The barricade erected in a disaster to block the National Rally (RN) held. And this time in a stunning way, with an unprecedented turnaround in the inter-round. No relative majority for the far right in the National Assembly, much less the absolute majority of 289 deputies that was dangled before it on the eve of the second round of the legislative elections held on Sunday. If the RN, which finally came third, almost doubled the number of its deputies compared to the 2022 legislative elections, which objectively makes it a party that continues to anchor its presence in the public and political space, the fact remains that a majority of voters, all tendencies combined on the left and in the center, put aside their divisions and mobilized to “block”. The turnout rate (67%) is proof of this. A sign that, despite everything that has been said and repeated about the normalization and social acceptability of the RN, its xenophobic principle continues to categorically offend. The great shift has not taken place. And the resounding breakthrough of the RN in the European elections last month has not been transposed to the national scale.
The end of Macronism? Not the lightning-fast one that many predicted. Renaissance / Ensemble, the presidential camp, has indeed lost the relative majority it had in the outgoing assembly and, therefore, continues to crumble and falter. But it has, miraculously some will say, come second (168 deputies), behind the left which came first against all expectations, united around the New Popular Front (NFP, 182 deputies), a coalition hastily assembled around the Socialist Party (PS) and La France Insoumise (LFI) of the thunderous Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has wasted no time in demanding that the NFP form the next government. If Mr. Macron can breathe a sigh of relief in light of this result, the fact remains that he has played with fire. In what state would his camp be without the withdrawal order given by the NFP to its candidates who came third in the first round?
Macron does not come out of the exercise looking good. The French are surely less and less fooled by this worn-out tactic which consists of brandishing the scarecrow of the extreme right to make people forget all the failures of his presidency. By exercising power vertically, in a way completely disconnected from the daily lives of the French, he has fed the RN. With Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, who saw himself as prime minister, skillfully surfed on the social tensions and frustrations linked to the erosion of purchasing power. They will not stop there. “The tide is rising,” declared Mme Le Pen, a three-time presidential candidate, but she didn’t go high enough this time.” Victory, she said, “is only delayed.” Understand: the RN is looking towards the 2027 presidential election. The obsession that immigration is the mother of all evils will not disappear behind the party’s demonization effort.
The fact is that the “clarification” desired by Mr. Macron by triggering these hasty elections gives rise to a division into three more or less equal blocs of deputies in the National Assembly. Also, it is on the other “extremism” that he likes to loathe, that of the left, that Mr. Macron will have to rely, against his will, if he decides to form a majority government coalition. As it stands, Sunday’s vote immediately announces a government of stewardship, full of conflicts and partisan blockages, between now and the next presidential election, as it is not in French political culture to govern by coalition. The result of this election nevertheless indicates that the French expect much better from the “republican front”: a left that is less quickly torn apart, between a PS that has regained strength and an LFI that would do well to soften, and then, above all, they hope for a Macron who, abandoning his stance as an elitist Europeanist and taking the measure of the illiberal threat to which he has just exposed the country, will make the effort to bring together a functional coalition focused patiently on the concern to calm the social climate and on concrete and fundamental issues, such as environmental justice and access to housing and health care.
The French, by coincidence, voted at the same time as the British. Result: the former defeated the RN and the latter gave a historic victory to Labour against the Conservatives, fathers of Brexit, who had been in power for 14 years, in an increasingly insane way. On both sides of the Channel, we see a promising recomposition of the political landscape through the left door.
In June 2016, in the wake of the weak Yes to Brexit, approved at the end of a referendum campaign polluted by anti-migrant resentment, Marine Le Pen had hailed the vote as a “signal of freedom” and “liberation of peoples” from the European Union. Today, polls say, 60 to 70% of Britons say they regret their choice. Populism being essentially reductive, Mme Le Pen got it all wrong.