François Fillon’s victory in the first round of the conservative Les Républicains’ primary on Sunday night marks an extraordinary comeback for the right-wing politician, and a turning point in the French presidential election campaign.
Fillon's meteoric rise – he gained more than 30 percentage points in the last two weeks of the campaign – ended the career of former president Nicolas Sarkozy and endangered the candidacy of Alain Juppé, who for more than two years appeared likely to succeed François Hollande.
In an era of populist rabble-rousers , Fillon (62) has the air of a country gentleman farmer, with his tweed jackets, self-effacing manners and careful diction. His Welsh wife, Penelope, and their five children, complete the picture of provincial domesticity.
But Fillon is also a stubborn and resilient risk-taker. Born in Le Mans, he made race car driving his hobby.
Ninety-four per cent of the more than four million people who voted in Sunday’s conservative primary believe the ultimate winner – Fillon or Juppé – will go to the Élysée next May, Émile Leclerc of the Odoxa polling agency said.
The logic runs like this: despite Marine Le Pen’s popularity, voters are not yet ready to elect the leader of the extreme right-wing Front National (FN) to France’s highest office. The left is in tatters, and polls indicate the conservative candidate will defeat Le Pen in the runoff next May.
That is to say, polls indicated that Juppé would defeat Le Pen. Fillon’s ability to do so is the key question of the next six months, if he snatches the nomination from Juppé in next Sunday’s run-off .
Fillon came in 16 percentage points ahead of Juppé in the first round. More than 80 per cent of those who voted for Sarkozy said they would transfer their vote to Fillon, not Juppé. So it is hard to see how Juppé can recover. The televised debate between the two on Thursday night will be crucial.
Middle ground
Fillon seems to offer a middle ground to conservative voters, between Sarkozy’s hard-right positions, modelled after those of the FN, and Juppé’s promise of a centrist, low-key transition, judged “too moderate” by Fillon.
Fillon bucked two important international trends. Having served in elected office continuously for the past 35 years, he is very much a figure of the “establishment”. And following on years of anti-austerity revolts, he has promised the French a mega dose of austerity, including €110 billion in government spending cuts and the firing of more than half a million civil servants.
The attack on the civil service could be Fillon’s undoing, when one considers that government workers represent a nearly a quarter of salaried employees.
Jean-Marie Le Guen, the socialist secretary of state for parliamentary affairs, fretted on Sunday night that Fillon would not be able to defeat Le Pen because the “republican pact”, whereby left- and right-wing voters join together to block the FN, would break down. Left-wing voters would simply not be able to stomach Fillon’s “Thatcherist” policies, Le Guen predicted.
One-third of Fillon’s cuts would come from central government, 20 per cent from local and regional governments, and the rest from social security. That would mean raising the retirement age from 62 to 65, forcing civil servants to work 39, rather than 35 hours a week, and allowing private sector bosses to require employees to work up to 48 hours a week, the maximum allowed by EU regulations.
Fillon would use a 2 percentage point rise in VAT to finance cuts in social charges on businesses.
He claims his programme would reduce unemployment from 10 to below 7 per cent within five years, and make France the leading economy in Europe within a decade.
Social conservative
Fillon the economic liberal is a social conservative. His “pro-family” policies have made him the favourite candidate of the religious right, who demonstrated against the legalistion of same-sex marriage. Fillon would not rescind the law, because “one cannot unmarry people who are already married”, but he would restrict adoption by homosexual couples, make them ineligible for medically assisted procreation, and revoke the circular that allows children conceived by surrogate mothers abroad on behalf of gay couples to obtain French identity papers.
In foreign policy, Fillon has cultivated a personal friendship with Vladimir Putin, whom he met when both were prime ministers. He advocates an alliance with Russia, Iran and the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to defeat Islamic State.
On Sunday night, Fillon took revenge on Sarkozy, who made his life a misery for the five years he served as Sarkozy's prime minister. Sarkozy wanted to be the "hyper president", who controlled everything. While Sarkozy soaked up the limelight, Fillon mouldered in the shadows, taking the blame for all that went wrong. He left the prime minister's office in 2012 a broken man, then began the long path to what Le Monde called his "astounding resurrection".
