Following European elections that saw right-wing parties surge, French President Emmanuel Macron called snap domestic elections, sending French voters back to the polls barely two weeks from now for the first round of the legislative ballot on June 30.Reuters
Jaws dropped across France on Sunday night.
Not because the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) had steamrolled into first place in elections for the European Parliament, humiliating President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition. Everyone had been expecting that. The polls were bang on.
No, what shocked (and appalled) so many was Mr. Macron’s mindboggling move to call snap domestic elections, sending cranky French voters back to the polls barely two weeks from now for the first round of the legislative ballot on June 30. With the RN coming off a historic win, and having shed the stigma that once kept it on the fringes of French politics, Mr. Macron appeared to have lost his mind.
Or not. Some French pundits immediately concluded that, faced with an intractable budget deficit and lacking the majority needed to push his agenda through the National Assembly, Mr. Macron was seeking to hand the poisoned chalice of government to RN leader Marine Le Pen and her 28-year-old lieutenant Jordan Bardella. Once voters got to see the RN exercise power, the theory went, they would quickly see through the party’s empty promises and incompetent leadership.
The RN has campaigned on a series of pie-in-the-sky commitments to raise social spending and lower the retirement age, all while building prisons and deporting immigrants. Most of its platform is either unaffordable or unconstitutional. And the inexperienced Mr. Bardella, who would become prime minister in an RN government, has never been entrusted with major responsibilities.
Still, it is nearly impossible to believe that Mr. Macron would agree to spend the rest of his final term as a lame-duck President – occupying the mainly ceremonial functions of a head of state, while ceding the political agenda to an RN-controlled National Assembly – all in the name of improving the chances of his Renaissance Party and its presidential candidate in the 2027 elections.
At 46, Mr. Macron revels in the exercise of power far too much to believe he would voluntarily surrender an ounce of it. He is the most omnipresent, strategic and meddling president that France has seen since Charles de Gaulle. In calling a snap election, he must have something else up his sleeve.
“I think returning to the people must never be seen as incomprehensible. It is a democratic principle,” Mr. Macron said Wednesday in defending the election call. “I do not want to give the keys of power to the far right in 2027. I want a government that can act to respond to [voters’] demands.”
Mr. Macron may still believe enough in his own powers of persuasion to mobilize anti-RN voters behind him, despite their obvious antipathy toward him. After all, he had been able to count on a “Republican common front” of voters on both the left and right to win two presidential elections against Ms. Le Pen, in 2017 and 2022, respectively.
Unlike the single-round European parliamentary vote, in which seats are allotted based on proportional representation, France’s legislative elections are a two-round affair. The top two finishers on June 30 in each of the country’s 577 circonscriptions (or ridings) will square off on a second ballot on July 7. Mr. Macron may be banking on the RN’s unpreparedness and inability to vet credible candidates for all 577 seats before this weekend’s deadline to register candidacies.
Yet, there are too many variables beyond Mr. Macron’s control to see his decision to call snap elections three years ahead of schedule as anything but a reckless gamble on his part. Most French voters are livid at the prospect of having to return to the polls at the end of the month after having just lived through the bitter campaign for the European elections. Domestic and international events alike could conspire to upend Mr. Macron’s strategy of rallying the anti-RN vote behind his candidates.
Infighting among the four main French parties on the left might still work in Mr. Macron’s favour. On Monday, representatives of the four agreed to get behind a single left-wing candidate in each circonscription in the first-round vote, buttressing their candidate’s chances of making it on to the second ballot. But that fragile alliance could fall apart as disagreements on the left resurface on the campaign trail.
The centre-right Les Républicains (LR) is on the verge of imploding after its president, Éric Ciotti, called for an electoral alliance with Ms. Le Pen. LR, the party of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, had long refused any association with the far-right. The party’s board voted on Wednesday to depose Mr. Ciotti. He called the move illegal.
Mr. Macron has designated 35-year-old Gabriel Attal, whose six-month stint as Prime Minister will come to an end if the President’s coalition loses on July 7, to lead his troops in the campaign. The stakes are high. The suspense is palpable. Voters are anxious. The Olympics are nigh. And anything could happen.