France / Les Législatives #1
A new government arrives … challenges and opportunities for Macron
As I have through the French presidential elections in April, now through the parliamentary elections in June, I'm posting here the latest updates, my ruminations, and a sense of just where we are and where we might be going in this landmark series of votes—landmark for the French, for Europe and for the entire western alliance, especially the United States. Follow along with me….stay tuned! Moreover, be sure to read the background in my latest book, A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen. And of course, subscribe here to my SubStack page….don't miss a single issue!
Now, as you will see by the dateline, I am back in Paris through the two rounds of “Les Legislatives” and their aftermath!
PARIS—A lot of water under the bridges of Paris and across this nation since the last time we visited France’s political space. To recall where we left matters: Emmanuel Macron was easily elected to a second (and final) five-year term as France’s president. Macron immediately began a search for his new government, the prime minister and the entire cabinet having resigned, pro forma, to allow the newly-elected president the freedom to choose who he wants to guide him through the next steps in his rule over France and France’s place in Europe and the world. The morning after the presidential vote, there also began the next major electoral campaign—“les législatives,” to decide who will occupy the 577 seats in the French parliament.
From the beginning, I’ve held that the parliamentary elections are by far the more significant of the two 2022 contests in France. They will decide whether Macron is able easily to move toward establishing his vision of a new, technocratic France or whether he will need to cobble together a fragile coalition for each major vote in the Assemblée Nationale, with innumerable and for him barely palatable consequences and no real assurance he will succeed.
So where do we stand right now? This past week, Macron named his new prime minister and the ministers of his new cabinet. And they do represent quite a departure in French political terms. For openers, eight of the 17 full ministers are women—including foreign affairs, health, ecology, higher education, culture, energy, overseas territories, and sports. And at their head is Elisabeth Born.
She is the first female prime minister of France since Édith Cresson held that post for 10 fraught months 30 years ago during the presidency of François Mitterrand. Cresson was the only other female prime minister of the Fifth Republic. Today, add in the new government’s public face—the official spokeswoman, Olivia Grégoire—and you have quite a matriarchy in charge of France’s day-to-day government. Indeed, many of the great names of the past five years are gone—especially France’s notable Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, 74, who served as Defense Minister under Macron’s Socialist predecessor, François Hollande, then at the helm of the Quai d’Orsay for Macron’s entire first term.
All the reshuffles at the cabinet level will mean precious little, however, if La République en Marche, (Macron’s party) can’t win an unassailable majority in the French parliament. LREM, the party invented by Macron less than six years ago to catapult him to the presidency with no strings attached, has managed 270 seats out of 577—more than double that of the number two Les Republicans with 105 in the current parliament. On most votes, Macron could count on the 58 votes of MoDem, the Mouvement Democrate party of Macron ally François Bayrou to get him over the top plus a couple of other more or less centrist splinter groups. (There are nine political groupings in the parliament today, plus far-right members of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally Party, whose seven legislators are not enough to qualify for a formal parliamentary grouping.)
Bring on the NUPES
Suddenly, though, matters have become considerably more complicated. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who came in a dangerously close third in the presidential contest, has not, unlike most also-rans in previous presidential elections, faded quietly into the night. He’s back, and in spades. Over the past two weeks he has cobbled together what appears to be a potent coalition. His Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale (Les NUPES) includes nearly the entire spectrum of the important segments of the once powerful French left. This includes Mélenchon’s own party, which captured 22% in the first round of the presidential elections, plus the Greens who accounted for 3%, and a number of other fractured factions, even including the Socialists. Anyway you count it, they are projected to wind up just a scootch ahead of Macron’s LREM in the generic voting for the next French parliament, at least on paper: 27.5% to 27%. And that’s when you add in votes from MoDem, Horizons and Agir for Macron’s coalition. Not, one would think, a good position on the starting grid for the month-long campaign of Macron and his allies.
But not so fast. Another way of looking at this is to go, constituency by constituency, and see just who might actually come out on top and find their way into the next parliament. When you look at it this way, the landscape takes on a whole different complexion. Looked at from this point of view, LREM and Macron come out with a “Majorité absolue” (absolute majority) of 290 to 330 seats—better even than they have now.
Which is what may, at least in part, have led some natural NUPES to have second thoughts about this coalition, that some see as little more than a Trojan Horse to get Mélenchon some real political power. So, recriminations are already surfacing among some important elements of the Left that should be falling all over themselves to join up with the NUPES and with the bitter, 70-year-old Mélenchon.
None of this is terribly surprising for anyone who has followed France’s byzantine domestic politics. But this time, there have come some very dark maneuverings that have already threatened to snatch another defeat from the jaws victory for France’s political left wing that the presidential elections already had left utterly out in the cold. Imagine for a moment a Socialist Party that has actually ruled France for nearly two decades under the Fifth Republic but whose candidate, Paris’s roundly detested Mayor Anne Hidalgo, came in 10th out of 12 candidates in this year’s presidential contest, eking out barely 1.75% of the vote. Indeed, she was even outdistanced by the communist, the green, two far right and one center-right candidates, not to mention Mélenchon himself, a left-wing Bernie Sanders lookalike who came in a strong third, failing by 1.2% from making it into the two-person runoff against Macron. And who knows how that might have turned out. Now the Socialists have, at least nominally, joined up with the NUPES.
As the leading French daily Le Monde asked, “who would have thought 13 years ago, that the Socialist Party would wind up by finding itself on the Mélenchon line?” The Socialists indeed had been a leading pillar of the French establishment for decades. Well, the answer, it turns out, some key Socialists are having misgivings—that their beloved party will wind up becoming a footnote to French political history, or at least to France today. One of the earliest breaks in what seemed to be an iron-clad alliance of the NUPES came from Carole Delga, the powerful governor of the Occitane that sweeps across the venerable Languedoc and mid-Pyrénées regions of southwestern France. «Le PS a préféré le tripatouillage électoral et la soumission,» [ “The PS preferred electoral tampering and submission” ] she told the nation’s leading Sunday daily, Journal du Dimanche. As for the agreement the Socialists made with Mélenchon she called it “renunciation and submission to the [France] Insoumis.” The name of Mélenchon’s party is France Insoumis [Unbowed], and it’s leading the NUPES initiative. This is only the beginning of the intricate political dance on which France is embarking. We still have three more tense, fraught weeks before voters go to the polls on June 12 for the first of two rounds of balloting.
As for Macron, he has calculated carefully where his support can come from and moved rapidly, even deftly, to shore up support among France’s young voters, ecologists, even the rural disenfranchised, who would naturally seem to gravitate toward the camp of the NUPES. One has only to look at the lineup of veterans and youths, women and men, leftists, and moderates in his cabinet.
His Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, had been a veteran Socialist, serving as “directrice de cabinet” of Ségolène Royal when this former Socialist presidential candidate was Minister of Ecology. Under Macron, Borne’s been serving loyally as Transport Minister, then Minister of Ecology, finally Minister of Labor in Macron’s first term. One of her first declarations to voters was “I will not lie to you.”
Above all, she really has little interest in Mélenchon, his “Insoumis” or his “NUPES.” As she put it quite simply and directly this weekend:
Les outrances de Jean-Luc Mélenchon, personnellement, m’intéressent assez peu. M. Mélenchon, comme nous tous, devrait respecter nos institutions. L’élection présidentielle se joue à deux tours, et je rappelle qu’il n’était pas au second tour. Le gouvernement est déjà dans l’action. Il porte un projet au service des Français, comme tous nos candidats aux législatives.
“The excesses of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, personally, interest me very little. Mr. Mélenchon, like all of us, should respect our institutions. The presidential election is played in two rounds, and I remind you that he was not in the second round [during the presidential contest]. The government is already in action. Its projects will be at the service of the French, like all our legislative candidates.”
In other words, it’s the voters who’ll decide. But the government is already hard at work, ignoring all the political background noise, fully prepared to allow the French people to choose who will represent them. And Prime Minister Borne has a pretty good sense where that choice will fall.
Vive la France!
Absolutely ... next week will deal with the issues, which are manifold. On my in from the airport, my French taxi driver kept shaking his head at the prices each time we passed a French petrol station!
A French government will need to hew close to the center to go along with tightening by the European central bank to head off gathering inflation.