The Plot Is Foiled

At the Wall Street Journal Christopher Caldwell presents some sketches of the candidates running for France’s president this weekend.

Le Pen

Ms. Le Pen promises a referendum within six months on taking back sovereignty from the EU. “Our battle for sovereignty is primary,” she said in Lyon in February. “Essential. Cardinal…Without sovereignty, all projects are broken promises. My opponents claim they can control the border, revoke birthright citizenship, slow immigration, fight unfair trade…They are lying to you. As long as they do not break the shackles of the European Union, which holds the authority on these matters, they are ruling out any change, even minor.”

Macron

People hear what they want to hear. In recent days, the onetime Le Monde editor Luc Rosenzweig announced that he would vote for Mr. Macron because the candidate believes in nuclear power and thus in the future. Meanwhile, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who represents the Green Party in the European Parliament, said that he is backing Mr. Macron in part because of his promise to cut nuclear power.

The most unusual thing about Mr. Macron is his marriage. He is not yet 40, while his wife is in her 60s. (He met her at age 15, when she was running the drama club at his high school.) In ordinary times, this might strike voters as weird; in today’s troubled climate, it seems to strike them as bracingly transgressive.

Fillon

The satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné alleged that Mr. Fillon had used taxpayer funds meant for running his office to employ his Welsh wife Penelope and their children and that Mrs. Fillon had briefly received monthly payments from a literary magazine. Almost immediately, an anticorruption arm of the government newly established by Mr. Hollande opened an investigation.

Mr. Fillon’s actions may not have been illegal, but the scandal has handicapped his campaign. The press exulted. Mr. Fillon couldn’t attend campaign rallies without being greeted with calls of “Escroc!” (“Crook!”). His poll numbers plummeted. But Mr. Fillon claimed that he had been set up by a cabinet noir (what we might call the “deep state”) in Mr. Hollande’s government and refused to step aside.

Mr. Fillon has another problem: He is a conventional candidate. His conservative cultural values are tied to a business-friendly agenda not so different from Mr. Macron’s. He supports the EU. Against Marine Le Pen and her National Front, he will never appear as the candidate of real change.

Mélenchon

The 65-year-old EU deputy Jean-Luc Mélenchon offers a version of Ms. Le Pen’s position that is more eloquent, if less logical. The best-selling economist Thomas Piketty said he would back him in the second round if the Socialist Hamon were eliminated (a virtual certainty). Mr. Mélenchon also has a new-media adviser who worked for Bernie Sanders.

Mr. Mélenchon argues that France can drive a harder bargain with the EU since its departure would doom the project altogether. (This is true of a half-dozen other countries too.) Though he hasn’t called for a referendum on EU membership, he might break up the EU more indirectly: His plans for €270 billion in stimulus spending by the government and for a 100% income tax on those earning more than €400,000 a year would rupture the voluntary fiscal and legal synchrony on which the EU rests.

As I’ve been saying for decades the European Union is essentially a plot to subsidize French farmers and German manufacturers. As long as those two things held good it maintained its support. Now that it has become rule by bureaucrats in Brussels and a pact to accept Middle Eastern and North African refugees to the degree that it is perceived that France could cease to be France the support has become shakier. This election may decide not just the presidency but the direction of France or even of Europe.

Update

It will be Le Pen vs. Macron in the run-off election. From France 24:

French centrist Emmanuel Macron and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen have qualified for the second round in the French presidential election with 23.7 percent and 21.7 percent of the vote respectively. Follow our live coverage below.