Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adviser to the Conservative Party.
It’s 1-1 so far in the great European snap election match, with the deciding leg being played in the UK today. Last year, Spain’s Pedro Sanchez used one to hang onto power. Then Emmanuel Macron, reeling from disastrous European election results decided it was time to dissolve the National Assembly.
His party had been defeated, winning just 15 per cent of the vote while he far-right Rassemblement National (RN) topped the poll with 32 per cent, plus another five per cent for remaining far-right parties. The centre left won around 21 per cent and the far left another ten. Les Republicains, successor to the centre-right parties led by great French presidents De Gaulle, Pompidou, and Chirac (and also Sarkozy) got seven per cent.
So Macron rolled the dice. The results of the first round of France’s two-round system ended up more or less the same as those of the Europeans: 33 per cent for the RN and allies, 28 per cent for an alliance of the centre and extreme left; some improvement for his own coalition, up to 21 per cent.
The Republicans stayed at seven per cent, despite their leader being forced out for trying to make an alliance with Le Pen and barricading himself in the party HQ after the rest of the party’s executive removed him; at least we can be fairly sure what their core vote is.
Now comes the second round, where all candidates that received 12.5 per cent of the total number of registered votes in their constituency get to take part in a run off, starting a battle of coalitions. Traditionally, all other parties have united to keep out the RN (or its predecessor, the Front National), and with the RN winning only 30 per centof the vote that should not be too difficult.
However, anti-RN forces are split because the “New Popular Front” leftist coalition contains quite a few candidates from the La France Insoumise (LFI) of the old-school Communist, anti-Ukranian Jean-Luc Melenchon. So there will be seats where the candidate most likely to beat the RN is an extremist of the left.
Melenchon himself has ordered his candidates to stand down, if they are third, and to support the centrist against the RN. But the centrists and centre-right have only asked for their votes to go to other candidates of the centre-left. So far more than 200 have stood down, reducing the number of three way contests to 91.
However this will leave an uncomfortable number of far-left-far-right contests, where the RN might slip through because centre-right voters stay at home. This makes the result of the second round, to be held on Sunday, extremely uncertain.
The smart money is on a hung parliament, with the RN the largest party, but unable to form a majority, and the far left’s showing making an alternative majority difficult to put together.
Or, More alarmingly, (and because voters won’t vote on foreign policy, even though the French people strongly support Ukraine) a Ribbentrop-Molotov bloc, drawn from RN and LFI, big enough to stymie aid to Ukraine, or prevent the implementation of the Franco-Ukrainian defence pact, could materialise.
If exact numbers are uncertain, what lessons can we draw from Macron’s gamble?
First is that resentment on both sides of the political spectrum has left him isolated: the ethnically mixed urban poor, together with champagne socialists, backing the extreme left, while people in mostly white smaller towns opting for Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. Many on the left won’t forgive him for leaving the Socialist Party, and pursuing what they see as right-wing economic and immigration policies.
On the right, they see his shift towards their positions as reason to vote for a somewhat detoxified Rassamblement National. Macron has made their detoxification easier by adopting their line on immigration and crime, while alienating a people who have always resented the dominance of the Île-de-France region (in which Paris is located).
A deeper lesson for centrist leaders, from Matteo Renzi in Italy and Mark Rutte in the Netherlands to Albert Rivera in Spain, is that in Western Europe, at least, left- and right-wing identity is still extremely strong – and it’s extremely difficult to govern from the centre by alienating both.
A Macron who had tilted more to the left might have suffered the same problem in reverse, legitimising the far-left instead of the extreme right; trying to govern past these entrenched transitions is harder than it looks.
This even though France also has a powerful centrist tradition that brought Giscard d’Estaing to the presidency, and the centrist MoDem to the cusp of a parliamentary majority in the 1990s, before Macron swept to power in 2017.
Macron’s plan A was to present himself as the bulwark against chaos. His plan B was to get the RN in power in the national assembly so their incompetence could become obvious in time for the presidential elections in 2027.
It seems he’s fallen between two stools: losing badly enough to be humiliated, but the RN not doing well enough to actually share power.
France can expect weak parliamentary government. Macron’s party may be called Renaissance, but it appears the only thing he’s managed to revive has been the Fourth Republic.
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Author: Garvan Walshe
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