Macron pins hopes on ‘poster boy’ prime minister as he trails Le Pen
Emmanuel Macron made a last-ditch attempt to avoid election humiliation by pitting his “poster boy” prime minister against Marine Le Pen’s young leader.
With the French president’s Renaissance lagging behind Ms Le Pen’s hard-Right National Rally ahead of the June 9 ballot, he dispatched Gabriel Attal, 35, to take on RN’s 28-year-old election leader Jordan Bardella in a debate on Thursday night watched by 3.6 million viewers.
The head of Mr Macron’s party list for the European elections, the little-known Valérie Hayer, has failed to make her mark and was widely believed to have lost her debate with Mr Bardella earlier this month.
The presidential camp now faces the real prospect of being overtaken in second place by the Socialists led by former commentator Raphael Glucksmann. Third place would be a fiasco for the French president, self-styled champion of European democracy and bulwark against the far-Right.
Mr Bardella has turned the campaign into a referendum for or against Mr Macron.
There were rumours the president might step in himself to take on Ms Le Pen, who he trounced in two successive debates ahead of presidential run-offs he went on to win in 2017 and 2022.
Instead, France’s centrist head-of-state, who has had to fly to the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia to try to calm the violent unrest there, dispatched Mr Attal to try and salvage the situation.
Mr Bardella, who took over the party leadership from his mentor, is key to Ms Le Pen’s strategy; he is a gifted communicator of immigrant origin with a growing following on TikTok.
Both he and Mr Attal, according to polls France’s two most popular politicians, are seen as capable of wooing a new generation of young voters.
The result was a tense debate – the eighth face-off between the pair – on issues ranging from immigration to foreign policy in which there were no knock-out blows but Mr Bardella was often on the ropes.
Mr Attal attacked the Le Pen party’s policy U-turns, notably its decision to drop previous calls for a French withdrawal from the EU.
“The method of the RN is to say ‘we are against everything’ and then in five or 10 years time when you realise you are wrong you say you have changed your mind. You were for Frexit – and now you supposedly want to stay in Europe!” he said.
“The question one has to be asked is when were you lying? Was it then or now?”
“That’s a caricature,” Mr Bardella hit back.
On Russia, Mr Bardella accused President Macron of “pouring fuel into the fire” by refusing to rule out sending troops to Ukraine and “using the war to run his election campaign”, while Mr Attal alleged that at one time the RN had an “alliance of mutual interest with Moscow”.
‘Principles and generalities’
“Why didn’t you vote for the resolution supporting Alexei Navalny, who was rotting in Russian jails and is now dead?” asked the prime minister. “Even if you’ve repaid your debt, you have a moral contract with [Vladimir Putin],” he said, referring to the €9.4 million (£8 million) loan taken out by the RN in 2014 with a bank close to the Kremlin.
On immigration, Mr Bardella suggested that the EU’s Schengen free travel space only be open to European travellers, an idea immediately rubbished by Mr Attal who asked how he intended to police this.
Mr Bardella replied that it would be by “stepping up random checks”. “In the space of a few seconds, we’ve gone from a dual border where everyone is going to be checked to ‘we’re increasing random checks a bit’”, Mr Attal then hit back.
Attacking one of the RN’s key measures, namely “national priority in the single market on public procurement,” Mr Attal said it was a recipe for disaster given that “80 per cent of our SMEs export to a European country”.
Most media and analysts saw Mr Attal as the winner.
“(Bardella) clearly had difficulty responding to arguments on figures other than with principles and generalities”, Brice Teinturier, deputy chairman of Ipsos, told AFP.
“There was no knockout blow from Attal, but Bardella showed a lack of mastery of the issues”, said Ifop director Frédéric Dabi.
Mr Bardella’s shortcomings were reminiscent of “the Le Pen-Macron debates”, widely seen as sealing Ms Le Pen’s electoral defeat, said Mr Teinturier. “It could act like a slow poison, in the medium term, reactivating doubts about whether the RN is up to scratch,” said Mr Dabi.
‘Traditionally debates rarely move votes’
Bardella supporters expressed disappointment. “It shows that when he’s challenged and has to go beyond his ready-made formulas, things get tough,” one told l’Express.
However, a poll released on Friday in Le Figaro suggested that the French viewed the pair as evenly matched, with Mr Bardella even a whisker ahead on 51 per cent.
With two weeks to go, it remains far from certain the debate will dent Mr Bardella’s lead.
An Ifop poll also in Le Figaro put the RN on 33 per cent, compared with 16 per cent for the Macron camp, just ahead of the Socialists on 14.5 per cent.
“Traditionally debates rarely move votes”, especially as “for many voters, the ease and good punchlines displayed by Jordan Bardella are enough to give him credibility”, said Mr Teinturier.
But Mr Attal’s performance may do enough to keep the Macron camp in second place ahead of Mr Glucksmann.
As Le Figaro’s Guillaume Tabard put it: “While for Emmanuel Macron’s friends, the ideological enemy is always Jordan Bardella, the political adversary is Raphaël Glucksmann.”