France has done it before. In May 2005, 55% of the French cast their ballots against the proposed EU Constitution on a voter turnout of 69%.

But that was underestimating the EU elites. Four years later, they found a “workaround” (a fudge) in a Lisbon Treaty, to resuscitate the key provisions of a costly and laborious multi-year effort on the new European charter.

This time, as the saying goes, will be different.

At the moment, the French President Emmanuel Macron is polling at 38%, and is topped in the first round of presidential elections next April by Marine Le Pen, a sworn EU foe and the leader of the right-of-center National Rally. Macron, however, is seen winning in the runoff on May 14, 2022 by 57% to 46% for Le Pen.

That is an old voting pattern in France since 2002, when Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen (founder of National Front, now called National Rally), scored in the first election round at 17% against the incumbent President Jacques Chirac’s 20%, only to lose in the runoff to Chirac’s 82% landslide.

What will be different this time?

Macron is seen – from left and right – as a weak leader, mismanaging a disastrous healthcare situation that is weighing down a structurally (i.e., “unreformed”) repressed economy, with high unemployment and poverty rates – 8% and 14% respectively.

Can Marine win?

Apart from that, France is facing a dangerous security issue of an explosive civil strife (some call it “civil war”) fostered by militant Islam communities and denounced by France’s top military brass.

None of that is expected to change much by next spring. In fact, things could get worse. And all those difficulties are blamed squarely on Macron’s poor leadership, because he cannot hide behind a prime minister from an opposition party.

And that’s where it hurts, because the history shows that over the last 40 years no French president has won re-election on his own record.

Paradoxically, Macron could still win – because Le Pen is generally perceived as being “incapable” of managing the complexities of the French political, economic and social difficulties.

That is how the situation looks now. Marine Le Pen is well known for her hostility to immigration and a German-run EU, but not much else has transpired about her election platform and people who would work with her to lead France in uncharted waters.

The EU, and its impact on French national interests, is the biggest issue between Macron and Le Pen. The election campaign will be an opportunity Le Pen will use to argue that Macron is taking the back seat to Germany, and that France is not well served by EU policies.

Macron’s attempt to divert attention from lackluster economic indicators and social violence to his European initiatives as a means of solving domestic problems is arguably his greatest weakness.

And that’s where Le Pen will come in and do her demolition job.

That could be easy to do. Macron’s mismanagement of the raging pandemic -- and its fallout on France’s already difficult economic and social affairs – is entirely a result of the EU Commission’s inability to deliver European solutions to medications, medical equipment and vaccines.

The German problem -- again

One can see there a striking contrast between France and Germany: despite the EU’s slow and heavy bureaucracy, Germany was still able to promptly and independently offer medical help to infected people, and to secure the necessary vaccine supplies.

Berlin’s go-it-alone pandemic response has rekindled the French ambivalence about the EU. Indeed, more than half of the French electorate is hostile to the EU, and opposes Germany’s heavy-handed approach to EU’s policy choices.

Macron has tried to change that. But, sadly, he has been repeatedly bruised by Berlin’s peremptory dismissals of his attempts to “re-found” the EU with far-reaching reforms and integration initiatives.

And Macron’s German saga continues. The fact that Germany now faces unsettling election choices next September is a serious complication for his re-election campaign. The pillars of Germany’s post-WWII political system – the Christian Democrats and the Socialists – are losing ground to Greens who care about the environment and not much else. Greens are also ready to put Germany’s foreign policy in Washington’s hands.

Germany, therefore, presents a huge problem for Macron’s policy options. With an inexperienced political leadership likely to take the helm in Berlin, it will be impossible for France to leverage the EU as a powerful global player asserting “European sovereignty” in political, economic and security affairs.   

France -- trapped within an EU that is shunted to the margins of global politics and commerce -- won’t go down well with the French electorate.

That’s a tailor made argument for Marine Le Pen. She will poke into that gaping wound of French pride to censure an allegedly unforgivable negligence of French national interests.

All that shows that France and Germany are inexorably slipping from a long and unsuccessful phase of marriage counseling to something ominously more serious.

Don’t get alarmed, though. Sober minds have known that all along. There won’t be immediate threats to the trading bloc’s customs union, its central bank, the common currency, and the ability to take ad hoc measures necessary to keep that going.

But the dream of the European economic and political union cannot live with an irreparable French-German discord.

_________________

*Dr. Michael Ivanovitch is an independent analyst focusing on world economy, geopolitics and investment strategy. He served as a senior economist at the OECD in Paris, international economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and taught economics at Columbia Business School.