Macron has sent France into meltdown

France has been plunged into turmoil. This time not by the actions of protesters, rioters or striking workers, but by the president of the French Republic himself.

In the aftermath of the European elections last month, Emmanuel Macron was facing the success of Marine Le Pen’s right-populist National Rally (RN) and the plummeting popularity of his own Ensemble coalition. As a result, he immediately dissolved the National Assembly and called snap legislative elections – despite the constitution in no way compelling him to do so. For the past two years, his party and his government have been struggling along without an absolute majority. The result at the weekend, after two rounds of voting, is a well and truly hung parliament.

A hung parliament was predicted by the pollsters. What they did not foresee was that the largest block of MPs would be not from the RN, but from the far-left-dominated New Popular Front (NFP) coalition. With the latter winning 188 seats, Macron’s centrist coalition 161 and the RN and its allies 142, no one is close to the 289 needed for an absolute majority. Worse still, it is not at all clear what kind of ‘coalition of coalitions’ could even form a majority. In the meantime, as the largest group, the NFP is insisting that a new prime minister should be appointed from its ranks to form a government so that it can put into practice its radical programme.

This drama is a disappointment for Le Pen, as well as for Jordan Bardella, RN’s president and leader in the European Parliament, who was set to become prime minister had the party won a majority. Equally, it is a disaster for Macron. Through his own actions, he has created a political impasse in government, and cemented his legacy as an arrogant, petulant decision-maker.

Above all, though, it is a tragedy for the French people. The country has now entered a period of uncertainty and strife. Many will be enraged that the RN, the party they voted for, has been frozen out of any kind of power-sharing. Even more will be horrified that a far-left government, with a programme to match, might actually get into power.

This is not what the French people voted for. Overall, the RN quite clearly had the largest percentage of votes cast, ahead of both the NFP and Ensemble. But it only finished in third place. This is actually the first time in the Fifth Republic that a party that was ahead after the first round of voting has not wound up with more seats after the second.

To understand the significance of this, it is important to grasp some of the technicalities of the French electoral system. In the first round of voting, a candidate with more than 50 per cent is elected immediately, with no need for a second round. On 30 June, 76 MPs were elected in this way, with 39 of them from the RN. This meant that 501 seats remained to be filled by the second round of voting. Where no candidate wins more than 50 per cent, all those who have polled more than 12.5 per cent of the electoral roll remain in the running. Normally, this only leaves two candidates for the run-off. If there are three, it’s called a triangulaire and if four, a quadrangulaire.

This time, the first round of voting left a staggering 306 triangulaires – the highest number since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958 – along with five quadrangulaires. For comparison, there were only eight triangulaires in 2022 and one in 2017. This year, more than 100 of these three- and four-way contests included a RN or RN-affiliated candidate in first position, opening up the possibility for one or two of the other candidates to withdraw and call on their voters to get behind the remaining non-RN candidate.

In the end, 83 candidates from Macron’s Ensemble and 132 from the NFP pulled out to improve the chances of victory against the RN. This alliance was, to say the least, an unnatural one. It was comprised of political groupings who had normally detested and opposed each other on all questions of policy. Macron, too, was apparently betraying his own principles. Until recently, he professed to equally reject extremists from both ends of the political spectrum. He now seems only to despise those on the right.

The proliferation of multi-contestant results from the first round was not a problem in terms of democracy. If anything, it was a sign of strong political engagement and a healthy plurality of views. The normal approach would have been simply to vote and let the best candidate win. But for those who consider democracy a system to be gamed, it was an opportunity to rob the electorate’s preferred party of victory. Such political chicanery will no doubt only further inflame the resentment felt by the ‘left behinds’ who vote for the RN.

The 19th-century autobiographer and opium-eater, Thomas De Quincey, wrote of the silk stockings of MP Sir John Cutler. These were regularly darned with cotton until there was no silk left. At what point did the stockings cease to be the original pair Cutler had purchased? Le Pen has similarly transformed the RN, since taking the party over from her father in 2011. She purged older, more extreme members (including her own father), recruiting new, more educated people. She moved the RN closer to the centre on policy issues and moderated her rhetoric.

Does that make the RN an entirely new party? The verdict of Macron and his temporary allies on the left is no. The dédiabolisation (‘de-toxifying’) process is to them just a façade. Behind it, they claim, lurk the same old xenophobic extremists.

This is profoundly unfair. I have met many of the leading RN MPs and they are as clean-cut, polite and serious as a bunch of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Quite a few are gay and in marriages or civil partnerships, putting paid to the idea that the RN is not LGBT-friendly (it is against the excesses of gender ideology, of course). They are self-disciplined and dedicated to their duties as elected representatives. However, there do remain question marks over the affiliations of some behind-the-scenes figures in the party.

Perhaps one factor in RN’s surprise loss was that the second-round campaign was poorly conducted, as Bardella has since admitted. He himself failed to go out on the knocker with his candidates or press the flesh with voters.

To make matters worse, the RN was under pressure to find a great many new candidates in a very short time. As a result, the party’s vetting process for recruits was far from thorough. Rather like with Reform UK, some bad apples made it on to the ballot paper. Of course, the press and RN’s political opponents had a field day with this – especially when it emerged that one candidate had once posted a photo of herself in a Nazi cap online.

In this respect, Macron was astute in giving very short notice for the elections. As Ensemble and the NFP withdrew many of their candidates in the second round, the RN had to field almost twice as many as the other parties. With the polls predicting a big win for RN and hysteria being whipped up in the media, the so-called united front against right-wing extremism achieved its goal. So much so, in fact, that the reaction against the RN went too far the other way and put the hard left in a position of strength.

Indeed, if Le Pen’s party has made some honest and appreciable efforts to move into the mainstream, the same cannot be said of La France Insoumise (LFI), which dominates the NFP and is a textbook Islamo-leftist party. Despite him no longer having an elected mandate, LFI is still under the overbearing influence of founder Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The LFI’s successful candidates include many who have downplayed the horrors of Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel and even used anti-Semitic dogwhistles. One is even a violent Antifa activist, flagged by the authorities as a threat to national security.

Under the influence of the LFI, the NFP’s election programme is undeniably extreme. It calls for immediate price controls on energy and food; new and increased taxes on the wealthy; a steep increase in the minimum wage, along with salary raises for the public sector; and to bring the basic retirement age back down to 62. If implemented all at once, this would of course tank the French economy.

An NFP government would also abolish Macron’s recent, very timid immigration reforms, demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and recognise a Palestinian state. Naturally, it would withdraw support for Israel and place an embargo on arms sales to the country.

The LFI MPs are insisting that someone from their own party must be made prime minister. Meanwhile, the Socialist Party members of the NFP insist that it should be someone elected by the NFP as a whole. As yet, the numbers of MPs are still shifting within the NFP bloc, as the LFI and the Socialists recruit independents on the left, and some defect from the LFI to the Socialists. The rules say only the president can appoint the PM and that he must choose someone whose government would not fall immediately to a no-confidence vote.

In the current state of affairs, that seems an impossibility. No fresh parliamentary elections can take place for a year, so France is stuck with the present National Assembly. Currently, Macron is playing for time, having kept his own PM, Gabriel Attal, in place despite him offering his resignation. The MPs will take their places on 18 July, by which time something must have been decided.

Jetting off to attend the NATO summit this week, Macron left an open letter to his fellow citizens to be published in the press. He blithely tells them: ‘You have called for the invention of a new French political culture.’ He then implies that he will leave the formation of a grand coalition to the National Assembly itself. What is certain is that the French people called for no such thing. Macron only has himself to blame for his country’s political meltdown.

Jeremy Stubbs is deputy editor of Causeur.