Macron’s reckless gamble leaves French voters with invidious choice

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One data point is enough to show how French President Emmanuel Macron’s snap election gamble went spectacularly wrong. In the first round of parliamentary elections in 2022, 4.2mn French people voted for the far-right Rassemblement National party; on Sunday, that number was around 11mn, according to estimates by pollster Ipsos.

Thanks to Macron’s miscalculations, the eurosceptic, anti-immigration RN has a shot at securing an absolute parliamentary majority in the second round of voting on July 7 — with potentially disastrous consequences for social cohesion and for France’s place in Europe. 

Macron dissolved parliament without consulting the leaders of the three parties in his centrist Ensemble alliance. Defying all conventional political wisdom, he did so when the RN already had huge momentum after its resounding victory in European parliament elections on June 9. He ordered a lightning campaign of only three weeks, giving precious little time for his ill-prepared allies to undermine the RN’s credibility on the economy and other issues.

Macron called the elections betting that the rancorous relations among France’s leftwing parties would prevent them from forming a common electoral front — which would have allowed his centrists to leapfrog them into the second round in hundreds of seats. Within four days, the four left parties agreed an electoral pact and a radical tax-and-spend programme.

Macron’s alliance has been crushed. It looks likely to lose as many as two-thirds of its seats, according to Ipsos. It is fracturing as its political heavyweights begin to position themselves for the post-Macron era and the presidential election in 2027. Macron’s authority has been shredded and whatever the outcome of the second round, his role is set to change dramatically. There will be no more hyperactive president running the country from the Elysée palace.

Macron called the election saying France needed a moment of political “clarification”. It says everything that the best outcome the president can probably now expect is a hung parliament, political gridlock and a caretaker prime minister with no mandate. In these circumstances, the populist “fever” that he hoped to break may only get worse, with the RN clamouring for an early presidential election to bring order and stability back to the country.

The RN is not assured of an absolute majority in the second round. Party leader Marine Le Pen avoided any triumphalism on Sunday night, warning that victory was not secure. The RN’s strategy now is to play up the threat to France from, as Le Pen put, a “far left with violent tendencies”.

Whether the RN forms the first far-right government since the Vichy regime during the second world war will depend on its opponents uniting against them. But the so-called “republican front” has been deployed so many times by Macron, cynically his critics would say, to block the far right that it is now tattered and battered.

The highest turnout in decades has produced hundreds of three-way constituency contests for the second round. To block the far right, the left and Macron’s centrists will need to work together, pulling out of three-way races where the other is better placed to beat the RN but also explicitly calling on their supporters to vote for the other camp where their candidate is not present.

Co-operation is so far partial at best. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI), made the first concession on Sunday night, saying the leftwing bloc would pull out of contests where it qualified in third place to favour Macron’s alliance. The centre-left and the greens had already said they would do so. The trouble is in more conservative districts, where it may be the third-placed centrists who are better placed to beat the RN.

After Mélenchon’s move, Macron’s Ensemble alliance said it too would stand down third-placed candidates in favour of those “in a position to beat the RN and with whom we share the essential: the values of the republic”. It implies its tactical withdrawals will be done selectively.

Édouard Philippe, the leader of Horizons, the liberal-conservative wing of Ensemble, meanwhile, urged voters to spurn both far-right and far-left parties.

Macron’s camp and the left will come under pressure to do more to bolster the republican front in the coming days. This will be hard to swallow for a president who has treated the far left and far right as equally bad for France.

Millions of voters will now have to wrestle with an invidious choice at the ballot box on July 7: between a far right dangerously close to power and a leftwing bloc under the glowering influence of the far-left Mélenchon. After Macron’s reckless wager, there is no alternative.