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!
PARIS—It’s hard to imagine that an election so defining as this month’s vote in France for a new parliament, likely to last for the five years of Emmanuel Macron’s second five-year term, may hinge on who doesn’t come out to vote. But that’s the reality of these times of deepening malaise in France and across much of Europe.
Not to hold you in suspense for too long, the short of it is that there were few winners on Sunday. This was the first of two days of voting, a week apart, by French citizens who will decide how much power to govern, legislate and innovate they want to give their newly re-elected president. To be quite precise, there were in fact five winners among the 577 seats being contested in the National Assembly. Five managed to clear the all but impossible hurdle of accumulating more than 50% percent of the votes in their race plus 25% of all registered voters in their district. Considering how many abstentions, that was a Herculean task. Each—four from the left, one with Macron—were elected outright without a second-round runoff. As it also happened, all 15 government ministers who need to win seats in the parliament in order to hold their offices made it to second-round runoffs, though the media identified a number as being “menacés” (threatened) in their races.
The problem is that fewer than half of those French citizens who are eligible to vote even bothered to do so—at 47.5%, the lowest turnout for any national election in the history of the Fifth Republic, back to its creation in 1958. This certainly skewed any number of races and was the headline in most French media beginning mid-day Sunday when the first such tallies became known. Anne-Charlène Bezzina, a professor of politics and constitutional law, attributed this phenomenon to “militant abstentionists,” although the anchor of BFM, France’s all-news channel, described it as “a drama for French democracy.” A remark that could cut any one of several ways.
But Paris’s leading tabloid, Le Parisien, perhaps put it best: “And now the battle without mercy for the second round” begins.
The particular oddity that makes the second round so vital is that when the final results were posted early Monday morning, the left-wing coalition cobbled together by Jean-Luc Mélenchon had accumulated 25.66% of the votes, Macron’s people won 25.75%, and the Marine Le Pen’s far-right 18.68%. But when French media tallied how this might translate into actual seats, they were projecting Mélenchon’s people to wind up with 180 to 210 seats, Macron with 275 to 310, and Le Pen with 15 to 30. In other words, only Macron stands a chance to win an absolute majority of 289. It could well wind up that no party controls parliament as Macron has for the past five years.
Deepest apologies for all these numbers, but this is what French politics has come down to lately—the numbers, and especially how to spin them. But then, how is that much different from America?
This race has really boiled down to, as the Journal du Dimanche, France’s leading Sunday newspaper, put it in a banner headline: “Macron-Mélenchon, mano-à-mano.” And though the first-round balloting shows the two sides in a statistical dead heat, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of his resurgent coalition of disparate left-wing forces, appeared on television Sunday evening proclaiming “the president’s party is beaten and defeated.” There are so many ways this statement could be wrong, or dangerously right.
Especially striking is that in a host of assembly districts, what had been a one-on-one battle five years ago between Macron’s party and the far-right party of Marine Le Pen, with her Rassemblement Nationale coming out on the losing end, this time it’s Macron’s “Ensemble!” party against Mélenchon’s far-left Nupes (La Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et sociale or New Union of populists, ecologists, and socialists). The contest is so intense and so polarizing that the leading French daily Le Monde pointed out that the Nupes are facing a very real risk they could, in seat after seat, fall victim to an “anti-Mélenchon front.”
The reason for much of this confusion and uncertainty is that so many contests were deeply fractured during the first round. Some 6,293 candidates were competing for 577 seats. In some places 20 or more candidates were on the ballot to be pared to two or rarely three in the second round. In Calvados, for instance, Macron’s newly-appointed Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne was standing Sunday in the parliamentary race for her first elected office against 10 opponents. While she came out on top with 34.32% of the vote, she’ll be facing just one foe next Sunday—Nupes candidate Noé Gauchard, who posted 24.53%. Which means they’ll each be scrambling for enough of the 41.15% who voted for the nine other candidates to put one of them over the top. Quite a dogfight.
Really in your wildest dreams could there ever have been a contest of so many contrasts and such high stakes up and down the ticket?
In one corner there is President Macron, 44 years old, the youngest French ruler since Napoleon, victor in April for a second time over his far-right wing challenger Marine Le Pen by a quite comfortable 17 percentage points (58.55% to 41.45%). The all but unchallenged leader of Europe, having replaced retired German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Macron has embarked on a second term with a well-defined a vision of where he wants to take France as well as Europe into a future that he believes will be better for all French men and women and Europeans as well.
In the other corner, there is Mélenchon, 70 years old, the far-left leader of a movement that he single-handedly assembled from history’s dust-bin of leftist political also-rans, combined with a passionately devoted following, a substantial number of them even younger than his foe, Macron. Mélenchon utterly detests just about everything Macron represents. The leader of the Nupes—a coalition of Mélenchon’s own France Insoumise (France Unbound) party with the near-moribund Socialist Party that once ruled France, plus ecologists, even communists—he wants to disassemble virtually everything that France represents. This includes: end the Fifth Republic that rescued France from oblivion seven decades ago; get France out of NATO, even the European Union which would go a long way toward ending both institutions; even guarantee all French youths €1,063 per month whether or not they work. His 694 propositions—way too many even to begin summarizing here but that Macron believes will bankrupt France—would shred society and effectively remove France from the rank of civilized nations. And, oh yes, he also wants Macron to name him Prime Minister.
It’s been hard for Macron to counter this. How do you respond to a combination of Santa Claus and the tooth fairy?
Overhanging much of this though, is a basic question given the stakes: why so many abstentions? After all, in the first round of the presidential election only 28% failed to show up at the ballot box. This time 52.5% abstained. Fewer than half the electorate will be choosing the nation’s new parliament. Even a burn-the-house down politico like Jordan Bardella, interim president of Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, told France’s first channel Sunday night, “abstention is a cancer for democracy.”
One answer may have been provided by one of France’s most venerable pundits—Alain Duhamel.
Duhamel, 82, has been analyzing French elections since 1963. He was at his first peak by the 1980s when he would show up for dinner at my apartment across the street from the then headquarters of the Socialist Party on a motorcycle and park his helmet by the front door. Now commenting for BFM, Duhamel explained Sunday evening it appeared “what is absolutely unprecedented: that people simply don’t want anyone—Macron, the Nupes or the Rassemblement Nationale—to have an absolute majority in the Parliament.” As evidence, he pointed to the reality that “for the first time in the history of the fifth republic, the third-place party in the présidentielles came in first in the first round of the législatives.” Mélenchon finished a hair’s-breadth behind Le Pen for third place in April and was therefore shut out of the second round Macron-Le Pen shootout for the presidency.
Now Mélenchon wants, indeed expects, Macron to name him prime minister, especially if the Nupes win an absolute majority next Sunday. That is simply not going to happen under any circumstances, Macron has already pledged. This will not be a government of “cohabitation,” with a bitter opponent as prime minister. Macron will not make that appointment. And indeed, no one can make him do that either.
By contrast, between 1986 and 1988, and again from 1993 to 1995 and 1997 to 2002, the president—François Mitterrand in the first two cases and Jacques Chirac in the third—faced a clearly hostile majority in the National Assembly. They were obliged to appoint as prime minister the designated leader of the main majority party with ministers of the new prime minister’s choosing, and to ‘cohabit’ with them for the rest of the legislative session. Domestic policy passed entirely into the hands of the government and the majority. As for foreign policy, divisions were papered over by a shared view that France should ‘speak with one voice.’ In each of these periods, the president became little more than a witness on the sidelines, a role that won him some significant popularity. So, when, at the end of each period of cohabitation, the opposition prime minister ran for the presidency, he lost. On two of the three occasions, the incumbent president won (Mitterrand did not seek re-election in 1995). Still during the cohabitation, the nation’s chief policy-maker was the prime minister, not the president.
There are several realities that may suggest Macron has considerably more flexibility than any of his predecessors who faced an opposition majority in parliament. Foremost is the fragility of Mélenchon’s coalition. Only some of his Nupes actually are members of his own France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party. The rest are loyal socialists, ecologists or communists of various stripes and beliefs. It is not difficult, for instance, to see Macron prying away the entire ecologist contingent for the vast environmental program he has pledged to enact. Equally, the Socialists—who actually ruled France for years before falling on hard times lately—hardly want to be seen as dancing to the tune played by an aging leftwing politico, namely Mélenchon, who’s spent much of his career dissing a host of Socialist Party leaders.
Finally, there’s the nuclear option, at least in French political terms. The constitution of the Fifth Republic does allow the president to dissolve parliament and call new legislative elections. Since 1958, parliament has been dissolved five times—by De Gaulle in 1962 and 1968, by Socialist François Mitterrand in 1981 and 1988, and by Republican Jacques Chirac in 1997. But in all those cases, there was either a grave political crisis or truly bitter acrimony between the president and parliament. Not that this is unlikely to develop again, sometimes in the next five years of a cohabitation. Still, there’s all kinds of danger lurking in a fiat calling a new election. Even in France, the devil you know and all that.
Now it will be up to all of the candidates who have swung immediately into overdrive on the campaign circuit Monday morning to explain to the electorate how profound are the stakes involved. And come out to vote.
There is a now-distinguished French and Euro politician who first made his name as one of Europe’s leading revolutionaries, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the May 1968 rebellions in France when he was known as Dany le Rouge. It was left to him to sum up France’s crise de coeur most eloquently and simply Sunday night, 54 years later.
“I have one piece of advice to the president,” he said. “You cannot govern alone.”
Vive la République
Vive la France