How a crisis forced a change of tune

March 15: French municipal elections (first round)

How do you vote in the midst of a pandemic? Last month France had the first round of its municipal elections. Turnout was low and the results skewed left. Some have speculated that this was because many older voters stayed home.

The coronavirus has delayed the second round of these elections until June. In the meantime, it has also signaled a possible change of position for French president Emmanuel Macron. In calmer times, he is incredibly unpopular, in part because of his aggressive cost-cutting measures. “I am not Santa Claus!” he likes to say. Now, as French hospitals become overwhelmed and the lockdown drags on, he has suddenly begun promising more state support—for people out of work, for hospitals and for businesses.

Here to explain what’s going on is James McAuley, French correspondent for The Washington Post.

This interview was conducted by Madeleine Schwartz. It has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Macron is suddenly a popular president for the first time. 

This has been a sort of public humbling for Macron. On Monday in his address to the nation, which I think something like 37 million people watched, an all-time record in France—here was an elected leader of a major Western democracy taking full responsibility for the failure of the French state to be adequately prepared for the coronavirus. That was quite something to see. He said something like “Were we prepared?  No, clearly not enough.”

Macron usually speaks in these extremely lofty, grandiose ways. In the speech you saw a much meeker, more down-to-earth and sort of weathered Macron. People responded to that.

France has listened to the counsel of the best and the brightest when it comes to epidemiology and public health. So you can debate the question as ever of whether France sprung into action too late. But I think people are feeling that Macron has taken charge.

Then again, there is a significant amount of public skepticism about a governmental plan that’s seen as too little too late, particularly with regard to the question of masks, and their availability. Authorities first said that masks, which have been unavailable here for months, were useless to wear in the streets, but now Macron has said that every French citizen will have access to a mask after May 11, when the lockdown restrictions are slated to be relaxed. But by the same token, the waffling on masks has occurred in other countries, and the French government isn’t really an exception.

In France, of course, you also have to remember that Great Britain is very close. And that in French eyes is seen as a disaster—the initial embrace of what they called “herd immunity.” It led to basically half of the task force designated to fighting the virus contracting the virus. And then the prime minister in the ICU. So that's somewhat of a divergence.

What has distinguished France’s response to the virus?

France mirrors other European countries in some ways, and it quickly expanded its numbers of available ICU beds. But one interesting difference has been the ways in which health authorities have worked to avoid a Lombardy-style over-saturation in particularly afflicted areas, such as in Alsace, in the eastern part of the country. France has a system of medically equipped high-speed TGV trains that it’s used to transport patients in critical condition from areas like Alsace to ICUs in other less afflicted regions, such as Brittany and the Loire in Western France. 

How has the president’s position from last year, when protests paralyzed the country?

One of the things that had really angered people about Macron before was the technocratic arrogance that he exemplified on any number of occasions.

Here you have this very photogenic, very crisply attired technocratic ex-investment banker who becomes French president at the age of 39. He’s elected, he assumes power and then he starts telling people things—like telling the kid who came up to him and said it was hard to find a job, “You should just go across the street and you can find a job over there.”

He also refuses to back down. In terms of the way the political landscape works, there's no reason for him to. There is no opposition in France. He has an absolute majority in the French parliament. Yes, of course, there are members of his own faction that have run awry of him and are no longer as on board as they were at the beginning. But by and large it's still Macron’s country and Macron’s party.

That said, the retirement reforms—in which essentially the idea was to streamline the innumerable different retirement schemes into a single point-based system, which meant that some public sector employees would have to retire later and would have changes to their pensions—that angered a lot of people. 

Macron claimed that the state could not continue to pay benefits as it had for decades and that things were getting too expensive, and that the world had changed.

However, one thing that's been really interesting to observe is that during the pandemic he has completely changed his tone. He has completely gotten rid of that insistence—some would say coldness—and has been extremely sensitive, particularly to the concerns of working people.

The French government is currently paying up to 84% of salary for a huge percentage of the workforce. Macron has said that he will refuse to allow any business to fail.

A lot of people were surprised and pleased to see this kind of investment and change of tune from a president who seemed to be about overhauling the system and cutting costs as opposed to spending more, which he definitely is doing now.

It does seem that the far-right Front National has basically disappeared in the crisis. Has the appetite for this kind of populism gone away?

We'll see what things are like when all of this ends. We’re only in the beginning stages of it. But for the moment, I would say: no one is really looking to Marine Le Pen for guidance.

Is there is there a sense in which the virus might contribute to ongoing forms of racism?

In the early days of the pandemic, people of Asian descent in France launched a campaign with the hashtag #jesuispasunvirus.

The question of anti-Asian racism has faded. What I would say has replaced it is the question of inequitable division of policing during the lockdown, where that is done and where that is done most heavily. Without question that is in places like the Paris banlieues, where many people of immigrant origin and people of color often live. People need to get out and to have fresh air and get out of their home. There have been reports of significant reports of police brutality in the last few weeks, which we do not see so much in places like central Paris.

The first round of municipal elections took place a few weeks ago. The results skewed left—the Green party in particular did well—in part because older people didn't turn out due to fear of the virus.

The turnout was incredibly low for the first round—around 45%.

We know that the second round of the election has been delayed until June.

But given that all campaigning has been suspended. and no one has been thinking about the question of municipal leadership in substantive ways since (or even before, for that matter), I'm not sure how it can resume.  

The municipal elections are split in two. It's interesting that Macron went ahead with having the first round. He had been accused—when they had floated the idea of just postponing the entire thing altogether—of subverting democracy by opponents on the right. And so I think to kind of stave off those critiques, they went forward with it anyway. But looking back now, given everything that is prohibited, it seems quite a striking decision to have done that.

Can you tell me what you’re seeing outside your window? 

I’m looking out onto a courtyard. There are all of these trees that I don’t know how to describe. There’s some ivy. It’s very nice and Parisian.

Madeleine Schwartz is the creator and editor of The Ballot.