Macron’s surprise

Yesterday I referred to the fact that many voters seem to treat elections for the European parliament as if it were a giant by-election, making it about their dissatisfactions with their national governments rather than about who should run the European Union. That’s one explanation for the consistent over-performance in those elections of the French far right.

In 2014, the National Front (now the National Rally) topped the poll at the European election with 24.9%, even though at the previous election for the French parliament (in 2012) it had only won 13.6%. In the next cycle, five years later, the gap was much the same, 23.3% to 13.2%. In the 2022 French election its vote rose to 18.7%, and then rose again in parallel in this month’s European election, to 31.4%. (Including the further-right Reconquest brings those latter figures to 22.9% and 36.8%.)

That consistent gap is the key driver behind president Emmanuel Macron’s decision to dissolve the National Assembly for an early election, to be held in two rounds on 30 June and 7 July. Faced with voters who are willing to put fascists into the European parliament, if only as a protest vote, he is daring them to say whether they really want a fascist government in France.

Macron won re-election in 2022 with 58.5% against National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, but he lost his parliamentary majority and his approval ratings since have been poor. And voters don’t usually like early elections: the last president who dissolved early, Jacques Chirac in 1997, lost badly, with the left winning a parliamentary majority.

But since Macron’s prime minister, Gabriel Attal, has no majority anyway – he depends on the failure of his diverse opponents to combine against him – there is less to lose this time. And Macron may reasonably regard it as a win-win proposition: either the far right falls short, thus stalling its momentum, or else it wins enough seats to form a government, giving it three years to discredit itself before the next presidential election, and while Macron is still there to rein in its worst excesses.

Le Pen, of course, would deny the charge of fascism: her project, in contrast to her father, has long been for a respectable far right, a party that could steer away from the further reaches of antisemitism and authoritarianism and be a normal contender for power (not unlike what Giorgia Meloni seems to have accomplished in Italy). But she has never renounced the party’s fundamental racism or its hostility to liberal democracy.

We’ll look at the electoral detail closer to the date, but even if National Rally can again top the 30% mark, winning an actual majority will not be easy. Macron won one in 2017 with 32.3%, but his party benefited from being in the centre, able to attract second-round votes from both sides. If the far right finishes with, say, between 200 and 250 of the 577 seats, then what the other parties do will decide the outcome.

And it’s among the other parties that the snap election has been most disruptive. The centre-right Republicans shifted to the right after the last election, choosing the very conservative Éric Ciotti as their leader. For years, the question of dealing with the far right has divided the Republicans; Ciotti brought it out into the open last week by announcing that he was willing to join forces with National Rally and Reconquest.

His party’s reaction was swift and brutal: an emergency meeting of its political committee disowned him and expelled him. It was a reminder of what I pointed out back in 2021: “The distinctive thing about French politics is that the deepest ideological divide runs not between left and right, but between the far right and the rest of the spectrum.” The blood of the Algerian war of independence still separates the party elites, even as their younger voters are increasingly making common cause.

It should have been less controversial for Marion Maréchal, who headed Reconquest’s list in the European election (and happens to be Le Pen’s niece), to also endorse co-operation with National Rally. But relations between the two far-right parties are not good, and she too was expelled as a result.

Potentially the most significant developments have been on the left. Last time around, the four main left-of-centre forces – the Socialists, Greens, Communists and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s LFI – combined in an electoral alliance called NUPES, which won 142 seats on a combined vote of 26.1%. Running separately for the European parliament they scored 31.5% between them, with the Socialists well in the lead on 13.8%.

But for the French election, unlike the European, the electoral system puts a premium on co-operation, so again the four, despite their deep ideological differences, are teaming up: in a nod to the 1930s, it’s now called the New Popular Front. Like last time, LFI has been allocated the largest share of seats, but the Socialists will have a greatly increased say. In 2022 they provided only 70 of the alliance’s candidates as against LFI’s 325; this time, those numbers are 175 and 229.

No-one wants to talk about it just now, but if National Rally’s support drops off there’s the prospect that the Socialists, the Republicans and Macron’s Ensemble may win enough seats between them to deny power to both the far right and LFI. That too would be a tricky exercise in co-operation – but it looks as if that will be the case for just about all the possible outcomes.