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Following gains by right-wing parties in the European Parliament elections, French President Emmanuel Macron has called for national elections, and French voters are due to head to the polls again in just two weeks for the first round of legislative ballots on June 30. Reuters
There was consternation across France on Sunday night.
It's not because the far-right National Rally (RN) party won a landslide victory in the European elections, humiliating President Emmanuel Macron's centrist coalition. Everyone expected that. The polls said so.
Instead, what surprised (and appalled) many was Macron's surprising move to call sudden national elections, with disgruntled French voters heading back to the polls just two weeks later, on June 30, for the first round of legislative votes. While the RN won a historic victory, erasing the stigma that had once relegated it to the fringes of French politics, Macron seemed to have lost his mind.
No. Some French pundits were quick to conclude that faced with an intractable budget deficit and lacking the majority needed to pass his policies in the National Assembly, Macron was handing a poisoned chalice of power to RN leader Marine Le Pen and her 28-year-old deputy, Jordan Bardella. The theory was that once voters saw the RN leader exercise power, they would quickly see through the party's empty promises and incompetent leadership.
The RN campaigned on a series of fanciful promises to increase social security payments and lower the retirement age while building prisons and deporting immigrants. Most of its policies are underfunded or unconstitutional. And its prime minister, the inexperienced Bardella, has never been given much responsibility.
Still, it is hard to believe that Macron would agree to spend the rest of his final term as a lame-duck president, taking on a largely ceremonial role as head of state and ceding the political agenda to the Renaissance-controlled National Assembly, in order to improve the chances of victory for his Renaissance party and its presidential candidate in the 2027 elections.
Macron, 46, revels in wielding power and finds it hard to imagine giving it up anytime soon. He is France's most omnipresent, strategic and interventionist president since Charles de Gaulle. His call for snap elections must suggest he's up to something else.
“I think a return to the people should never be seen as something incomprehensible. It is a democratic principle,” Macron said Wednesday in defending his call for elections. “I do not want to hand over the keys of power to the far right in 2027. I want a government that acts in response to the demands of the people.” [voters’] “I request it.”
Macron may still have plenty of faith in his ability to mobilize anti-Republican support despite the apparent antipathy toward him: after all, he was able to rely on a “common republican front” of voters on both the left and right to defeat Le Pen in the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections, respectively.
Unlike European elections, which have a single-round system in which seats are allocated based on proportional representation, French parliamentary elections have a two-round system: the top two candidates in each of the country's 577 constituencies (or districts) as of June 30 will face off in a second round on July 7. Macron may be betting on the RN's lack of preparation and inability to select credible candidates for all 577 seats by the deadline for candidate registration this weekend.
But there are so many variables outside Macron's control that the decision to call elections three years early is nothing short of a reckless gamble. Most French voters are furious at the prospect of having to go to the polls again later this month, so soon after bitterly contested European elections. A confluence of domestic and international events could upend Macron's strategy to rally anti-RN votes to his candidate.
Infighting among France's four biggest left-wing parties could work to Mr Macron's advantage: Their leaders agreed on Monday to support one left-wing candidate in each first-round constituency, improving their party candidates' chances of reaching the second round. But the fragile alliance risks falling apart if left-wing differences resurface during the race.
The centre-right Republicans (LR) are on the brink of collapse after their leader, Eric Ciotti, called for an electoral alliance with Le Pen. LR, the party of former President Nicolas Sarkozy, has long rejected any alliance with the far right. The party's executive board voted on Wednesday to sack Ciotti, a move he called illegal.
Mr Macron has appointed Gabriel Attal, the 35-year-old whose six-month premiership would come to an end if the president's coalition is defeated on July 7, as his campaign manager. The stakes are high and the tension is palpable. Voters are anxious. The Olympics are around the corner. Anything could happen.
