Emmanuel Macron faces heavy losses after a short campaign
As France’s flash parliamentary-election campaign officially got under way this week, Emmanuel Macron’s centrist candidates were pounding the streets, trying to put on a brave face. After days handing out flyers, one deputy standing for re-election concedes that campaigning is “extremely tough”. Another describes the president’s decision to call a snap legislative election as “idiotic”. Many are preparing to pack their bags. “He has thrown us under a bus,” says a minister.
The two-round vote for the National Assembly, on June 30th and July 7th, has turned into one of the most crucial in post-war French history. At stake is the serious possibility of a government led by either the hard right or hard left. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) is the better known. But the reconstituted left-wing alliance, the New Popular Front (NFP), is now hot on its heels, with an equally drastic tax-and-spend programme.
Three main political blocs have emerged after Mr Macron’s decision on June 9th to dissolve parliament, which took everybody by surprise. Even his own government, including the prime minister, Gabriel Attal, was informed only at the last minute. Voting at this election concerns only the lower house of parliament; Mr Macron, short of a surprise resignation, remains president until 2027.
Polls show the leading bloc to be the RN, which held only 88 seats out of 577 in the old parliament. Its candidate for the job of prime minister is Ms Le Pen’s 28-year-old protégé, Jordan Bardella (pictured). The RN has been joined by a scattering of candidates from the centre-right Republicans (LR), after their leader, Eric Ciotti, jumped in with them. Ms Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal, has also lent her support, prompting her expulsion from the ultra-right Reconquest party. Alone, the RN remains ahead in first-round polls, on 33%, according to Ifop, a pollster, on June 18th. Its new LR friends, running in 62 constituencies, could bring it a further 4%. (Anti-Ciotti Republicans are putting up 400 of their own candidates.)
In a close second place, on 28%, is the NFP. Numerically it is dominated by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France (LFI), which is fielding 230 candidates, followed by the Socialists (175), Greens (92) and Communists (50). The enduring influence of Mr Mélenchon, an anti-capitalist former Trotskyite, was exposed when he deselected three of his leading outgoing deputies and put in a close ally (who, convicted of domestic violence, then had to stand down). Expediency, however, is trumping deep differences. At the last minute, François Hollande, a former Socialist president, decided to join, standing in his old rural heartland of Corrèze. Behind the scenes, a battle for control rages.
The third bloc, Mr Macron’s centrist alliance Ensemble, trails far behind in third place, with just 18%. It is hoping to find future allies for an anti-extremist “republican front”, on the left and centre-right, by standing aside in some 60 constituencies.
Given polling trends, the likeliest outcome currently looks to be a hung parliament, with either the hard right or hard left in a position to try to form a government. If either succeeded, France would then face an attempted reversal of much of the economic agenda that Mr Macron has pursued since he was first elected in 2017.
Mr Bardella has promised “immediately” to lower the level of vat from 20% to 5.5% on energy bills and motor fuel, and to use tax breaks to raise salaries by up to 10%. After the French stockmarket, the world’s sixth-biggest, fell by 6% in the first five days after the election was called, Mr Bardella took fright. Other measures, he suggested, could wait until the autumn. These include his pledge to strike down Mr Macron’s pension reform, which raised the minimum retirement age from 62 years to 64. Mr Bardella also vows to restore a wealth tax and abolish the right to French nationality for those born to foreign parents on French soil.
How such measures would be financed remains rather vague. Ludovic Subran, chief economist at Allianz, an insurer, estimates the RN’s total new annual spending costs, including a reversal of the pension reform, to be €74bn ($79bn). Factoring in additional receipts from new taxes, Allianz calculates a net yearly cost of about €18bn or 0.7% of GDP. That would push France’s budget deficit from over 5% of GDP this year to 6.4% by 2026, it thinks.
The left-wing programme looks equally damaging. The NFp promises to raise the minimum wage by 13%, bring back the wealth tax, cap energy prices even though costs have now stabilised, and reverse Mr Macron’s pension reform. Valérie Rabault, a Socialist outgoing deputy, puts its total extra spending pledges at €35bn a year, not including the cost of lowering the pension age to 60. The NFp programme, says one French business boss, is “such madness” that it makes the watered-down RN wish-list look almost reasonable.
Projecting seat numbers from first-round polling is tricky. Any candidate backed by 12.5% of registered voters can go through to a run-off. But party deals can prompt qualifiers to stand down. In 2022 there were only seven three-way votes in the second round. What does seem clear is that Mr Macron’s party is facing crushing losses. Voters give him no credit for bringing down inflation and joblessness in France, nor for capping energy bills during the pandemic. They are neither ashamed nor nervous about backing the RN, and seem just to want “change”.
Whatever the outcome, France may be in for a period of extreme instability. Any minority government risks being voted down in a no-confidence motion. Even with a majority, a government that enters a period of cohabitation with a president of a different party will generate tension. No doubt taking note, Mr Bardella this week said that he would take the job of prime minister only if his party won a majority.
The best hope for Mr Macron is that, after the vote, a union of moderate parties might agree to work together under a technocratic leader. More probable is that France enters the uncharted territory of parliamentary instability: exactly what Charles de Gaulle sought to avoid when he founded the modern French republic. ■
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