From all the breathless comments on election night and the radio the next morning, one could be forgiven for thinking that Emmanuel Macron, re-elected by 58% of voters on April 24th, was about to be forced to resign. “An electoral tsunami”, said one opposition politician, “a crushing defeat”, said another. Political commentators normally more reserved in their judgements, also sounded as if a dam had broken by systematically qualifying what happened in polling stations on Sunday as a “slap in the face”, “a humiliating defeat”, etc. etc. It was all a little reminiscent of May 10th 1981, when François Mitterrand beat Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to become the first left-wing President of the Fifth Republic – and some alarmist commentators saw Soviet tanks rolling down the Champs Elysées!
In reality, all that has happened is that Emmanuel Macron’s party En Marche and its allies (“Ensemble” as it is now calls itself) has simply lost its parliamentary majority. Certainly a shock for a party that won a handsome overall majority in the 2017 parliamentary elections, but the Ensemble alliance remains by far the largest group in the Assemblée Nationale with 245 out of 577 seats. The “Républicains” who pride themselves on being a “republican right-wing party”, as opposed to Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement Nationale (National Rally), have 61 seats. On the hard left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s “La France Insoumise” (LFI or Unbowed France as it usually called in English speaking media) won 83, and in its recently formed alliance with the Socialists, the Greens, and the Communists boasts 131 seats. The real shock to the system came from a highly unexpected and unpredicted 89 seats won by Marine Le Pen’s hard right National Rally. Le Pen herself was re-elected in her constituency in the North of France with 61% of the vote. Ironically, it was the spokesperson of her party who summed up the situation most appropriately when she said in a Monday morning interview that “Parliament looks a lot more like France than it did before”.
And indeed, no commentator seems to have made the point that, despite an abstention rate of over 50%, it is perhaps no bad thing that France’s lower house of parliament now reflects a far wider spectrum of opinion than it did before. On the face of it therefore, this is not a very different situation from that which prevails in many comparable European countries where it is rare for any one party or electoral grouping to enjoy an overall majority and compromises are required to implement a programme of government. France’s politics however, by their history and tradition, are far are more confrontational and not at all used to compromise. Reviewing only the history of the Fifth Republic, there have been two periods of “cohabitation”, the first between 1986 and 1988 under President Mitterrand and the second from 1997 to 2002 under President Chirac. A situation akin to that of the U.S when an elected President faces a hostile Congress. During these two periods, the relationship between the President and the majority party in parliament was more of a permanent stand-off than anything else, with, in both cases, the President trying hard to prevent the parliamentary majority from implementing its policies and the majority party trying hard to minimise the power of the President. Since the seven-year presidential term was replaced by a five-year term in 2002, running concurrently with the term of the Assemblée Nationale (but not the upper house (Sénat) which has a different electoral cycle) Presidents Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron, from 2017 until today, have enjoyed an overall majority in the lower house. Emmanuel Macron’s idea in 2017 was that by combining elements of the moderate right and the moderate left into a broad centre party, that he called En Marche, the country would be governed in line with the wishes of the majority of voters and that the extremists would be relegated to the political fringes.
As I wrote in a previous post (The extremes fight back – April 20th 2022) it has not turned out like that at all. The first warning that governing from the centre and for the centre was not going according to plan was the emergence in the autumn of 2018 of the often violent “gilets jaunes” revolts of the left behind, the disaffected and the working poor. It was not clear at the time where the political sympathies of the movement lay. Some thought on the extreme right, some on the extreme left. Any gilet jaune who tested the political waters by trying to channel the movement in one political direction or another was promptly howled down. The election results of June 19th go a long way to answering the question: the gilets jaunes clearly came from both ends of the political spectrum and have now found some representation in parliament. Once again, Le Pen’s National Rally has 89 MPs and the hard left LFI 83. The shock for many commentators is that for once, a very large range of France’s different communities, young and old, comfortably paid executives and lowly workers, public and private sector employees, urban and rural dwellers, can now consider that they have some degree of representation in the Assemblée Nationale.
How all this will play out in the coming weeks and months is very uncertain. In all logic, political battles could now be fought out in parliament rather than in the streets. Now that all sections of society have some level of representation, pension reform, for instance, could be negotiated first and foremost among the political parties rather than with the unions, whose main legitimacy is in the public sector, which has the most generous pension system and is therefore, quite naturally, the most resistant to change. But in a country that prides itself on being “logical”, the logic of compromise is not very much in evidence! The heated debates, not to say mud-slinging, between winners and losers on election night are not encouraging. President Macron, in an attempt to gauge attitudes of the political parties, has just invited them all for consultations and almost all have emerged from the Elysée Palace announcing that they do not intend to enter into any coalition and even less to a government of national unity. LFI’s programme is indeed so radical that is hard to imagine their MPs compromising on even those measures that would be favourable to their electorate. Readiness to compromise cannot be expected from Le Pen’s National Rally either, even more so as their MPs see themselves as long time victims of the political system and are triumphant at winning 89 seats in the Assemblée Nationale. The radicality of these two parties at the extremes of the political spectrum is also fostered by the two-stage voting system in France, something that is not always appreciated within the country, let alone outside it. Contrary to the British first past the post (FPTP) system, with which it is often wrongly compared, the first round eliminates all but two or three candidates and only the second elects the candidate with the most votes. Voters whose candidate is eliminated in the first round can only choose therefore between what is on offer in the second and often choose by default, spoil their ballot paper or abstain. The system was designed precisely to channel voters towards the centre ground of politics and away from the extremes. But for the first time, many of those who voted Le Pen or Mélenchon in the presidential election were able to vote for a candidate of their choice in the second round of the parliamentary elections, given the 60 duels between LFI and the National Rally, explaining to some extent the large number of seats won by both parties: many right wing or even centre right candidates will have voted RN to keep out LFI and vice versa, in the same way that in the presidential election, many left-wing voters voted Macron to keep out Le Pen.
But even more moderate parties like the Républicains have been unusually virulent in their opposition to the President and have said that they will stay in opposition. It is possible of course that the feverish statements on election night will give way to calmer and more rational behaviour as the media spotlight dims and the 577 members of the Assembly meet and work together in the corridors and committee rooms of power. Only if all-round intransigeance were to persist, the President could use the powers he has to dissolve the Assemblée Nationale and organise fresh elections, although it is difficult to see how they would return a substantially different result. Unless therefore compromises can be found, France could be heading for the situation prevalent in other Latin countries, like Spain, Italy or Romania, or, harking back to its own history, the “revolving door” governments of the Fourth Republic in which shaky coalitions were made and unmade in quick succession and any meaningful reform proved elusive.
It remains a mystery that Macron did not involve himself more directly in the election campaign, defending his governments’ record, countering the outlandish claims of his opponents that he would continue to “tear down” France’s welfare system and urging voters to give him the powers to continue the sensible, middle of the road policies that he has always advocated. But now that he has landed himself in a hole from which he will struggle to extricate himself, his only choice seems to be to initiate and practise the type of compromise common in comparable countries but that with France’s confrontational politics will be no easy task. To prevent many of the largely beneficial measures of his first term being neutered or reversed, he must now use his considerable political skills to reach out and negotiate balanced compromises, starting with those MPs and parties closest to him before, perhaps, going further. If he were to succeed, he would leave a positive - and lasting - legacy to his country.
