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—Did Emmanuel Macron wait too long? The man with all but infallible political instincts, the chief of state who called himself “Jupiter,” king of the gods, as he began his first term as French president five years ago—has he just overplayed his hand?
One week to go before the landmark “legislatives”—when France elects its parliament for the next five years—and the French are only beginning to awaken to the reality of this tense, hard-fought, yet potentially historic election. But so has Macron. Perhaps too late. As France’s national Sunday newspaper, Journal du Dimanche screamed on its front page, “Sueurs froides à l’Élysée.” [ Cold sweats at the Élysée ]
And then JDD, as it’s affectionately known, elaborates: «Sondages à la baisse, ministres menacés, la majorité en plein doute… Emmanuel Macron sonne le branle-bas de combat.” [ “Falling polls, ministers threatened, [his] majority in full doubt… Emmanuel Macron sounds the call to combat.” ]
All this worked last time. In the presidential contest just six weeks ago, Macron barely phoned it in for the First Round, focused a tad more for Round Two against right-wing challenger Marine Le Pen, and won handily by 17 percentage points—half the 33 points five years earlier, but still a landslide, certainly in American terms.
But now we have the elections for what is shaping up to be hard-fought, very much trench warfare. Until Sunday, just a week before the first-round vote, this looming reality hardly seemed to have moved the needle even in a media or a population that was utterly transfixed by last month’s presidential election.
Friday morning’s Le Figaro, the center-right newspaper that has for decades served as the mouthpiece of what was once a vast Gaullist center, featured four stories on page one. The five-column lede proclaimed, “After 10 days, the Russian noose is tightening on the Donbass.” Beneath was a four-column photo montage of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, “the trial that’s fascinated America.” Then there was a look at the two-year war that’s been going on between France’s attorney general and the nation’s magistrates. And at the bottom, the column by Le Figaro’s foreign editor Patrick Saint-Paul asked, “What victory?” After “100 days of war in Ukraine that’s changed the world.”
The paper’s coverage of les législatives began and ended on page eight, with a feature on how 13 ministers of the Macron government had fanned out to their local constituencies to campaign for a seat in the new parliament—many of them first-time candidates.
The weekend edition of France’s leading daily, Le Monde, leads with a five-column banner that Macron is “promising a change of [his] method.” But then the paper quickly goes on to point out: “One week before the législatives, the campaign [which has featured] no debate and which the executive [Macron] has largely avoided, is not interesting the French.” Well, maybe not. But perhaps that in itself is a good part of what’s causing cold sweats among the president’s entourage.
Perhaps not enough Macron voters will bother going to the polls to give him the majority in parliament he so desperately needs. In one measure of political disillusionment, more than 3 million voters cast “blank” or nullified ballots in the April presidential contest—and that doesn’t include the 13.7 million who opted simply not to vote at all. But this time, the risk is that Macron’s foes will come out to vote in spades. And then there are those, across the political spectrum who, having given him a personal mandate to govern, now may well want to rein in his ability to rule in any imperial, Napoleonic fashion. Giving no majority to any one party could lead to outright paralysis, or a need to arrange a painfully crafted coalition for every single measure Macron needs to cram through. The imperial president will basically be rendered a political and diplomatic eunuch.
Even worse is the very real possibility for an outright majority to Macron’s leftwing or rightwing opponents that could produce the chilling result of “cohabitation.”
Cohabitation—a president of one party barricaded in the Élysée, a parliament controlled by the opposition just across the Seine—hasn’t happened in France in a generation. With good reason. The three times that it did happen in France—1986-1988, 1993-1995 and 1997-2002—were all but catastrophic. Paralysis, bickering, France retreating into itself in Europe and on the world stage. But a huge number of those planning to vote, or abstain, today were hardly around the last time.
So how likely for a repeat? First, we need to look carefully at the crazy-quilt electoral map of France. There will be a lot of contests, a whole host of profoundly contested races, in constituencies across France. And a whole lot of confusion to accompany them. With some 6,293 candidates for 577 seats, an average of nearly 11 for each seat and with one contest featuring 22 candidates, it’s more like utter chaos. Moreover, Le Monde, France’s most prestigious newspaper that occupies a sort of center-left spot on the political spectrum, has done a mammoth survey of every constituency up for grabs, underlining several realities. “There is one certitude about the elections of June 12 and June 19,” Le Monde’s veteran chief Parliamentary reporter, Patrick Roger, began in a colossus of understatement, “it will not take place under the same conditions as five years ago.”
Le Monde published an extraordinary map that examines all 577 voting districts in France, singling out nearly 200 that must be followed closely. If you think this looks upsetting, just imagine how it looks to Macron’s “mormons” (brain trust) in their campaign headquarters dubbed The Beehive (La Ruche).
What seems most likely this time is that the real complexion of the National Assembly simply won’t be known after the first round next Sunday, June 12. Not enough candidates will have managed to accumulate 50% of the vote in their constituency to avoid a runoff a week later on June 19. But the run-off risks being as chaotic as the first round. Each will feature the top two from the first round, but also any candidate who wins 12.5% of the total number of registered voters in that election district. Since nationwide more than 51% abstained five years ago and the apathy seems even more profound this year, you can begin to see just by the numbers what a mess this year is shaping up to be. In any event, it’s winner (even by a plurality) takes all in the second round.
So, just what is Macron doing to help assure a bullet-proof majority on every major initiative in France’s parliament for the next five years? Instead of campaigning one-by-one, doorbell to doorbell, this past week, having apparently awakened to the danger before him, he seems instead to be seizing on some issues that should be important to a range of French voters—especially the young. Many of them have been drawn in the fashion of Bernie Sanders and his acolytes in America to the septuagenarian candidate of the far left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
In some narrow but very appealing areas, Macron is seeking to out-Mélenchon this leader of the Nupes. [Nupes, if you haven’t been following these pages, stands for Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale or an uneasy alliance of Mélenchon’s Rebellious France (France Insoumise), old-line Socialists, green Ecologists, even some communists thrown in.]
All sides are doing their best to portray themselves as the saviors of France. The Le Monde reporter who covers Macron and his party just recently dubbed him “the chameleon president,” who appears to be dancing to a “three-step waltz.” He’s stolen talking points from the center-right Les Republicains; from the Greens and the Mélenchon folks pledging a “prime minister directly responsible for environmental planning,” which he promptly appeared largely to ignore, and from the far-right.
This past week Macron spent some time in Marseilles with his newly-appointed minister of education, Pap Ndiaye, himself quite a break with precedent and a clear gesture by Macron to win over a substantial portion of what should be reflexively Nupe voters.
Ndiaye is a very much left-wing scholar—a Black French historian and expert on colonialism and racial history, son of a Senegalese father and French mother, who describes himself as “a pure product of republican meritocracy.” He’s succeeded a right-wing predecessor, the jurist and bureaucrat Jean-Michel Blanquer, one of whose central missions included keeping “wokism” out of French culture and especially schools. Ndiaye believes deeply in Macron’s new structure for French education. The heart of it, which Macron spelled out in his campaign swing last week, is decentralization and localism. He wants local school districts, even individual schools, to take control of how they operate, even what they teach—a sharp contrast to the centralized curriculum that’s been dictated from Paris since the time of Napoleon. Which should be catnip to both Nupes and LePenistes alike—most of whom want to see France’s central government removed from most interference in the daily lives of Jacques Sixpack and his family. If this means the local principal can choose his or her teachers, add or subtract time for sports and recreation, teach math in kindergarten, well bravo—“donner carte blanche au personnel enseignant,” as Macron put it. [give carte blanche to the teaching profession.]
On Saturday, Le Monde finally observed: “Emmanuel Macron has entered the campaign. At last, say his troops. But alone, the French will point out. A week before the first round, the head of state has launched himself into his second electoral battle, absolutely critical for the destiny he intends to forge.”
To give a sense of just how far Macron has come, or is prepared to go to assure himself of an unchallenged second term, another headline observes quite pointedly, “For his second five-year term, Macron (now) want to be seen as less ‘Jupiter.’” God of sky and thunder, the king of the gods of Roman mythology, Jupiter was the term Macron attached to himself at the onset of his first term. That never really took wings. As the magazine Le Nouvel Économiste observed, “after Jupiter, Macron has taken the habits of Mars, god of war, then Minerva, goddess of wisdom.” Only now, it seems, the newly re-elected president is coming down to earth. Perhaps too late?
The big question is whether a lightning-round series of interviews with provincial newspapers, or drop-in visits to deeply contested hotspots from Marseilles on the Mediterranean to Cherbourg on the English Channel will be enough at this stage to move the needle in Macron’s direction and away from a parliament that risks being hopelessly deadlocked between the left-wing of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Nupes, the right-wing of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement, and the center of Macron’s Ensemble!
Macron has already let it be known he has no intention of naming Mélenchon prime minister, even if his Nupes have a big showing. (Mélenchon, age 70, and Macron, 44, a generation and light years apart, really do detest each other. After the first round of the presidential elections, when Mélenchon came in a close third to Le Pen, he urged his voters not to cast a single vote for Le Pen in the second round, but refused to endorse Macron at all.)
One reality operating in Macron’s favor is the 80 percent of incumbents standing for re-election in an outgoing parliament that his party dominates with 267 seats of its own allied closely with 79 reliable, smaller parties. By contrast, Le Pen’s party has just 7 seats, while Mélenchon’s France Insoumise has 17 and the Socialists 28. Even in France, incumbency counts. The candidates of Nupes and Le Pen out on the hustings will find themselves up against and vastly outnumbered by some seasoned competitors who have had five years to cement their popularity and prove their value to their constituents.
So, much is at stake over the next two Sundays. Beyond France, the whole world, but especially NATO and the Kremlin, are watching closely. For with a deeply divided France, Macron will be hard-pressed to assume the leadership of Europe he has so devotedly sought, especially since the retirement of German Chancellor Angel Merkel. Equally difficult—launching the kinds of initiatives that would have any chance of putting an end to the war in Ukraine, uniting a deeply divided European Union, or at home coping with rising inflation and plummeting purchasing power for every French household. So if you wonder why pay attention to a legislative election in a corner of Europe, that’s why.
Vive la France!