The author is a professor of literature in Montreal, contributor to the journal Argument and essayist. He notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and Why do our children leave school ignorant? (Boreal, 2008).
The main person responsible for the rise of the National Rally (RN) during the last elections, and for its possible victory in the next ones, is neither extremism to the sirens of which a majority of French people would now yield, nor a right-wing of the electorate , but indeed Emmanuel Macron himself.
By positioning itself, from 2017, at the center of the political spectrum and by rallying a portion of elected officials and Republican and socialist voters, it ensured that, from now on, neither the traditional left nor right could bring together a majority and therefore form the government. He thus destroyed any possibility of a left-right alternation which had been the norm in France since 1981.
This upheaval of the French political landscape could have seemed normal and legitimate, if he himself had been able to bring together a majority around his person and his ideas, but this was never the case and, during the second In both elections, he was only elected because he was opposed to Marine Le Pen.
It should also be noted that the score he achieved during this second round where all the parties called for “beating the extreme right” crumbled slowly but surely, from one election to the next: 66.1 % in 2017; but only 58.55% in 2022 (while Jacques Chirac, placed in the same situation in 2002, had gathered in his name 82.21% of the votes against Jean-Marie Le Pen who progressed by less than 1% between the two turns).
Unlike her father, Marine Le Pen saw her score increase significantly between the two rounds, going from 21.30% to 33.90% in 2017 and from 23.15% to 41.45% in 2022. Not counting that around 10% of voters refused, by voting void or blank, to choose in the second round between Emmanuel Macron and his opponent, proof that the “republican pact” supposed to be a barrier to the RN was no longer working very well.
In these conditions, one did not need to be a great cleric to see that if Marine Le Pen was not guaranteed to win the presidential election in 2027, the National Rally would at the very least have moved a little closer. doors of power.
This was all the more obvious because, although he had been elected as it were by default, or, to put it better, thanks to a tactical sleight of hand which had allowed him to slip between the Socialist Party and the Republicans, the new president immediately adopted the arrogant attitude of one who believes he has an absolute truth about everything and pursued a neoliberal policy (the symbol of which is certainly his pension reform) which was far from unanimous among the Republicans. French, including among those who felt forced to vote for him in the second round of the presidential election.
Deaf ears
Instead of bringing together his fellow citizens and pursuing a moderate policy of republican union which would have been supported by a large majority of them, he applied his program without qualms as if it had been approved by the electorate. A part of the latter therefore had reason to feel betrayed, trapped.
Instead of being alert to all the signs of fracture, increasingly apparent within French society, of being concerned about the concerns of the French (in particular regarding their declining purchasing power, the omnipresent violence in certain neighborhoods, uncontrolled immigration, etc.) and to worry about popular anger that the Yellow Vests had manifested in their own way, the “Jupiterian” president was content to turn a deaf ear, to treat his opponents as unconscious or extremists and violently repress demonstrations. He thus played the role of arsonist firefighters and threw the discontented, or at least part of them, into the arms of the National Rally, which, thanks to him, had become the main party to embody the opposition to a macronism which was presenting itself as the only legitimate option for the country.
In such circumstances, dissolving the assembly and hoping to once again make the “republican pact” intended to “block the extreme right” work in its favor is probably a lost bet. The French have already been fooled twice; It’s a safe bet that we won’t take them there again. For a good number of them, this electoral blackmail no longer works.
If the National Rally does not obtain a majority in the National Assembly at the beginning of July, it will certainly not be to Emmanuel Macron that it will owe this relative failure, but to the great division of the vote, which will probably send people to the Palais Bourbon. elected officials divided into three more or less equivalent groups: on the left, a Popular Front weakened by its internal quarrels; in the center, a presidential party to which the few survivors of the Republicans will have joined and which will perhaps succeed in saving the furniture; on the right, the National Rally and the ex-Republicans who have agreed to line up under its banner which will become the leading party in France, possibly without reaching the fateful bar of 289 deputies.
It is likely that none of these three blocs will obtain a majority. France will then simply have become ungovernable and will enter, on the eve of the Olympic Games, an unpredictable zone of turbulence.