. Whether he can surprise France by unleashing its caged and cautious entrepreneurialism is one of the great questions of the next five years. If he fails, Le Pen will be there to pounce again.
DUKE RETIRES RATHER THAN GROW FRAIL IN PUBLIC
Valentine Low
MAY 5 2017
THE DUKE OF EDINBURGH decided to retire from royal duties to avoid his growing frailty being exposed in public, The Times has learnt. Prince Philip, who turns 96 next month, will continue to carry out public engagements before stepping down at the end of the summer, Buckingham Palace announced yesterday.
He had spent several months considering his future as he increasingly felt the strain of his official duties, it is understood. He broke the news of his planned retirement to the Queen over the Easter weekend at Windsor Castle and she immediately gave him her full support.
The duke came to the decision after a busy run of engagements last year, which included the Queen’s 90th birthday. The landmark royal event this year is their 70th wedding anniversary in November.
Over recent months Prince Philip has been feeling the relentless pace of engagements — he carried out 219 last year, and more than 22,000 since 1952 — and while he remains in good health, The Times understands that he can find himself lacking energy.
In recent outings, however, he has appeared in good spirits. Attending the service for the Order of Merit at the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, yesterday and a reception afterwards, he was in characteristically humorous f
orm. “I’m sorry to hear you’re standing down,” the mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah told him. “Well, I can’t stand up much longer,” he replied.
For the duke, a man who has been fit and active all his life, to draw a line under 65 years of public service was a tough decision. But he had reached a growing realisation that even someone of his stamina eventually had to slow down. As he said at his 90th birthday: “It’s better to get out before you reach your sell-by date.”
By stepping down at the end of the summer, he has timed his retirement to perfection. At the same time the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are moving their operations from Norfolk to Kensington Palace so that Prince William, 34, can take up full-time royal engagements.
The announcement comes after a number of health problems for Prince Philip. In 2013 he spent 11 days in hospital for what was described as an exploratory operation on his abdomen. Although sources have suggested that it was more serious, he has had no significant problems since. He has in the past received hospital treatment for bladder infections and a blocked coronary artery.
The news was broken to the royal household by the Lord Chamberlain, Earl Peel, and the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Christopher Geidt, yesterday morning. Several hundred of the 500 staff that the Queen employs gathered in the ballroom of Buckingham Palace to hear Sir Christopher, 55, tell them how, after the duke stepped down, other members of the royal family would support the Queen by carrying out engagements with her and on her behalf.
That was followed minutes later by a statement from the Palace that said: “His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh has decided that he will no longer carry out public engagements from the autumn of this year. In taking this decision, the duke has the full support of the Queen.”
In a “farewell tour” the duke will appear in public at events including Trooping the Colour and the Spanish state visit and he has not ruled out attending occasional functions after that. The statement added: “Thereafter, the duke will not be accepting new invitations for visits and engagements, although he may still choose to attend certain public events from time to time.”
Tributes were led by Theresa May, who said that he had been a “steadfast support” to the Queen. The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, an avowed republican, praised the duke’s “clear sense of public duty”.
In a reference to the duke’s outdoor cooking at Balmoral, David Cameron said: “The Duke of Edinburgh is an outstanding public servant. We owe him a huge debt of gratitude. I always enjoyed his company, especially his BBQs.”
LANDSLIDE FOR MACRON
Charles Bremner, Adam Sage; Paris
MAY 8 2017
EMMANUEL MACRON won the French presidency last night, crushing Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate, after a vicious contest that has ended decades of rule by established parties. Mr Macron, 39, a pro-EU, free-trade proponent who made a bold pitch for power with no electoral experience, is France’s youngest new leader since Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799.
The victory marked a historic upheaval in the country’s political landscape and inflicted a reversal on the nationalist, anti-globalisation cause that has made inroads in the US and Europe. Mr Macron, a former economy minister under President Hollande, won 66.06 per cent of the vote in the second-round run-off to Ms Le Pen’s 33.94 per cent.
A low turnout of 74 per cent and a record 12 per cent spoilt or blank ballots reflected widespread rejection of both finalists who emerged from the first round on April 23. Although Ms Le Pen’s score was the highest by the National Front in a presidential election, it fell behind forecasts and was far from the 45 per cent that her party had hoped for. She still almost doubled the vote share of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who won 18 per cent against Jacques Chirac in 2002.
Mr Macron’s landslide triggered relief in European capitals, which had feared the destruction of the EU if Ms Le Pen won. Several thousand supporters celebrated with Mr Macron outside the Louvre. In a signal of his commitment to Europe, he marched alone towards the stage to the sound of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the EU’s anthem.
“Tonight France won. Europe and the world are expecting us to defend the spirit of enlightenment,” he told the crowd. In a swipe at his doubters, he said: “Everyone told us that it was impossible, but they didn’t know France.” Theresa May congratulated him, saying that France was one of Britain’s closest allies and “we look forward to working with the new president”. Downing Street said that they discussed Brexit briefly in a phone call.
President Trump, who had earlier indicated support for Ms Le Pen, tweeted: “Congratulations to Emmanuel Macron on his big win … I look very much forward to working with him!” Donald Tusk, the European Council president, saluted the French “for choosing liberty, equality and fraternity over the tyranny of fake news”. Mr Macron also spoke to Angela Merkel on the phone. The German chancellor described the result as “a victory for a strong and united Europe”.
Mr Macron, a former merchant banker, said in a television address: “A new page in our long history opens tonight. I want it to be one of hope and trust restored.” In solemn tones, he said: “Let us love France. I will serve her with humility, devotion and determination.”
To National Front voters and supporters of other extreme candidates, he said that he understood the “anger, anxiety and doubt that a large part of you have expressed … I will fight with all my strength against the divisions that are undermining us”. He said that he would revive France’s “spirit of conquest” and defend a reborn nation. “Our civilisation is at stake,” he said, pledging to restore French leadership in Europe.
Ms Le Pen, 48, said that she had phoned Mr Macron to congratulate him. She called her tally of 11.4 million votes “historic and massive” because it made the nationalist right the new opposition. A “major remake of political life” had created a new duel between “patriots and globalisation supporters”, she said. She would now re-create her National Front into a broader “patriotic” party that would seek power in parliamentary elections next month.
Mr Macron said that his priority would be to impose “new morality on public life”, referring to his pledges to clean up the practices of MPs who abuse expenses and employ family members. François Hollande, the Socialist president who abandoned his run for re-election after his protégé sought his job, wished him well.
The president-elect aims to win a governing majority for his fledgling En Marche movement in the elections. If he fails, he could be forced to forge a coalition or accept the formation of a government by the opposition. The conservative Republicans, formerly led by Nicolas Sarkozy, are the biggest threat to him, polls show.
Jean Pisani-Ferry, Mr Macron’s chief economic adviser, told Radio 4’s Today programme that the new president had no interest in forcing through a hard Brexit. “He is definitely a reformer,” he said. “He needs to build trust, be bold and quick. I don’t think anyone has an interest in a hard Brexit. There are interests in both sides and those have to be considered. There is a need for clarity and expressing beliefs. Macron knows that. He is a committed pro-European but he certainly doesn’t want to punish Britain.
“There is not nervousness but there is certainly a huge sense of responsibility. This was a major shock. There has been distrust, division and despair. To build inclusiveness in France is going to be a huge challenge to begin with.”
Six out of ten voters told pollsters yesterday that they did not want Mr Macron to win a governing majority. François Baroin, the new leader of the Republicans, vowed to win power in parliament. “I am going to fight at the side of our candidates for an absolute majority,” he said.
Mr Macron was backed by less than a quarter of voters in the first round of the campaign. Half voted for candidates seeking withdrawal from the EU as it exists. He faces a mountainous task to reconcile a nation deeply divided over the economy and riven with tension over identity and immigration.
Mr Macron’s first attempt at presidential gravity contrasted with a light-
hearted celebration of his first-round victory that was deemed unseemly. The new solemnity was slightly marred when TV showed him having make-up applied, unaware that he was on air.
GIVING A VOICE TO THE LOST GIRLS OF ROCHDALE
Andrew Norfolk
MAY 10 2017
THE ROCHDALE SAGA began, for me, with the arrival of an explosive email. Its anonymous author wrote of a bungled police inquiry into the grooming and sexual exploitation of young girls by a group of men in the town. A failed 2008-09 investigation, claimed the sender, left offenders free to rape and abuse even more children. Two years on, a new criminal inquiry into the same suspects was under way. It was all being kept quiet.
My mystery correspondent said the men were of Pakistani origin, their young victims white. Greater Manchester police, terrified of the ethnicity factor, were trying “to keep the Asian element away from the public”.
The email landed on the afternoon of January 5, 2011. Its timing was no coincidence. That morning, the headline on the front page of The Times was “Revealed: conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs”. Across five pages, the newspaper described a hidden pattern of street-grooming sexual abuse across the north and the Midlands involving vulnerable girls and organised networks of men, largely from a subsection of the Pakistani community.
It was the first of what was to become a series of articles over the next four years exposing failings by the police and child-protection authorities who knew of such crimes yet failed to protect victims and prosecute offenders. The emailer told me that that day’s article had been “spot-on”. As, our inquiries soon established, were his or her claims about Rochdale. We published the story six days later.
The Times Companion to 2017 Page 22