The French Disconnection

France’s voters have a bare chance of keeping the far right from power, if the center and left can manage to cooperate.

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As the whole world knows, French President Emmanuel Macron’s impulsive gamble of calling snap elections backfired spectacularly. The Rassemblement National (RN) party of Marine Le Pen captured one third of the votes, well ahead of both the leftwing New Popular Front coalition, with 28 percent and Macron’s own party, which finished a weak third with 22.

Whether this translates into an absolute parliamentary majority in next Sunday’s runoff and the first neo-fascist government since Vichy, or just a hung parliament and a likely technocratic prime minister, depends entirely on whether the fragmented center and the not-quite-so-fragmented left can put aside their vanities and agree on tactics.

The French system provides that any candidate who gains at least 12.5 percent of the vote makes it to next Sunday’s runoff. Normally, most runoffs are two-way contests. But because of the far larger than usual turnout, about 67 percent, as well as fewer than usual candidates due to the New Popular Front coalition, in this election there could be as many as 300 three-way runoffs, more than half of the National Assembly. If most candidates who qualify for runoffs stay in, that divides the non-RN vote and the RN will win an absolute majority and form the next government. If those candidates withdraw, it’s a much closer question.

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The parties of the Popular Front coalition (the far-left La France Insoumise, Communists, Socialists and Greens) have already agreed that in districts where one of their candidates places third, the third-place finisher will drop out and back the anti-Le Pen candidate in a two-way race. But Macron and his allies have sent mixed messages.

Macron has said that his Renaissance Party would make case-by-case decisions, depending on whether the strongest non-rightwing candidate was “compatible with republican values.” The problem with that formulation is that the Popular Front party with the most second-place finishes is Jean-Luc Melanchon’s La France Insoumise, which Macron in the past has declared unacceptable.

Macron’s former prime minister, Edouard Philippe, who has his own tiny Horizons party, has gone even further and said that no votes should be given to candidates from Melanchon’s party. The deadline for decisions on candidates in runoffs is 6:15 pm Tuesday, and there will be frantic jockeying and negotiating up until the last minute.

If everything breaks right, parties of the center and left will grasp the stakes and agree to urge their supporters to back the non-RN candidate, even if from Melanchon’s La France Insoumise (which fielded the most candidates in the left coalition). That would produce a decent chance of keeping the RN below the 289 seats that they need to form a government.

Should this occur, the best outcome would for a moderate socialist such as Raphaël Glucksmann, who led his party to a better-than-expected outcome in the recent European Parliamentary elections, to be named prime minister.  But that seems vanishingly unlikely because of Melanchon’s own ambitions. Macron could live with Glucksmann, but he is Melanchon’s prime rival as the left’s leader.

Our friend Arthur Goldhammer, a leading American student of French politics, tells me that the greater likelihood in a defeat-Le Pen scenario would be for a “technocratic” figure from outside parliament to be named prime minister in a caretaker government. That could be a leading economist such as Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist of the (widely resented) International Monetary Fund, or Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank.

The problem with that is that it would be a recipe for a weak government, and three years until France’s next presidential election is a very long time for a caretaker. Every policy decision could potentially be a deal-breaker for either the center or the left, and the prime minister would be at risk of repeated votes of censure. The coalition itself could crack up, leading us right back to elections, which are permitted after one year.

Moreover, Macron was increasingly unpopular because he was such an elitist technocrat. None of the parties that contributed to his humiliating defeat was voting to install another technocrat.

For now, the best of a set of bad outcomes is for the non-fascist left and center to unite tactically to keep Le Pen’s party from governing France, and then squabble about what do next. This does not augur well as France approaches the 2027 presidential election, because in that circumstance, the far right looks like the one party with unity and clarity.

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