At first glance, there is little logic in calling elections from a position of great weakness. But that is what President Emmanuel Macron has done by calling early parliamentary elections in France after humiliation by the far right.
After Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and her popular protégé Jordan Bardella handed him a crushing defeat in the European Parliament elections on Sunday, Macron could have done nothing, reorganized his government or simply altered course through tighter controls. tough on immigration and abandoning contested plans to tighten rules on unemployment benefits.
Instead, Macron, who became president at age 39 in 2017 by being a risk-taker, chose to bet that France, having voted one way on Sunday, will vote another way in a few weeks.
“I am astonished, like almost everyone else,” said Alain Duhamel, the noted author of “Emmanuel the Bold,” a book about Macron. “It is not madness, it is not desperation, but it is an enormous risk on the part of an impetuous man who prefers to take the initiative rather than be subjected to events.”
Shock swept through France on Monday. The stock market crashed. Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris, a city that will host the Olympic Games in just over six weeks, said she was “surprised” by a “disturbing” decision. “Lightning,” thundered the newspaper Le Parisien on its front page.
For Le Monde, it was “a leap into the void.” Raphaël Glucksmann, who guided the revived center-left Socialists to third place among French parties in the European vote, accused Macron of “a dangerous game.”
France is always a mystery, its perennial discontent and restlessness at odds with its prosperity and beauty, but this was a surprise of unusual proportions. Macron, after a tough defeat in which the National Rally won 31.37 percent of the vote against 14.6 percent for the coalition led by his Renaissance party, has actually exposed his country’s deception, asking whether his apparent willingness to put the far right in power is real or a mere venting.
The risk is that within a month or so Macron will have to govern with Bardella, 28, who represents everything he loathes, as his prime minister. If the nationalist, anti-immigrant National Rally wins an absolute majority in the 577-member National Assembly, an unlikely scenario, or simply emerges as by far the strongest party, which is more plausible, Macron may be forced to swallow hard. and do that.
Le Pen, with her sights set on winning the presidency in 2027, would almost certainly defer to Bardella, who led the party’s European election campaign, for the prime minister’s post.
France would then face consecration through senior far-right political officials, an idea considered unthinkable since the Vichy government ruled France in collaboration with the Nazis between 1940 and 1944.
Why play with fire this way? “They are not the same elections, nor the same form of voting, nor the same at stake,” said Jean-Philippe Derosier, professor of public law at the University of Lille. “Macron apparently feels it is the least bad option to have a potential National Rally prime minister under his control, rather than a Le Pen victory in 2027.”
In other words, Macron, who is term-limited and will leave office in 2027, may be flirting with the idea that a three-year term for the National Rally—turning it from a protest party to a party with the onerous responsibilities of government— would stop its inexorable rise.
It is one thing to rant from the sidelines and quite another to govern a heavily indebted and polarized country, so angry at the level of immigration, crime and costs of living that many French people seem driven by the feeling that “enough is enough.”
As in other Western societies, including the United States, a widespread feeling of alienation, even invisibility, among people outside the cities connected by the knowledge economy has led to a widespread feeling that the prevailing system needs to be blown up.
Ms Le Pen announced on Sunday the end of the “painful globalist parenthesis that has made so many people in the world suffer”. Given that the main pro-European parties won around 60 percent of the vote in the European Parliament elections, despite the rise of the far right, that seemed to be a bold prediction.
“Cohabitation,” as the French call it, between a president of one party and a prime minister of another is not unknown; More recently, Jacques Chirac, a center-right Gaullist, governed with a socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin. between 1997 and 2002. France survived and Chirac was re-elected.
But never before has there been such an ideological gulf, in terms of the very conception of French values and the fundamental importance of the European Union for the freedom of the continent, as there would be between Macron and a National Rally prime minister.