The author is a professor of literature in Montreal and a contributor to the journal Argument and essayist. He has notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and Why do our children leave school ignorant? (Boreal, 2008).
Emmanuel Macron is a bad loser. The choice of Michel Barnier as Prime Minister has just confirmed this to the French, if some of them still doubted it.
If there is indeed one result from the summer legislative elections, and only one, that was clear, it was the bitter defeat of the presidential camp. The coalition led by the outgoing Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, came in third in the first round with 20% of the vote, against 28% for the New Popular Front and just over 33% for the National Rally (RN).
In the second round, the president’s supporters barely exceeded 23% thanks to the transfer of left-wing votes to their candidates who came in first or second place in certain constituencies, but that did not prevent them from losing nearly 100 seats compared to the previous legislative elections, those of 2022, at the same time as the relative majority they had until then enjoyed in the chamber.
By declaring the dissolution of the National Assembly following disastrous European elections for the government, Emmanuel Macron was attempting a gamble. He thought he would take advantage of the deep divisions between the different left-wing parties and the historic low in votes for the Republicans so that the candidates supporting him would face RN candidates in the second round in most constituencies. He would then have played the far-right threat card again to win the day, that is to say a potentially absolute majority by invoking the Republican pact for the umpteenth time to block the far right.
This is not what happened. The left having reached in extremis to unite within the New Popular Front, it was she who came in first or second place in many constituencies. Respecting the terms of the famous republican pact, the left-wing parties, including La France insoumise (LFI), called on their candidates who were not in the lead against an RN candidate to withdraw in favor of the candidates of Ensemble pour la République or the Republicans, while, for their part, the president’s supporters preferred to blow hot and cold, calling for blocking the path of the extremes of the right and the left and saying they were ready to withdraw in favor of socialist candidates, but not LFI candidates.
The results of the second round resulted in a chamber divided into three blocs, none of which had a majority. In these circumstances, it was justified for the President of the Republic to refuse to choose as Prime Minister the candidate put forward by the New Popular Front, Lucie Castets, because a government determined to implement the programme of the united left would not have been able to govern and would have been subject to a motion of censure fairly quickly.
But by choosing Michel Barnier, a man of the right, Emmanuel Macron clearly shows that it was not the question of the stability of the future government that motivated him in his refusal to appoint Lucie Castets or another left-wing official to Matignon, but his desire not to see his own political choices, and in particular his very unpopular pension reform, called into question by this new government. A Barnier government will indeed be just as at risk of being overthrown as any other, since it does not have a majority. Even with the support of the Republicans and a few other elected representatives from the right and the centre, it will be supported by barely more than 200 deputies out of 577.
Rather than respecting the result of the elections by taking into account the will of the voters to whom he claimed to give back their voice, as well as the new composition of the Assembly, Emmanuel Macron has therefore chosen to maintain, against all odds, the liberal policies that his governments have pursued with bated breath since 2017, the very policies that have been disavowed by a large part of the electorate.
This is not so surprising; because the current French president is probably the best representative of these liberal elites (which, of course, do not exist only in France) who are so convinced that they possess the absolute truth and that there is no alternative to their way of governing that they are not averse to a denial of democracy.
This also means that he, who had always presented himself as the only bulwark against the National Rally, has just made a very concrete choice to govern with the support of the National Rally. The Barnier government will indeed have to either refrain from governing and be content to deal with current affairs while periodically imploring its adversaries not to overthrow it, or present only bills that have received the prior approval of the leader of the RN and can thus be voted on in the chamber.
The new Prime Minister will then have to live in the coming months with the sword of Damocles of a refusal by RN deputies to vote for his budget or his proposed laws. They will be able to force him to resign whenever they want, which they will not fail to do as soon as the polls suggest the possibility of the RN winning the election, a victory that is less and less improbable, since its objective alliance with the President as well as the guarantees that the latter will not fail to give it will have in the meantime legitimized the RN as a party of government in the eyes of many French people.