ho won Wednesday night’s debate between Emmanuel Macron and Marine
Le Pen depends on who is doing the scoring. In the spin room and on the
social networks, Team Macron claimed a victory for the President. With the
second round of the presidential election on Sunday, my reaction is exactly
the opposite.
Le Pen was not crushed as she was in 2017. In a way, she
won by not being terrible, leaving Macron unable to
administer a coup de grace to her candidacy. She got
stronger and more confident as the evening wore on; he
seemed to become more defensive.
To be generous, Macron was not on form. As the three-hour
debate began, his voice seemed almost to break as he
described his ambition for France. Sincerity? Or the
bravado performance? It was a strangely emotional beginning.
The conflicts between the candidates were predictable as
they ground their way through international affairs, the
future of the French social model, the environment, economic
competitiveness, youth, security and immigration, and
finally France’s troubled state institutions. These topics
producing forests of what the French call mots de bois.
Wooden words. But among the branches, one could glean
fundamental differences on Europe, where Le Pen remains
a sceptic and Macron an obsessive.
How much attention the television audience paid to these details is itself debatable. But millions will have dutifully watched, and they might well believe that Marine Le Pen is less toxic than advertised. She’s not brilliant but not as much of an entitled dunce as I have previously considered. True, she’s longwinded; certainly not profound or mentally agile. But she had done her homework. She remained disciplined throughout. Macron was often characteristically patronising.
As the debate drew to a close, Le Pen was calm as Macron
interrupted constantly and on several occasions the
President’s voice again appeared close to breaking. It’s
taken for granted that Macron is a master of his dossiers
and the President’s performance wasn’t terrible. But this
was not the rout of 2017. He jabbed, he feinted, but he
never knocked Le Pen to the floor.
The debate will have been exhausting for the pair and
certainly for the audience. But it reaffirmed that this election
is much closer than in 2017, where Le Pen was humiliated
by Macron in their head-to-head and went on to lose
66 to 34 per cent in the voting that followed. Sunday's
vote is likely to be far closer.
