Schmidt in WaPo on French Presidential Election
Vivien Schmidt, Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently interviewed on her predictions for the upcoming French presidential election.
Schmidt was quoted in a March 28, 2017 feature in the Washington Post entitled “The Guesstimator.”
From the text of the article:
Vivien Schmidt, director of Boston University’s Center for the Study of Europe: First-round winner: Le Pen, 32 percent; final results: Macron 57 percent, Le Pen 43 percent. “Le Pen’s base is no more than 40 to 45 percent,” while Fillon and Macron are competing for a realigning electorate. Hurting Le Pen further is that the French are “appalled” by Trump. Finally, Schmidt notes, the “fake jobs” scandals facing Fillon and Le Pen will help Macron. If Fillon does survive the first round, Schmidt predicts Le Pen will pick up some votes from the left due to her strong defense of welfare and her anti-globalization stance.
Schmidt was also quoted in a March 31, 2017 story in the Washington Post on the upcoming French presidential election entitled “France’s presidential election may determine the future of the European Union.“
From the text of the article:
The anti-European sentiment in France closely mirrors that of the Brexit and Trump phenomena in Britain and the United States, said Vivien Schmidt, an expert in European integration at Boston University.
“It’s the same discourse of globalization gone too far, of outrage over high unemployment — and especially youth unemployment,” she said. The general unemployment rate in France has hovered around 10 percent for years, and the youth unemployment rate is around 26 percent.
“But it’s also sociocultural,” Schmidt said. “People really feel a loss of control, political and otherwise. Le Pen gives people a nostalgia for a vanished past, a past most people don’t even remember.”
Prof. Schmidt is Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration at Boston University. Her research focuses on European political economy, institutions, democracy, and political theory. She has published ten books, over 100 scholarly journal articles or chapters in books, and numerous policy briefs and comments, most recently on the Eurozone crisis. Her current work focuses on democratic legitimacy in Europe, with a special focus on the challenges resulting from the Eurozone crisis, and on methodological theory, in particular on the importance of ideas and discourse in political analysis (discursive institutionalism). You can learn more about her here.