I happened to be standing beside a young man distributing leaflets when Elisabeth Borne, France’s new Prime Minister, and several TV crews approached. You don’t see many TV cameras in Thury Harcourt, in the hills 30 kilometres south of Caen. You don’t see many prime ministers either.

The young man began to berate the PM. Why was she scared to debate with him in public, he asked? Madame Borne put him down politely. “I am very pleased to meet you and I hope that we’re all going to campaign nicely,” she said.

It was only then that I realised that the young man was Noé Gauchard, the local candidate for the Left-Green alliance Nouvelle Union Populaire Ecologique et Sociale (or Nupes for short).

Madame Borne became France’s second female prime minister last week. She is running for election — for the first time in her long career as a public servant — in my home constituency, the sixth circonscription of Calvados. After becoming boss of the Paris Metro, after becoming a regional Prefect in uniform and white gloves, after becoming three kinds of minister during President Emmanuel Macron’s first term, Elisabeth Borne has decided that it is time to get herself elected.

You have to give her credit for that. She doesn’t have to be a member of parliament to be the PM in France. If she wins, she will have to resign the seat and allow her running mate to become the local MP. If she loses, she will have to step down as Prime Minister — not for any legal reason but because Macron has made that the rule for all members of his government who are running in the parliamentary elections on 12 and 19 June. So here, down my way, came an event which could only happen in France: a Prime Minister campaigning for votes for the first time in her life.

How would Elisabeth Borne, a classic product of the French technocracy, take to being a stump politician? She is a fiercely competent and hard-working woman, but is reputed to have little charisma. Her nickname when head of the Paris Metro was “Borne-Out (because she burned out her staff). “She is not a barrel of laughs,” one Macron ally says. “But, then again, government is not the Club Med.”

The Prime Minister spent 45 minutes at the Thury Harcourt Vide-Grenier (attic-clearance sale), which is an occasional opportunity for local people to exchange their unwanted rubbish for other people’s unwanted rubbish. You could buy Johnny Hallyday’s Greatest Hits, Volume 12. Or a casserole with no lid.

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I thought that, for a first-timer, she did pretty well. She came over like a hospital matron of the old school doing the rounds of the wards. She has a lovely smile, which is rarely seen on television. She listened for longer than was strictly necessary to complaints about high pump prices or Emmanuel Macron. She was able to connect with people — especially, it seemed, the women. She allowed selfies to be taken with children.

Borne made one beginner’s mistake, however. She didn’t buy anything. A practiced French stump politician visiting a market would always buy something. It doesn’t have to be Johnny Hallyday’s Greatest Hits Volume 12.

***

Borne’s mother was a pharmacist who came from Livarot, a little further east in Calvados. Her father was a Holocaust survivor and resistance hero who never recovered from his wartime trauma and committed suicide when Elisabeth was 11-years-old.

She was brought up in Paris and rose through the ranks of the French meritocracy. She trained as an engineer at France’s premier engineering school, Ecole Polytechnique, whose students — still almost all men to this day — have uniforms and ceremonial swords. She then worked, in increasingly senior roles, in the private offices of a series of Socialist politicians: the culture minister Jack Lang, the Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, President François Hollande, the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe. She regarded herself as “of the Left” but never joined the Socialist Party.

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She was one of the first women to become a Prefect of a French region, in Poitou-Charentes. During the first Macron presidency, Borne was successively transport, environment and employment minister. She is credited by some (and blamed by the unions and part of the Left) for pushing through two of the most important reforms of the Macron era: the opening of the state French railways to competition and making the terms for unemployment pay tougher (but still more generous than most other EU countries).

Fast forward to Macron’s re-election on 24 April, and she is reported to have been his first choice as Prime Minister. He then spent three weeks looking at other options, all of whom were women. He had decided that, 30 years after the brief and disastrous term of Edith Cresson in 1991-2, it was time for France to have a second female PM.

Macron was torn between choosing a woman with proven experience in national government and one with deep roots in local or regional politics. He is reported by the French media to have almost made another choice, Catherine Vautrin, the centre-right president of the Greater Rheims area in eastern France. But several of his closest aides pointed out that Vautrin had once been a vocal opponent of the legalisation of gay marriage in France. Macron backed away rather than offend his supporters on the centre or the centre-left.

After three weeks, the President returned to his original choice: Elisabeth Borne. This stuttering process — the longest delay before the appointment of a new PM since the present doubled-headed French government system began in 1965 — reveals two things: one about Macron, the other about the changing status of French Prime Ministers.

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The first is that Macron, who appears confident, even arrogant, can be indecisive, especially when it comes to choosing people. He is often torn between doing what he thinks will be the right thing and what will be the clever thing.

The second is more profound. It used to be that the Prime Minister was a disposable front-bumper or a fuse to protect the President from being damaged by random events — especially during domestic crises. All the same, the PM used to have a certain amount of autonomy. They were often senior politicians from the President’s own ideological family. They ran the country while the President presided.

But since the seven-year presidential term was reduced to align with the five-year parliamentary term from 2007, the role of the French Prime Minister has become uncertain, even problematic. The semi-detached status of French Presidents is no longer tenable in the age of Twitter and 24-hour TV news. If the President leaves too much to the PM, he is accused of being aloof; if he takes all the decisions, he is accused of being overbearing.

Macron is frequently accused of both. He resented the popularity of his independent-minded, first Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe. He had a much better working relationship with his successor, the hard-working, unassuming but effective Jean Castex. Any French Prime Minister now risks being Prime Minister only in name. He or she no longer leads the majority party in parliament because French parties have all but vanished and have been replaced with permanent or shifting alliances.

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In theory, Borne — with zero experience as an electoral strategist — will spearhead Macron’s forces in the parliamentary campaign next month: the half-dozen parties and factions which make up his centrist alliance, Ensemble. The campaign will actually be led by a committee of  more experienced stump politicians with Macron (officially banned from campaigning as head of state) directing operations in the background.

All of which means that the French Prime Minister, whatever the constitution may say, has become a kind of Super-Chief-of- Staff or a Grand Vizir. Castex was well-suited to that role. Elisabeth Borne — demanding, tough, intellectually impressive — should also be in her element.

But like her more successful predecessors, she has to find a way of connecting with the French without making Macron jealous. And she has to win her first election in the sixth circonsciption of Calvados. If my own little patch of France rejects her on 19 June, she will be the shortest-serving prime minister of the Fifth Republic. I suspect, however, that it won’t reject her. Macron came first in this area in both the first and second round of the Presidential elections in April. In any case, the words “Prime Minister” may be devalued in Paris but they still mean something in rural France.

In the Thury Harcourt market, I spoke to Patrick, 58, a local beef farmer and village councillor just after he had chatted to Madame Borne. “I was surprised,” he said. “She was easy to talk to and seemed genuinely interested in farming. But even if she is as dull and cold as people say she is, she would win. How often do you see prime ministers in Thury Harcourt? Never. It will be a great and wonderful thing for this area to elect a Prime Minister.”

Her imitator and friend, Matteo Salvini, has taken his once marginal far-Right party, La Lega, to a share of power and increasing popularity in Italy. The populists are in government in Hungary, Poland, and Austria. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is increasingly infirm and no longer embarrasses her with his thoughts on the Holocaust or the “correct behaviour” of German troops in France during World War Two.

This is surely her moment.

And yet she has had a disastrous time in the 20 months since she was crushed by Emmanuel Macron in the second round of the presidential elections. She has failed to establish herself as the de facto ‘leader of the opposition’. If anything, that role has been seized by her populist rival on the hard Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

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She is, according to one of her most senior economic advisors, who recently quit the party, economically illiterate and incapable of understanding even the most basic fiscal questions.

Euro or no Euro? Low-taxation or big-state interventionism? It was these same confusions that Macron gleefully tore apart during Marine’s calamitous performance in a television debate just before the second round vote last year. Since when, little has changed, save the name of the party – and her popularity.

Marine’s poll rating as ‘potential future President’ has fallen to around 16% . Her party remains more resilient than its leader electorally, but financially it is in a mess. The Rassemblement National, formerly the Front National, is struggling to keep afloat after being denied €2 million of government election funds, for defrauding the European Parliament.

It also faces an embarrassing trial of two of its former campaign finance officials. They are accused of defrauding both the French state and the party’s own grassroots candidates, with Marine Le Pen’s blessing. They, and she, deny all wrong-doing.

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Florian Philippot, her estranged former number two and the man who masterminded the de-toxification of the FN, has painted a chaotic picture of the party in his book Frexit, published last month, Few party officials are capable of writing a speech or preparing a candidate for a TV interview, he claims. Those who are capable rarely bother. The Front National under Marine, he wrote, became a “universe of laziness”.

His old boss, he concluded, knew after her defeat in May 2017 that she had failed and would continue to fail. She knew that she would never be elected to high office.

And yet Marine Le Pen shows no sign of giving up. The RN/FN is a family business as well as a political party. Some disgruntled ex-Frontistes say that it is a family business before it is a political party. No serious challenger has emerged, or probably can emerge, to the hegemony of the Le Pens over the ex-FN.

Marine’s niece, Marion Maréchal, only 28, but “retired” from politics, may eventually become a new kind of leader for the party, but not for many years and certainly not before the next presidential election in 2022. This family “ownership” structure is one of the principlal factors preventing the RN, name change or not, from emerging seriously as a potential party of government.

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Philippot, defenestrated by more traditional-minded LePennists in March, has now launched a rival party, Les Patriotes, which pursues his Nigel Farage-like conviction that “sovereignty” and confrontation with the European Union are the proper route to power for nationalists – not the FN/RN’s traditional fixation with racial and cultural “identity” and immigration.

He is almost certainly wrong about that. There is a latent, grumbling euro-scepticism in France but no widespread desire to challenge the country’s membership of  the single market, the Euro or the Brussels institutions.

Without Philippot’s influence, the Rassemblement National has moved back closer to the identity politics of Le Pen père – though without Jean Marie’s vulgarity, his anti-Semitism or his obsession with the Second World War. Marine Le Pen has returned to the themes of allegedly uncontrolled immigration and the internal threat from militant Islam. Unlike her father, she tries to put these issues into a “Republican” rather than “racial” context. Like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, she portrays Islam as a threat to western traditions of tolerance and democracy.

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She has however failed to clarify her economic policies. French membership of the EU and the Euro are still in theory up for debate, but scarcely mentioned. It would be difficult to see how the RN could run on such a programme in next May’s European elections – if it were not for the fact that voters care little about European election manifestos. The same will not be true in the next presidential campaign in 2022.

To understand the schizophrenic nature of the FN/RN, to understand why it has been tearing itself apart since Marine became president in 2011, you have to consider geography as well as ideology. The old FN had many tribes – ex-Vichy sentimentalists, expatriate Algerian white settlers (pied noirs), Catholic fundamentalists, pagan believers in white supremacy and former members, like Jean-Marie Le Pen himself, of Pierre Poujade’s anti-elite, anti-tax and anti-regulation party of the mid-1950s.

Somehow, give or take the odd split or revolt, Jean-Marie kept this collection of mutually distrustful clans together. He was helped by the fact that the FN of the 1980s and 1990s was mostly implanted in the South, in Alsace and the hard-scrabble, lower-middle-class suburbs of big cities. Marine, encouraged by Philippot, conquered new territories in the post-industrial North and East, recruiting many blue-collar voters who once supported the Communists or Socialists. She has also built a big following in rural France, especially among older people and the unemployed young.

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In the first round of last year’s election, Marine racked up votes of between 30 and 70% in villages in Normandy or on the remote eastern steppes of France, which know no crime or immigration but feel ignored and disfranchised by the multi-racial, global-minded, Europhile, broadly successful France of the cities and big towns.

To appeal to these new electorates, Marine and Philippot bolted on to the old Frontiste, anti-Socialist, small-government doctrine a statist devotion to early retirement, high pensions, industrial intervention and agricultural protectionism. No attempt was made to rationalise the conflicting programmes or explain how they would be funded.

Thus the Marine Le Pen FN/RN became two parties – a nationalist-socialist party in the North and East and a Poujadiste-fundamentalist Christian and white “identity” party in the South. Philippot’s ejection has brought the party back closer to its Southern, Poujadiste, pied-noir roots – but not entirely. Marine Le Pen’s parliamentary constituency, Hénin-Beaumont, is near Lille in the ex-industral North. She is unwilling to surrender her fiefdom or her ex-Leftist voters to Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise. Result: confusion and continuing tension and suspicion between the “northern” and “southern” wings of the party.

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In any case, economic political coherence and abstract political theory are not Marine’s strengths. Her father Jean-Marie Le Pen is doubtless a sincere racist – not a fascist but a pre-fascist, someone who drew his political beliefs from an ancient French strand of anti-semitism and a mystical belief in “patrie”, “race”, “blood” and “soil”. Marine Le Pen gives the impression – both in public and in interviews and private conversations – of being a rather pleasant saleswoman and TV host. It is difficult to dislike her. It is also difficult finally to take her seriously.

She is a good public speaker. She usually performs well on TV. She has had some success in her campaign to “de-demonise” the FN/RN.  Her defeat last year should not disguise the fact that she managed to persuade over 30 per cent of French voters to cast a ballot for a hard-right candidate – far more than her father ever achieved.

But she is also responsible for two big failures. The first is the incoherence of her economic programme, which Macron joyfully exploded live on TV. The second, more surprisingly to non-French readers perhaps, is her failure to turn the FN/RN into a genuine grass-roots party.

In travelling all over France covering politics over the last 20 years, I have repeatedly stumbled across this paradox. The ex-FN is a populist party and, in some areas, a popular party. But it has great difficulty in recruiting local candidates or even local, political operatives. Its candidates are often people from head office. In one campaign that I visited in Lorraine, the party’s standard-bearer was Le Pen senior’s chauffeur, who rarely visited the constituency. For a party which claims to represent “the people” against “the elite”, this is embarrassing.

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Those candidates that are recruited locally often turn out to be more extreme on racial questions than the detoxified Mariniste version of the FN officially allows. Just as awkward is the fact that they don’t stay in office for long: of the 54 Front National regional councillors elected in 2015, only 42 remain. The rest have resigned over petty quarrels or switched parties.

Marine Le Pen will not go away easily or soon. She is stubborn and, in any case, the family business is the family business.

Some things are going her way. Macron is less popular than the unpopular François Hollande was at the same stage of his presidency. The new leader of the main centre-right party, Les Républicains, Laurent Wauquiez has set out to steal the ex-FN’s clothes and voters. He has failed. His poll ratings are disastrous. Her clever niece Marion, who was emerging strongly as rival to her aunt, has given up politics, for the time being at least.

The RN will probably perform well in the European elections in May. The low turn-out always favours parties outside the mainstream.  But this is unlikely to be the “game-changer” that Marine Le Pen pretends. She will have to do very well indeed to match her stunning performance in the last European elections, when she took 25 per cent of the French seats. The fact that she is not leading the RN list herself will be a handicap. She has chosen to keep her seat in the National Assembly rather than try again for a seat in Strasbourg. Under a new French law, she cannot have both. The RN European campaign will probably be led by her romantic partner, Louis Aliot, the party’s vice President. He is a poor campaigner and a poor public speaker but in the RN/FN family comes first.

Marine Le Pen, barring an unforeseeable development, will be the RN presidential candidate in four years’ time. She will, once again, be one of the top three or four candidates jostling to reach the two candidate second round. Her best chance of ultimate victory – would be a Mélenchon v Le Pen run off in May 2022. This is highly unlikely since the hard left and hard right electorates overlap, especially in post-industrial and rural France.

In any case, the French two round system permits insurgent candidates in the first round but stacks the odds against them in the second. Unless you are an insurgent of the centre like Emmanuel Macron, the rest of the electorate tends to combine against you.

Macron’s absurdly charmed life has come to an abrupt halt this year. All the same, he remains lucky in his likely principal opponents in 2022. Florian Philippot may be sour and parti pris but he is probably right. Marine Le Pen’s moment has come and gone.

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