Moderate France looks to Fillon to halt rise of far right

After his landslide victory in Les Républicains’ primary on Sunday night, the newly minted conservative presidential candidate François Fillon has set about choosing his shadow cabinet and new leaders for the party. He is looking for a larger campaign headquarters and deciding who will represent the party in next June’s legislative elections.

Meanwhile, the socialist government has pulled back from an institutional crisis over rivalry between French president François Hollande and prime minister Manuel Valls.

The elevation of Fillon, a politician who was until recently mocked using nicknames such as "Droopy" and "Mr Nobody", to the status of the man most likely to become president of France is seen as tantamount to a miracle.

Fillon was the eternal number two, the man who carried out the orders of more boisterous politicians such as former president Nicolas Sarkozy, with whom he served for five years as prime minister.

Now France is counting on Fillon to slay the dragon of the extreme right. Two polls on Sunday night indicated Fillon would defeat his likely rival in the May 7th, 2017 runoff, the leader of the Front National, Marine Le Pen.

A Harris interactive poll found Fillon would win 26 per cent of the vote against 24 per cent for Le Pen in the first round, and 67 per cent against 33 per cent for Le Pen in the runoff. An Odoxa poll showed Fillon winning 32 per cent in the first round against 22 per cent for Le Pen, and 71 per cent in the runoff to 29 per cent for Le Pen.

On a trip to the Indian Ocean island of La Réunion, Le Pen said Fillon was a lamb when it came to fighting radical Islam, but a wolf in his social policies. He was, she said, “a very good candidate” for her to stand against, calling him “the spokesman for all the worst the EU has produced”.

Conservative revolution

Fillon’s victory is clearly a revolt, though unlike the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election, it is a revolt of middle-class and upper-class white people rather than poor white people. Fillon’s territory is

la France profonde

of the regions, of traditional Catholicism.

It is an electorate that had been all but forgotten. Who could have believed that a politician espousing a return to 1980s Thatcherism could lead a conservative revolution in France? Fillon even borrowed one of his favourite sayings, “The best social protection is employment”, from the Iron Lady.

As recounted by Le Monde, Fillon, his Welsh wife Penelope, four sons and daughter were photographed kneeling before Pope Benedict in 2009. Penelope wore a black mantilla. "I was raised in this tradition and I kept my faith," Fillon says.

The conservative candidate may be in harmony with the older, more affluent electorate who catapulted him to the nomination, but is he really in harmony with France?

Through this primary election, the French electorate has finally devised a way of eliminating entrenched career politicians who cling on beyond their sell-by date. In the old days, Sarkozy or former prime minister Alain Juppé would have been appointed by the party.

The primary system – first tested by the socialists in 2007 and 2012 – proved an effective way of ridding France of two decades of Chirac-ism, embodied by Juppé, and Sarkozy-ism.

Until now, a sitting president was considered the natural candidate of his party. But Hollande's approval ratings are so abysmal, his unpopularity so total, that he has been forced to participate in the January 22nd-29th Socialist Party primary. That, in itself, is already a humiliation.

‘Terrorist threat’

Now the prospect of that primary is tearing the socialists apart. Seven left-wing candidates have already declared. At least three are running outside the primary, draining more votes from the future socialist nominee.

On a trip to Madagascar for the Francophonie summit, Hollande had a nightmare of a weekend. Two additional leftists declared outside the primary. Claude Bartolone, the speaker of the national assembly, who Hollande insulted in the book A President Shouldn't Say That, got even by saying that Hollande and Valls should both stand in the socialist primary.

When Valls told the Journal du Dimanche that he might stand against Hollande, the party executive was plunged into crisis.

“There will be no primary between the president and prime minister,” government spokesman Stéphane Le Foll said yesterday morning.

While rumours of his imminent sacking or resignation swirled around Paris, a stern-faced Valls lunched with Hollande at the Élysée. His entourage told Agence France Presse that Valls’s “loyalty to the state” meant he would remain prime minister.

“At this moment, when France faces a terrorist threat, there can be no political confrontation in the framework of a primary between a president of the republic and a prime minister,” said a statement issued by Valls’s office.

The government crisis is over. For the time being.