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!
I am in Paris now, through the two rounds of “Les Législatives” and their aftermath!
PARIS—Les Législatives (France’ Parliamentary elections), whose first round takes place in just two weeks, with the second round a week later, is not simply a re-run of the Presidential elections last month. Not at all. Now, having chosen their president for another five years, the French are deciding whether to give him and his party an unassailable majority in the Assemblée Nationale—or make him battle for every single initiative, one by one, for five more fraught and contentious years.
Last week, I spent some time on the phone with the mayor of the town of Provins that I wrote about last month shortly after the second round of the presidential elections that catapulted Emmanuel Macron into a second and final (also meaning lame duck) five-year term as president.
Mayor Olivier Lavenka is a member of Les Républicains—the party of Valérie Pécresse in the presidential contest—but also the party whose DNA stretches in the Fifth Republic all the way back in one form or another to Charles de Gaulle. Pécresse managed to eke out barely 4.8% of the vote for a bleak fifth place finish nationwide, fourth place even in Provins, the beating heart of French Republicanism. Provins’ national assembly member is the powerful Christian Jacob, leader of the Les Républicains party and their block in the National Assembly. They represent the parliament’s second largest voting block—though barely half the number of seats currently held by La République en Marche (LREM), the party formed by President Macron just six years ago to catapult him into power.
Ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy, Christian Jacob, Mayor Olivier Lavenka...October 2019
What Les Républicains and every other major party is seeking in the parliamentary vote is a blocking maneuver—keep LREM from achieving an absolute majority in the National Assembly that would give President Macron carte blanche to work his will on French government and society for the next five years.
Mayor Lavenka really put it perfectly to me. “You have to pay attention and be careful in making comparisons with the presidential election. Each election is different,” he began. “The legislative elections are going to say other things, just as the territorial and regional elections a year ago said very different things entirely.” Indeed, in that vote last June, Lavenka and his Les Républicains beat the far-right candidate of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement Nationale 72% to 28% in the Provins region. This year, in the presidential election, the Républicain candidate came in a distant fourth in Provins with barely 11% of the vote.
So, despite Macron’s victory in the presidential elections, his party is no shoe-in for the parliamentary elections. Nor should you rule out Les Républicains. Reflecting the views of his party, Mayor Lavenka defined three principal issues:
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“Purchasing power, salary levels, and equally taxes and public spending. Because in a country like ours, with a level of taxation so elevated, if you raise salaries without some control over the level of charges on enterprises you destroy the common objective,” low inflation and a lower burden on families’ budgets.
·
“Access to health care: with a growing disparity of access to health care and a medical desertification which hits the entire nation which now includes urban areas. We must really pay attention to this crisis. Over the next four, five years, it may become impossible to attract specialist [physicians] or even generalists to the areas where they are most needed.”
· “The third subject is security—daily security, security of the French people, a person, and his property. And then, after there are concerns about energy, about global geopolitics.”
Retirement age is also a central point since Macron, in his campaign did pledge to return to this third rail of French politics—raising the age of retirement—one of the subjects that sent tens of thousands of voters into the streets in “yellow vest” protests two years ago, forcing him to defer, though clearly not abandon, this obective.
The problem across the entire spectrum of issues, each deeply fraught and that threaten to be deeply fought, is that France is suddenly confronted with a reality it has not faced in a generation—a French president who, from the moment his election was certified, has nothing to lose.
With his tenure capped at two five-year terms, Macron is constitutionally barred from standing for reelection in 2027—the first president since Jacques Chirac was re-elected in 2002 who has been in a position of not ever having to run for this office again. This instant lame duck status, of course, can cut two ways. On the one hand, he can propose any initiative he wants. On the other, without a bulletproof majority in the National Assembly, he has precious little bargaining power to assemble the kind of coalition he would need for every major bill he seeks to pass.
Which is why there is such desperation on the part of each major party, and any number of minor ones, to put together a majority or block Macron from achieving his own. The polls suggest there already are three major blocks shaping up for the National Assembly—none even approaching a majority—Macron’s centrist LREM, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left NUPES, and Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National.
Each comes to this campaign with more than a little hope—mixed with desperation—across the entire political spectrum, with just two weeks left until the first round of voting. As the center-right daily Le Figaro put it on Saturday in its lead story on page one: “The tack to the left by Emmanuel Macron, the difficult debut of the [new] government, or the Mélenchon scarecrow could play in favor of the Républicain candidates.”
Indeed, what most parties seem to be fighting for is blocking rights, though each certainly has its own priorities—or those of its leader. As we examined here last week, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is pressing ahead as leader of the NUPES [Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale]. In the first round of the presidential elections, he registered a strong third-place finish, barely 1.2% behind far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. Now, with his coalition adding the Ecologists (4.63%) and the Socialists (1.75%), his NUPES are basically dead-even in the polls with Macron’s LREM, each with 27% to 28%. Certainly a frightening number for Macron, but which encourages Mélenchon to hope that Macron will name him Prime Minister to arrive at a workable majority in the parliament.
Workable is hardly the word for a NUPES-LREM coalition, however. Mélenchon still hasn’t given up on such completely off-the-deep-end ideas as abolishing the Fifth Republic and establishing a Sixth Republic, a national minimum wage of €1,500 Euros ($1,800) a month for both workers and retirees, a dole that would give €1,063 euros per month to every French citizen, whether or not they are actually working, a withdrawal from NATO, and he would pick and choose in which European Union programs France would continue to participate. For Macron, the consummate technocrat who understands how profoundly destructive any one of these ideas would be to French society, economy, and its standing in the world, none of this would be remotely acceptable. Still, the NUPES and LREM are locked neck-and-neck in a fight to the finish.
And then there is the far right. So far, neither Le Pen’s Rassemblement Nationale nor the Reconquête! (with the exclamation mark) party of far-right firebrand Éric Zemmour, has approached the numbers of the two leading competitors. Together, though, they would find themselves in a three-way tie, with 27% of the total vote. Fortunately, Zemmour who as Le Monde puts it, is “participating in the legislative election so as not to disappear,” still refuses to engage in a NUPE-like coalition with Le Pen’s party. And on Friday Le Pen herself, still smarting from her third defeat in a presidential election, said she’s pulling back from her party’s national legislative efforts and will devote herself to winning a seat of her own in parliament from her local constituency, the Pas de Calais.
As for Les Républicains, currently the second largest block in the National Assembly, polls show them deeply in fourth place with barely 9% of the vote.
As for Macron, he seems to be preserving his utter equanimity. This holiday of Ascension, he has spent in seclusion at the remote presidential country retreat of Brégançon in the south of France, just as he has done for each of the five past such Ascension weekends. Largely absent from the campaign trail, he has, as the Élysée put it, been “working on his dossiers,” plunging deeply into his role as the titular head of Europe. On Saturday, he spent over an hour on a three-way call with Vladimir Putin and German chancellor Olof Scholz. That followed a long call with Turkey’s strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan to try to talk him into letting Finland and Sweden into NATO. In between there were calls with the former president of Kurdistan, Australia’s new prime minister Anthony Albanese, and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. This was all to prepare for the last summit of Europe’s leaders on Monday—his last as titular president of the European Union, a six-month role he will be relinquishing on June 30 to the prime minister of the Czech republic. But do the French care very much about most of this? Not as much as such deeply personal issues as inflation, the cost of food and petrol, and their retirement age. Macron needs, desperately, to retain his majority in the National Assembly, to achieve his vision on each of these subjects.
So what’s to be done? How bad off could France actually get beginning three weeks from now when we have the members of a new Assemblée Nationale taking their seats in the Palais Bourbon, preparing to legislate—or simply bicker?
Macron could still get an unassailable majority. French voters, in parliamentary elections, cast their ballots for individuals. Some are their local mayors. Others are incumbents who’ve had five years to work their voters closely, distance themselves from their national party where necessary, or clutch it to their hearts. Moreover, for 577 seats in the National Assembly, there are 6,293 candidates—and that’s down from 7,882 five years ago—the drop attributable largely to some of the new coalitions this year. Still, more than ten candidates for each available seat.
Some voters will certainly cast their ballot, blindly, for whoever represents Macron or Mélenchon or Le Pen. But pay close attention to what the Mayor of Provins told me in conclusion: It is the local towns and villages where the real power sits—"the schools, the trade unions, they can serve as an echo chamber for national opinion.” An echo chamber. Let us hope in the end its sound reflects the best good will and good sense of the French ‘patrie.’
Vive la France!