The overwhelming victory this Sunday of the French extreme right in the European elections and the humiliating defeat of Emmanuel Macron’s supporters have unleashed a political crisis with unpredictable consequences. The president, after knowing a result that gives one in three votes to the National Regroupment (RN) of Marine Le Pen, announced the dissolution of the National Assembly and the calling of early legislative elections.
The decision took the country and even a good part of the Macronist leaders by surprise. The French are called to the polls to elect their deputies on June 30 in the first round and on July 7 in the second. The future Prime Minister and Government will emerge from this National Assembly. The campaign and its results will coincide with the final preparations for the Paris Olympic Games, which open on July 26 and in which France intends to offer the best image of itself to the world.
If the result of the European elections in France has already caused a political earthquake, the hypothesis of Le Pen’s party coming to power in one of the two central countries of the EU – the other being Germany – draws hitherto unknown scenarios and, For many, disturbing. Although in France it is the president who deals with international politics, the arrival to the Government of a party reluctant to help Ukraine and with a tradition of ties with Vladimir Putin’s Russia would not be innocuous.
Macron’s supporters form the first group in the National Assembly. But since the 2022 legislative elections, the Macronists have governed by decree as they lack an absolute majority in the chamber. Some polls, reinforced by the results of the European elections, indicate that the extreme right of the RN, today the main opposition group, could become the first parliamentary force and choose to elect a prime minister of its color.
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“I cannot act, at the end of this day, as if nothing had happened,” Macron justified in a speech to the nation, before announcing the parliamentary dissolution and new elections. “This decision is an act of trust, of trust in you, dear compatriots, and in the ability of the French people to make the most just decision for themselves and for future generations.”
The president defended that “there is nothing more republican than giving the floor to the sovereign people.” He explained that “a fever has taken over public and parliamentary debate in recent years (…), a disorder.” And he added: “France needs a clear majority to act in serenity and harmony.” Le Pen applauded Macron’s decision and declared: “We are ready to exercise power.”
Although the outcome of the European elections in France has been a surprise, the result, predicted for weeks by the polls, has not been a surprise at all. The RN, with the young and vibrant Jordan Bardella as the head of the list, has obtained 32.8% of the vote, according to official data with 93% counted, almost 10 points more than in 2019.
The Renaissance candidacy, Macron’s supporters led by MEP Valérie Hayer, has achieved less than half the votes of the far right, 14.4%. Five years ago he got 22.4%.
In third position was the list of the Socialist Party and Public Square, headed by the leader of this small formation, Raphaël Glucksmann, with 13.4%. It is a ray of hope for French social democracy, practically disappeared during the Macron years and a minority on the left due to the hegemony of La France Insoumise (LFI), the sovereignist and eurosceptic party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. LFI gets 8.7%.
To find a victory of comparable dimensions to Bardella’s list, we must go back to 1984. That year, a coalition of center-right parties led by Simone Veil, a survivor of Auschwitz, won the European elections in France, with 43% of the vote. architect of the legalization of abortion in his country and first president of the European Parliament. Today’s winners are their adversaries from then: the emerging National Front of the eighties, an old ultra party founded, among others, by collaborators with Nazi Germany, and predecessor of the current RN.
It is common for voters to use the European elections to sanction whoever is in power: Le Pen’s people already won the European elections in 2014 and 2019. In no case, however, did they do so with as much margin as 9-J. And this is what has set off all the alarms in the Elysée and has precipitated the president’s decision.
The very large victory of the RN is a giant step in its ambition to be considered a reliable and acceptable party in the French political landscape. The result proves that it has definitively broken the dams that kept it on the margins of political centrality, and that it has consolidated itself as a preferred option in a good part of the socioeconomic and demographic categories.
In the RN they are convinced that this result is “the first step towards the Elysée,” an official from this party said on the eve of the vote. Macron’s term ends in 2027 and he cannot run again. The legislative ones, and the possibility of France having a prime minister from a party that a few years ago lived in ostracism, would be another gigantic step, perhaps decisive. Bardella sounds like prime minister. Le Pen has always said that she would reserve herself for the presidency.
But Macron’s entourage insists that nothing has been decided. “Come on [a estas legislativas] to win them,” they say. These sources, who request anonymity, assure that they will seek “a majority to act forcefully in favor of the French.” And they rule out placing themselves in a cohabitation scenario. That is, a President Macron, who came to power in 2017 with the banner of Europeanism and the fight against populism and the extreme right, working hand in hand with a prime minister of the RN.
Now begins a campaign in which it will be at stake whether, for the first time since 1945, France has a Government with a party whose roots lie partly in collaborationist France, although it has renounced them. Some prominent Macronists, such as the current Foreign Minister, Stéphane Séjourné, promote avoiding the victory of the extreme right by presenting joint candidacies of the central arc parties, from the Socialist Party to the moderate right.
Macron’s entourage speaks of his boss’s “audacity” to describe the call for elections, audacity that, they say, “has always been in the DNA of Macronism.” Others, in the opposition, accuse the president of recklessness in risking bringing the extreme right to the doors of power. “He plays with fire,” according to the leader of the radical left Mathilde Panot. Or “play Russian roulette”, in the words of the former presidential candidate of the moderate right, Valérie Pécresse.
There is a history of failed dissolution: that of then-president Jacques Chirac in 1997, which led to a victory for the socialist opposition and five years of cohabitation with Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. But neither Le Pen nor Bardella, obviously, are Jospin. Macron has launched the country into the most uncertain campaign in recent times, a campaign whose outcome will determine the legacy of his presidency and the direction of France, and Europe.
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