As the first round of legislative elections approaches, concern wins over the majority, which changes tone and attacks the Nupes.
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Feverishness wins the macronist ranks. According to some polls, the Head of State could be deprived of an absolute majority in the Assembly and only have a relative majority. It is therefore time for a change of strategy. After a long period of avoidance, the executive has finally decided to respond to Jean-Luc Mélenchon. It must be said that for weeks, the rebellious has been having a field day. He surveys the country to accuse Emmanuel Macron of practicing a policy of “social abuse” and to establish “hell for the poor”. Omnipresent in the media and in meetings, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has managed to stimulate a dynamic at Nupes, to the point of bringing the majority out of its torpor.
Emmanuel Macron himself drew a formula at the end of the week to dismiss the danger of the projects of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen back to back: “Disorder and submission!”. To mobilize his voters, the Head of State wants to shake up the Mélenchon scarecrow, a bit like he used the Le Pen scarecrow to win the presidential election. This time, it is a question of rounding up the electorate of the center and the right, in particular the pensioners, by castigating both the brutal style, the sanguine temperament of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the unrealistic character of a project that the rebellious himself puts at 250 billion euros per year.
The heavyweights of the majority do not skimp on the means. The Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire denounces “the authoritarianism of a Gallic Chavez whose project would lead the country to bankruptcy and submission to political Islam”. And the boss of the walking deputies, Christophe Castaner, flatly accuses Jean-Luc Mélenchon of “take back all the clichés of the Soviet world” with “requisitions, prohibitions and nationalizations”.
Macronists fear a good score from the United Left in the first round, which should be able to qualify in most constituencies. But it is in the second round that the majority intends to brandish the danger Mélenchon to gather wide. If he manages to avoid a cohabitation with the left, there will remain for Emmanuel Macron another pitfall to overcome: a cohabitation within his own camp if his majority depends on the elected MoDem of François Bayrou, or even, more complicated still, on the deputies of Edouard Philippe’s Horizons movement.