The biggest loser in the French presidential election is the party system – traditional ruling parties are fading to nothing

PARIS Fiona Cheval carries the “Women for Zemmour” sign on the Trocadero in Paris. Far right Eric Zemmour hold an election ceremony in the square.

– She’s protecting us women. That’s what I look forward to as a woman and a future mother, Fiona Cheval says.

Since chauvinism is particularly associated with the image of the presidential candidate Eric Zemmour, the young woman’s comment is surprising.

Cheval’s choice makes sense when you think about it through a Christian and family-centered worldview. Zemmour offers traditional family values ​​and discipline where “men run politics and women run children”.

In France, the president has an exceptional amount of power, which is why the idea of ​​the nation’s father sits naturally into the country’s political system.

– We often say in France that we do not have a republican presidential system but a republican monarchy, professor of political studies Pascal Perrineau About Sciences Po from Paris tells .

According to Perrineau, the sitting president Emmanuel Macron has played a lot with monarchism and the role of the hyperpresident who decides everything.

The first round of the French presidential election is on Sunday. Macron has prepared for it with the grip of a distant king.

He has hardly campaigned and agreed to any TV election debates with other candidates before the first round.

– I am worried. The president’s attitude of refusing to debate and rising above other candidates is belittling democracy, Perrineau says.

Macron has calculated that spectacular telephone diplomacy in the wake of the war in Ukraine and continued visibility as president of the EU presidency are enough. Times are uncertain and the people are entangled in tricolor, hoping for wisdom from the father of the nation.

– The personification of power is very dangerous. That is what erodes democracy, professor of sociology at the University of Saint-Denis in Paris Eric Fassin says to .

The personification of politics has also weakened the position of political parties.

A good example of this is that the combined support of the two traditional ruling parties, the Moderate Right Republican Party and the Socialists, for presidential candidates is around 12 per cent in opinion polls.

As late as the first round of the 2012 election, candidates from these parties received a total of more than 55 percent of the vote and were opposed in the second round.

The collapse is thus amazingly fast.

The reorganization of the political field is partly explained by the fact that the language of politics in France has become more right-wing.

The far right has defined the vocabulary and way of speaking of key themes. Speech is filtered through narrow nationalist thinking.

For example, the debate on insecurity is automatically linked to migration and immigration. This is thanks to the National Front, the predecessor of the far-right National Alliance.

Sociology professor Fassin confirms this by stating that “ideologically, the far right has won the struggle in public”.

Far right Eric Zemmour is a journalist-writer with very sharp opinions. He engages in rhetorical excesses and obsessions. That’s why he dominated television conversations and newspaper columns on a weekly basis.

Zemmour has taken the tone of speech more to the right. He also raised the theory of “demographic change”.

The theory flashes in the speech of several young supporters at Trocadero.

– He’s the only one talking about population change. It’s a big problem and it’s important to talk about it before it’s too late, says a twenties Nicolas Nogues.

Demographic change is a far-right conspiracy theory that Caucasian people will remain a minority unless they even go extinct when people from the Middle East and Africa move to the West.

– It is normal to talk about population change, that is, to talk completely racist. The far right has been ordinaryized and normalized in public speech, Professor Fassin says.

Even a Republican presidential candidate Valérie Pécresse raised the theory of population change in his own campaign event.

So, in addition to the fact that the whole political field has become right-wing, there has been a shift towards the extreme within the right.

According to opinion polls, two far-right candidates, Zemmour and the National Alliance Marine Le Penyour vote is more than 30% in total, while the support of the moderate right – wing candidate Pécresse seems to be close to 10%.

President Macron eats the other side of the moderate right.

The Republican Movement party, which he founded in the previous presidential election, emerged from scratch and took over from the political center, uniting supporters of the center-right and center-left.

The market economy, Europeanness and liberalism were at the heart of the Republican Movement’s message. The movement would absorb liberal Republicans and the politically homeless who alienated both the old parties and the far right and populist populism.

One wanted to cut red tape, another to prolong careers, and a third was liberal about gay marriage, for example. Everyone wanted to reform France.

– In the past, France was politically divided into left and right. The center has caused major problems for the balance of power, Professor Pascal Perrineau estimates.

In the second round of the 2017 presidential election, Macron clearly won Le Pen, receiving more than 66 percent of the vote.

The far-right Le Pen lost its status as an alternative to the old parties in that election and appeared precisely as part of the old political setup.

In this election, Marine Le Pen has wanted to fade the last name out of his campaign and thus at the latest remove his father. Jean-Marie Le Penin the burdens of the shadow and the past.

Emmanuel Macron’s centralism also struck the left, which is still completely scattered.

Attempts to get the political left behind one candidate failed in this election as well.

– It is sad that the left has not found a common candidate. It can’t fight the right, student Islam Dahoum says.

Dahoum sits on the grass on the campus of the University of Saint-Denis in Paris. Election work at the university is intense. Every entrant receives a ballot paper and hears the prelude to equality and justice.

On campus, you can see that the top name on the left side of France is the radical left Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The leader of the Indomitable France party is already 70 years old, but he has a lot of young supporters.

Mélenchon is third in the support measures and thus does not seem to make it to the second round.

The popularity of Jean-Luc Mélenchon has further sharpened the decline of the Socialists.

In the 2012 election, the Socialists François Hollande was still elected president, but in the first round of the 2017 election Benoît Hamon received about six percent more votes. Now Anne Hidalgon support can be as low as two percent.

– The left has lost its soul. It does not speak in a folk way. It speaks to the Bobos, the bohemian bourgeoisie, Professor Perrineau says.

Sociology professor Fassin says the distinction between left and right must now be made visible again. The difference disappeared over the decades.

He instructs the Socialists to return to their roots and values. He thinks that in the end, all the key issues for the future, whether they relate to the environment, the economy or even migration, can be addressed through human rights.

Many scholars have said that the core values ​​of republicanism — freedom, fraternity, and equality — are very often perceived as originally leftist values, but French political life and the debate over power have slipped to the right.

Fassin says another problem that is shaking the entire party field is that the social movement has shifted outside the parties. The Yellow Vest movement, which took over the streets and roundabouts, was a good example of this.

Worries, worries, problems and despair unite people and create movement. The parties have been left out of this.

– If the left still wants to come back, it must cooperate with various social movements.

The presidential election shows another thing that is reducing the importance of the parties. Alongside the parties, there have been loose movements set up around the person, such as the Republic of Macron movement and the Reconquête of Zemmour.

Macron and Le Pen’s entry into the second round of elections looks pretty clear. It is assumed that Macron will win the second round.