Jostled by the left in the first round of the legislative elections, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, and his camp begin a decisive week to try to obtain an absolute majority on Sunday in the National Assembly, essential to implement the announced reforms.
“We are going to be very mobilized to give a clear and strong majority, we need this majority, France needs it”, declared the Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, Monday during a trip to her department of Calvados (north -west), where she came comfortably ahead on the first lap.
“There are emergencies on purchasing power, […] we have war at the gates of Europe, we need stability”, she argued, after having mentioned the day before an “unprecedented confusion between the extremes”.
Re-elected at the end of April against the far right, Emmanuel Macron, a liberal centrist, has to deal with a less favorable panorama than when he came to power in 2017, with, for this edition, record abstention and a double breakthrough from the left and of the extreme right.
Led by the tribune Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the NUPES (union of communists, ecologists, socialists and members of the radical left) played almost evenly with the outgoing presidential majority, united under the label Together! and came first in the first round on Sunday with only 21,000 votes ahead, out of 23.3 million votes.
If the presidential coalition retains the advantage in the projections of the 577 seats of deputies (255 to 295), ahead of the NUPES (150 to 210), it is not guaranteed to maintain its absolute majority, which is set at 289 seats.
In this context, the week promises to be crucial for the presidential camp, which will have to try to maintain the mobilization of its voters and convince those on the right.
“It’s all the irony of political history: today, my political family is not doing well and, for all that, we may need the Republicans”, noted on the France 2 channel Jean-François Copé, an elected member of this right-wing party which will lose the status of the first opposition group in the Assembly, but whose voters and future deputies could be valuable to Mr. Macron.
On the radios and televisions Monday, the tenors of the presidential camp assured that “nothing was played”.
The absence of an absolute majority would complicate the task of the executive and would be a first since the legislative elections of 1988, when the Socialists and their allies failed to obtain an absolute majority. They then had to make alliances with the center right to have their texts voted on.
Convince abstainers
In the camp of the NUPES, the challenge will be to convince the voters to move to vote, after the record abstention recorded on Sunday, less than one voter in two having gone to the polls.
“Matignon is not moving away, Matignon is getting closer,” said Jean-Luc Mélenchon on Monday outside his headquarters in Paris, referring to the Prime Minister’s office, a position to which he aspires, even if this scenario now seems unlikely.
“The game is open,” said radical left MP Clémentine Autain on France Inter radio, referring to a “rather scathing defeat for the power in place”.
On the same radio, the Minister in charge of Public Accounts, Gabriel Attal, insisted on the differences between the programs of the two camps, praising the government’s project “deeply European” and “deeply republican”. The presidential camp warns against the danger represented, according to him, by the importance of the “extreme left” in the NUPES.
A sign of the stakes and the duel that is looming, the NUPES accused the Ministry of the Interior of “tampering” for not having, according to it, counted all the votes that came to it in the first round. The ministry, for its part, explained that it was sticking to the lists of declared candidates.
The presidential camp must also deal with certain ministers in unfavorable ballot against the NUPES, such as Amélie de Montchalin (Ecological Transition) or Clément Beaune (European Affairs). The rule imposed by the Élysée wants a minister beaten at the ballot box to leave the government.
As for the far-right party (National Rally) of Marine Le Pen, finalist in the presidential election on April 24, it came in third position, with around 19% of the vote, far ahead of the traditional right.