Getting to the bottom of the barrel, in my absolutely not objective evaluation of the punches packed in these posters (or not packed rather). It doesn’t necessarily mean I think these politicians are awful, it’s just that their campaigns have, objectively, flopped.

Here is the next candidate:

I originally had planned to do two postings about this, but upon looking at these, I realized these two posters were eerily similar, although they come from opposite part of the political spectrum.

This is the Conservative party candidate, Valérie Pécresse. She is running for the party Les Républicains. I’ve explained the complicated (and murky) past of the Républicains, but Pécresse represents also a new reality, as she is younger than the former conservative turned alt-right nationalist, Dupont-Aignan.

This is also something I feel goes well with the other poster I’ll put down here: Pécresse’s party has consistently lost voices to the centrist Macron or the far right Le Pen in the past, and this election is no different. After I started writing this series, the first round of the election gave around 4% to Pécresse, underscoring how inaudible she is amongst the big weight of the election, Macron, Le Pen, and Mélenchon.

To give you an idea of this constant decrease of the part Les Républicains (formerly UMP, formerly RPR), this is what their scores look like in the past 40 years or so:

In pink, the Socialist party, in blue Les Républicains-UMP-RPR

A couple of things are remarkable on this: in 1981, the Socialist party, led by Mitterrand, took power for the first time under the new constitutional regime of the Fifth Republic, and more broadly, for the first time since 1957-1958. Most first time voters in 1981 still remember the huge parties in the streets. If you are interested in the whole TV evening, which is one of the first times the election gets a huge televised coverage, you can watch this INA (Institut National de l’audiovisuel–and peep out these amazing MSDos special effects) video, but the gist of it is that Mitterrand squeaks by at 51 or so percent, and that it’s a huge event for the youth of France, who massively voted for him.

It took Chirac a couple of tries to win, but finally, in 1995, as Mitterrand retired, he was elected president. For both parties, left and right wings, the pre-1995 period is the peak, but they have different outcomes. In 2002, a huge abstention propels Le Pen, the far right candidate, to the second round of the election. A couple of reasons for this: Jospin, the socialist candidate, is uninspiring and bland, as well as rather conservative socially for a socialist. Further, Chirac starts what’s essentially been the strategy of Les Républicain-UMP-RPR since the early 2000s: he gleans voices from the far right by emphasizing a tough on crime, tough on immigration, no to islamism stance. More than him, though, it’s Nicolas Sarkozy who embodies this dangerous strategy. With a speechwriter, Henri Gaino, who is reaching well into the far right and nationalist discourse, steeped in a colonialist, imperialist and racialist approach (see Sarko’s Dakar speech, where Gaino wrote that the African man has never entered history).

But Sarkozy is also, not unlike Trump, someone who confuses brutal honesty with candor, and has no filter, which results in pearl like “casse-toi pauvre con” (move out, you c***). He might have sold his vision once in 2007, but 2012 was a case of “let’s kick Sarko out” rather than a case of “We love Hollande”. Compared to Sarko, Hollande was a model of moderation, a stalwart socialist who might not have inspired great love and adoration, but seemed modest and well-rounded. Oh, and his private life was private (how mistaken and foolish were we on this).

After the Hollande Sarko run off, which Hollande barely won, there were celebrations in the streets–Sarko was divisive and harsh, and Hollande’s victory speech recognized this, acknowledging the work to be done to mend fence (he didn’t do any of it, fair warning). Remember that at this point, it was only the second time France Fifth’s Republic had a socialist president, and he was largely elected by France’s youth. But we will come back to this.

In 2017, François Fillon ran against Macron, in the first round, essentially ahead, thanks to the siphoning of socialist voices by Mélenchon, until it was revealed that Fillon had “employed” his wife in largely imaginary positions, for large sums of money. In the context of an increasing desire from the French to have a transparent position in public affairs, Fillon tanked, or as The Guardian put it, he ran into defeat, taking it “from the jaws of victory”. The Républicains party failed, placing third place, barely. Might Fillon have saved the party by stepping down mid-campaign in favor of someone like Rachida Dati or another prominent figure? Maybe, but that’s all speculation anyways.

After the humiliating defeat of 2017, Valérie Pécresse won a hard-fought primary facing Eric Ciotti in the final leg of it. Pécresse was, by far, the most moderate of the candidates in the primary. Ciotti, and other potential candidates who ended up not running like Laurent Wauquiez, or Nadine Moreno, are from the far right of the center right party, and they largely run on Le Pen’s turf. By contrast, Pécresse was a moderate choice, rather to the center.

Perhaps too much. Caught between the most unsavory far right elements of her party, and Macron’s particular brand of centrism, Pécresse suffered some of the same accusations as Clinton in 2016: too cold, too closed, not emotional enough, too inexistent. Despite being one of the rare voices of reasons in her party, and seemingly no affairs nor corruption issues following her, Pécresse’s campaign never emerged from the dregs.

I think part of the reason why we are having this poster is this difficulty, seemingly, for Pécresse to come across as warm. We know it’s a sexist predisposition of politics, of course, to not consider warm any woman who doesn’t dab her eyes when something upsets her, as we have seen in the show The Crown, which made much of Elizabeth’s stoic face at Aberfan, when over a 100 school children were swallowed up by a landslide.

That’s the sense of this picture, which is really actually not bad, but trying for warmth and reaching an audience are two different things. Interestingly enough, she wears about the same clothing as Le Pen, but in a totally different way, and to a different effect. Where Le Pen’s picture is meant to display confidence and respectability, Pécresse’s is meant to make her less inaccessible (partially like Le Pen), but has the effect of making her look less visible and more unsure than Le Pen. The handwriting is also here, I think, to express closeness to the audience, as in “look, I care, I’m handwriting to you.” I mean we know it’s not a proper handwriting, but it shows a form of closeness to the audience than a typed text wouldn’t. Unfortunately for Pécresse, because her poster resembles so closely Le Pen’s and others’, she becomes invisible by contrast.