Emmanuel Macron wants a snap election to get him out of a deep hole
SOMETIMES YOU have no choice but to roll the dice. That is where France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, found himself on the night of June 9th. He had just received a thumping in elections to the European Parliament, in which the National Rally (RN), led by Marine Le Pen, won twice as many votes as his own party, Renaissance. Already, in his own national parliament, he has to govern with a minority, cobbling together support as best he can to get his government’s domestic legislation through. The boost to Ms Le Pen’s standing from her big Euro-win risked making him a lamer duck than ever, with the very real prospect that the opposition would anyway force an election later in the year by voting down his budget.
It was an untenable position. As in the United States, French presidents cannot pass much of their domestic agenda without a majority in the legislature. At the moment, Mr Macron’s party has no majority, but neither can anyone else form a majority government. And so he seized the initiative by calling a snap election at the end of this month, a full three years early.
Will this bold move make Mr Macron’s situation better or worse? The vote could work to his advantage. He hopes to force the French to confront the choice between centrism and the extremes. In a two-round system, centrist voters will have a chance to cast their ballots tactically in the second stage in order to keep the RN at bay. Even if his side does not get any closer to a majority, he may be able to persuade the moderate parties to work together to keep the RN from forming its own government. Inconveniently, Eric Ciotti, the leader of the centre-right Republicans, said that he wanted to join forces with the RN. That caused uproar, leading to a vote in the party to oust him. Post-election haggling will be intense.
However, France also faces a more alarming possibility: the election could be won by the RN. That does not mean Ms Le Pen would become prime minister; she says she would instead put forward her young protégé, Jordan Bardella, which would keep her powder dry for the presidential race in 2027.
How bad might an RN government be for France? Not catastrophic, perhaps. It would run most domestic policy and draw up the budget. So there would be lots of areas in which it could drag France further from the centre towards its hard-right positions. Yet the French constitution reserves huge powers for the president, particularly over foreign and defence policy; and he has a veto. France’s relations with the European Union and its support for Ukraine might not change all that much.
The real question is how having an RN prime minister might affect the election that really matters: the presidential vote in 2027, in which Mr Macron cannot be a candidate. This would critically depend on how well the RN was seen to have performed in office. On the one hand, French prime ministers tend to get the blame for everything that goes wrong, while presidents can float above the fray. That is what happened to Elisabeth Borne, who served under Mr Macron and was replaced in January. It is especially true in a period of cohabitation, as in the 1990s when Presidents François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac had prime ministers from different parties.
On the other hand, French voters have in the past always adhered to a taboo over the hard right holding national office. Ms Le Pen has already done a lot to make her party more professional. If an RN prime minister surprised France on the upside, it could both make Ms Le Pen seem a more normal candidate and enhance her popularity—rather as has happened to Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.
Ms Le Pen has not yet shown she aims to follow Ms Meloni’s path towards the centre. If she were to win the presidency in 2027 with her current policies, it really would be alarming: she is pro-Russia, against heavily arming Ukraine and sceptical of the EU, even if she no longer says she wants France to leave it. A Le Pen presidency would be bad news for anyone who thinks that deeper integration is part of the solution to many of the problems Europe faces, from its deficit in technology to its energy transition. Racial and religious relations in France would worsen; disruptive xenophobes like Hungary’s Viktor Orban would gain a powerful ally.
The right stuff
The irony is that events in France have distracted attention from an election that was not as dire as centrists had feared. Europe saw no right-wing surge. The parties of the hard right collectively picked up only three or four percentage points of support; they did well in Germany and in Austria, as they did in France, but elsewhere had a disappointing night. That slight loss of ground for the centre will make governing in Brussels a little trickier, but not much. Yet owing to Mr Macron’s surprise, the surge in France and a smaller one in Germany are hogging the headlines. We hope it was worth it. ■