French president’s defeat accelerates the end of Macronism

Sánchez? Or Cameron? In the days following the surprise dissolution of the National Assembly and the calling of early legislative elections, Emmanuel Macron’s entourage cited, among other things, Pedro Sánchez’s precedent to explain the decision. A year ago, the Spanish president had also unexpectedly called early general elections and had done so, like Macron after losing in the European elections on June 9, after his party’s defeat in the municipal and regional elections of 2023.

But the French president, unlike the Spanish, has not been able to afford the gamble. In the first round of early elections on Sunday, the Macronist ticket, which had dominated the National Assembly for seven years, came third with 20% of the vote. The far-right National Rally won with 33%. The left-wing New Popular Front coalition came second with 28%.

The defeat of the President of the Republic is unavoidable. His party will lose the government, barring a surprise. The political situation, contrary to what he intended with the parliamentary dissolution, has not been “clarified” and will probably be more complicated after the second round on July 7. And the extreme right that he intended to keep out of power, finds itself on the brink of it.

That is why another comparison is being made these days in Paris to explain the gesture that could define Macron’s legacy. “It’s like David Cameron’s Brexit,” commented the philosopher Pascal Bruckner on Monday in a café in the central Marais district. “Macron thought he could put the French between a rock and a hard place, and it is he who has put himself in this situation.”

The comparison with Cameron’s losing gamble to consult the British on the EU in 2016 is not perfect. There will be no French Brexit, although until a few years ago Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally, promised one. Frexit and the exit from the euro. It is not even certain that Le Pen’s party will obtain an absolute majority, or a number of deputies that comes close to it. But it is not impossible either. And it could happen that next week France, the driving force behind European integration along with Germany, will have a Eurosceptic prime minister and government. It is not unlikely that, in the midst of Russian aggression against Ukraine, France will be governed by a party with a past of complicity with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The mere possibility of this happening casts a shadow over Emmanuel Macron’s legacy. He has, after all, been the most pro-European of the French presidents of recent decades. One of the few European leaders with an articulate vision of the continent’s future. Someone who, in the midst of the national-populist wave of 2017 — the British had just decided in a referendum to leave the European Union, Donald Trump had just taken over the White House — campaigned under the European flag. And won.

All this could be buried if, after these elections, Macron is forced to coexist as head of state with a head of government who is ideologically at the antipodes of his. An entire movement – ​​Macronism, which was born in the dazzling campaign of 2017; which occupied the positions of power in the following years and obtained parliamentary majorities; which redefined the political playing field and wanted to end the division between left and right – is rushing to its end. The unusual thing is that it is Macron himself who, with the parliamentary dissolution, has precipitated it: “This crazy dissolution is its own dissolution,” writes columnist Solenn de Royer in The WorldIt is also unusual that those who certify the death of Macronism are those who politically formed themselves in his shadow. As political scientist Dominique Reynié, from the Fondapol think tank, says: “Macron is rejected above all by Macron’s children.”

Macron’s candidates for these legislative elections, who in many cases were elected thanks to the President’s power to win, hide their image. The barons of the parties that supported him distance themselves from him or, as Édouard Philippe, a competent former Prime Minister, moderate conservative, aspiring to be President of France in 2027, did, they say outright: “It is the President who has killed the presidential majority.”

Macron, alone in the Elysée Palace, abandoned by his own people, created from nothing a broad centre “neither left nor right” – or “both left and right” – a “circle of reasonable people”, as his mentor, the influential adviser Alain Minc, would have said, a Europeanist and liberal wall against the populist and nationalist tide. And for a while it worked. Macron defeated Marine Le Pen twice, in 2017 and 2022, in the second round of the presidential elections and protected France from the storm. Or he simply postponed it.

“Today, the two forces that could win an absolute majority are forces of rupture,” Reynié sums up, referring to the RN and La France Insoumise, the dominant radical left party in the New Popular Front. And the philosopher Bruckner takes up: “The man who boasted of killing the extremes has turned out to have favoured them by weakening the left and the right. This was his mistake. He believed himself all-powerful, he believed himself master of time, master of the agenda, and he believed that his intelligence would seduce the masses when, in reality, it irritated them.”

The second round of voting is due on Sunday. It remains to be seen whether the far right will be the majority and whether it will govern with Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s inexperienced successor, as prime minister. There remains a debate, which will inevitably begin on Sunday evening, on whether the president should resign after repeated setbacks at the polls.

But legally, there are three years left of the presidency, three years to save the legacy. And a constellation of calculations and equations, speculations such as the one that claims that Macron called these elections knowing that the RN could win and with the Machiavellian idea that someone in his circle expressed in the press: “We will pass the keys to the truck to young Bardella, who does not even have a driving license, and then they will be dead for the presidential elections.”

It is a risky bet, even more so than this election, and in the meantime the damage could be considerable for France and Europe. But Macron has always said that his priority was to avoid giving the keys to the Elysée to Le Pen in 2027. If he succeeds, he will at least be able to claim it. That would be no small thing.

Follow all the international information at Facebook and Xor in our weekly newsletter.

_