And Macron became a liability

Seven years ago, Emmanuel Macron led more than 300 deputies to the French National Assembly with the force of charisma and youth. The claim of his name, the image of him on the electoral posters, was enough to elect them. His party changed its name several times, but for voters it was Macron’s party.

Everything has changed. His candidates are now avoiding putting it on the posters for the legislative elections of June 30 and July 7. The Macronist deputies who, with the polls against them, are running to revalidate their seats, are trying to mark their own profile as men and women on the ground. For many, the president has become a liability.

―Macron, let him stay home!

-My name is Patrick Macron or Patrick Vignal?

In Liberation Square in Mauguio, a town of 17,000 inhabitants in the south of France, Macronist deputy Patrick Vignal campaigns. He has just crossed paths with Jean-Marie Pla, a retired painter, son of a Spanish fighter exiled after the Civil War, and proud to be a communist. Vignal, a former judo teacher and veteran politician in the area, tries to convince Pla that he is not Macron, even though he is running for his party, and that in the last seven years as a deputy in the National Assembly he has fought for the interests of this territory, the 9th constituency of the province of Hérault.

There is no way. Pla tells Vignal that, if he reaches the second round against a rival from the extreme right, he will abstain. And don’t let them tell you that this gives victory to Marine Le Pen’s National Regroupment (RN). Pla maintains that it is the president, not the left, who, with his policies – and now, it could be added, bringing forward the surprise elections at the height of the RN’s rise – has placed Le Pen’s people at the gates of power.

“Communist sir, my father was a communist…” Vignal tells him. And Pla ditches: “I would rather be a communist than be with Macron.”

This is the campaign at street level in this town in the agricultural belt of Montpellier, a region where, as throughout France, the Lepenists swept the European elections on June 9. The triumph of the RN and the third position of the Macronist candidacy was a humiliation for those loyal to the president. After knowing the result, Macron announced the dissolution of the Assembly and new elections.

With this decision, Macron’s deputies have been thrown, against their will, into a campaign in which it seems unlikely to revalidate the majority. And they distance themselves day by day from a president who arouses visceral hatred in some sectors of society. Meanwhile the revolt of the yellow vests and the impoverished middle classes, the unpopular pension reform, the arrogance of the French monarchical power and the sanbenito of the “president of the rich.”

Macron no longer adds up; rather it subtracts.

Gabriel Attal, the precocious 35-year-old politician whom Macron appointed prime minister in January and who could lose office after the elections, was walking this week in Le Perreux-sur-Marne, a municipality near Paris. A citizen crossed him and scolded him:

“I’ll shake your hand because I like you.” But you’ll have to tell the president to shut up.

“Step aside, president.”

There is summarized the problem of the Macronists in this campaign, and perhaps the remedy. His people think that the less he talks, the better. He was told, after the announcement of the parliamentary dissolution, by one of his former prime ministers, and aspiring to succeed him in the Elysée, Édouard Philippe, according to a person familiar with the conversation: “Step aside, president.” The president responded: “Yes, yes.” But he immediately added, denying the previous statement: “By the way, I’m going to give a press conference.”

Indomitable, the president has not stopped talking. And to make his people uncomfortable, like on Tuesday, when he attacked “the extreme left” for proposing to allow something “worthy of the theater of the absurd,” such as the procedure of “changing one’s sex at City Hall.” One of his most faithful collaborators, former minister Clément Beaune, reacted: “For trans people, for LGBT people, for everyone… We must reject all stigmatization in political discourse and advance rights.”

For many Macronists, the less said, the better. Philippe has declared that “we have to move on to something else.” Attal distances himself from his mentor and, like Philippe, also dreams of the Elysée in 2027, the year in which the president’s term ends. It is as if everyone, starting with the Macronists, wants to turn the page on Macronism.

-I vote more for Mr. Vignal than for Mr. Macron.

The speaker is Xavier Magne, the pharmacist from Mauguio, the town in the 9th constituency of the Hérault, where the candidate Patrick Vignal risks succumbing to the lepenist and anti-Macron tide. Magne explains, however, that he voted for the president and regrets that he is the target on which the country focuses its criticism to vent. There is a Macronist France, despite everything; a base that possibly represents a fifth of the electorate, or slightly more.

“The president does not have to be a burden!” says Vincent Malavielle. “Whoever had been in charge of the State would have been a liability.” There is a problem, yes, says this retired civil servant in the town café, and it is that in Paris “they are too suit and tie”. “His advantage,” he says, pointing to Deputy Vignal, sitting in front of him, “is that he wears a polo shirt.”

“I find that the president is given an unfair process, but it is politics, that is how it is,” summarizes Vignal, who was not at all happy with Macron’s decision to dissolve the Assembly (of dissolve themto them, actually). “He has faced crises, riots, Covid, the war in Ukraine… Without him, I don’t know who would have been better than him.” Pragmatic, he adds: “Macron wants Vignal to be a deputy, and Vignal wants Macron to have one more deputy, so if we have to avoid putting his photo on posters because he makes people angry today…”

Later, in the square, Vignal distributes leaflets without Macron’s face, only his own and that of his deputy, Patricia Moulin-Traffort, who accompanies him on this day of campaigning. He speaks with far-right voters and with the communist Pla, who tells him: “I think you are dead.” “Shall we make a bet?” answers the deputy. “I invite you to the aperitif, because we are going to win.”

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