The Le Pen Surge: French Election and Immigration.

A whiff of Trumpism has come to the European heartland.  

Immigration has loomed large in the French presidential election, a showdown between a centrist president and a far-right firebrand envisaging a “France for the French.”    

Emmanuel Macron is hoping voters will return him to the Élysée for a second time. That task now looks like an uphill battle. His challenger Marine Le Pen is gaining ground—and fast. In 2017, Macron beat Le Pen by a 32% margin to become the country’s youngest president at the age of 39. Today, the race is remarkably tighter, with one poll predicting only a razor-thin 4% voting gap in the April 24 runoff election.  

A Le Pen win is sure to send shockwaves across Europe. She has vowed, if elected, to rewrite Constitution to scrap birthright citizenship. Eager to resurrect French values, she has embraced a nationalistic economic policy and threatened to ban head scarves in public. For his part, Macron—despite his liberal bona fides—has presided over tougher measures on immigration, in particular asylum seekers.  

Beyond rising living expenses, perhaps no other subject is more important than immigration during the French election, as Europe’s third-largest economy debates its cultural identity and its place in the world. About 13% of France’s population were born overseas, compared with nearly 22% in Canada.  

Already, anti-immigration sentiment was on the rise prior to the pandemic, a trend particularly pronounced in the EU. Yet for many countries, post-pandemic economic recovery is likely to overshadow the debate over immigration, a new report from the UN’s migration agency argued.  

 “Citizens and governments will prioritize other concerns: economic reconstruction and States’ finances, as well as their health-care and education systems,” The IOM said. “Migration will clearly interlink with these concerns, but our point is that the migration issue itself seems likely to be less exposed to direct public debate, which can lead to a period of “quieter” immigration politics that can create space for innovations.” 

Whether such a space exists in France is an open question. French voters, naturally, are more preoccupied with bread and butter issues. But Le Pen’s surge in popularity has made one thing clear: the French views on immigration are hardening.