Ludovic Marin/Pool via AP
French President Emmanuel Macron meets French centrist party Mouvement Democrate leader Francois Bayrou on June 21, 2022, during coalition talks after Macron's party lost its majority in recent parliamentary elections.
French voters dealt a serious blow to President Emmanuel Macron this Sunday. In the second of two rounds of voting for the 579 members of the National Assembly, Macron lost the absolute majority he has held since he was first elected president in 2017. The latest results show Macron’s Ensemble! Party with 246 seats, well short of the 289 he needs to form a majority.
Worse, Marine Le Pen’s far right Rassemblement National (RN) scored a surprise breakthrough, winning 89 seats—a tenfold increase in its representation compared with the previous parliament. With this success only two months after her loss to Macron in the presidential election by a margin of 58.5 to 41.5, Le Pen has proven that she remains a force to be reckoned with, despite her third successive failure to gain the presidency.
The results also come as a bitter disappointment to left-wing voters, whose mood had shifted from despair to hope over the past two months. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of La France Insoumise, who came in a close third behind Le Pen in the presidential election, astonished observers by uniting the previously irreconcilable factions of the French left in a loose electoral coalition known as the New Popular Ecological and Social Union (NUPES).
Some polls had predicted that the NUPES would garner as many as 180 to 200 seats. Mélenchon himself professed to believe that that this new left coalition could even win a majority impregnable enough to force Macron to choose him to head a new government. The walls of French cities were plastered with posters calling upon voters to “elect Mélenchon prime minister”—an impossibility under the French constitution, which grants the president the exclusive right to appoint the head of government. But the audacity of the move was sufficient to focus almost all media attention on Mélenchon, amplifying expectations beyond all reason and thus contributing to the disappointment when in the end NUPES won 142 seats, a performance that would have been considered incredible only a month ago.
The combined breakthroughs of NUPES and the RN, together with a better-than-expected showing by the traditional mainstream right-wing party Les Républicains, which won 64 seats despite its poor showing in the presidential race (in which its standard-bearer Valérie Pécresse took only 4.7 percent of the vote), leaves Macron with few options in putting together a new government. Given the predominantly center-right coloration of his administration to date, his most logical choice would be to try to form a coalition with Les Républicains. But party leader Christian Jacob stated firmly on Sunday that his party would “remain in opposition,” a position he reiterated even more forcefully on Monday. There is some dissension in the ranks: Former minister Jean-François Copé called on the party to seek a “governmental pact” with Macron, but for the time being he finds himself in the minority of the LR leadership.
A Macron alliance with Le Pen is out of the question. Elisabeth Borne, the interim prime minister, who won a seat as deputy in the new parliament, has called for the formation of a “majority for action,” but this is easier said than done given the composition of the new legislature. Although Macron is seen as badly damaged by Sunday’s vote, he retains the power to rule by fiat under Article 49-3 of the constitution. The opposition can then block the president only by forcing a vote of no confidence and toppling the government. Thus a governmental crisis could be in the offing, but only if the left and right are willing to join forces, since neither the NUPES, LR, or RN has sufficient strength on their own. The president also has the option to dissolve the parliament and call new elections, although constitutional experts disagree about whether he must wait a year before doing so. But there is no reason to believe that new elections before then will produce a different result.
Any coalition government that might emerge over the next few weeks could easily crumble at the first sign of crisis. Any ambitious reforms that Macron might have had up his sleeve, including the pension reform that was virtually the only serious proposal discussed in either the presidential or legislative campaign, will probably be put on hold. Macron’s bid to assume the leadership of Europe now that Angela Merkel is gone is a dead letter for now.
Meanwhile, the country awaits a sign from the president about what direction he wants to steer the country in his second term. Indeed, it was the absence of any such sign during the presidential and legislative campaigns that led to the impasse in which Macron now finds himself. He won reelection only because a majority still refuses to elect Le Pen, not because they support the current head of state. Macron could respond to the stalemate by choosing a new prime minister, as losing LR presidential candidate Valérie Pécresse urged him to do on Monday, perhaps with herself in mind for the post.
The advent of the Fifth Republic in 1962 was intended to put an end to perennial governmental instability by creating a strong executive sustained by robust competition between cohesive political parties. Since then, France has known occasional periods of “cohabitation,” in which the executive was drawn from one party and the prime minister from another.
The electoral reform of 2002 was supposed to diminish the likelihood of cohabitation by arranging for the legislative election to follow closely on the heels of the presidential. The assumption was that voters who had just chosen a president would be in a mood to grant legislative leadership to the president’s party. But political parties have devolved from robust organizations to vehicles of their leaders’ personal ambitions. Knowing that he was unpopular, Macron successfully pinned his re-election hopes on Le Pen’s unacceptability to the majority of voters. But he failed to reckon with the possibility that a second rival might rally the left and thus diminish his ability to dominate the legislature.
Despite the unification of the left, the startlingly strong performance of Le Pen’s Rassemblement National leaves the future shrouded in doubt.
A fiery orator who inspired strong support among younger voters (not unlike Bernie Sanders in the U.S.), Mélenchon successfully broke Macron’s hold on the National Assembly. He was shrewd enough to recognize that much of his support came from voters who, despite doubts about his personal fitness for office, nevertheless longed for a left alternative to Macronism. He cleverly offered an olive branch to parties that had refused to support him for the presidency but that had little chance of preserving their legislative seats without an alliance. His tactical acumen leaves the left in a stronger position than it has been in for many years, but its internal divisions will now be put to the test. Mélenchon has called on his partners to form a single unified group in the new parliament, but the Socialists and Greens have already rejected this proposal.
Despite the unification of the left, the startlingly strong performance of Le Pen’s Rassemblement National leaves the future shrouded in doubt. To be sure, the previous parliament woefully underrepresented the RN’s actual electoral strength: despite being the second largest party in France, it could claim only 8 of 577 deputies. While the new parliament more accurately represents the tripartite division of the French party system with its substantial left, right, and center blocs, the result is stalemate. The electorate is so disgruntled with this situation that 54 percent of eligible voters abstained from voting.
The legislature that has emerged from this unhappy state of affairs is tailor-made to hamstring the president and ensure that no government will survive for long. Yet crises loom everywhere. The strong youth vote for NUPES shows that the younger generation is deeply worried about climate change; war rages in Ukraine just a short flight from Paris; French hospitals and schools cry out for reform; and the rapidly rising cost of living has people anxious about making ends meet and angry at the government it holds responsible. Macron, who came to power as the champion of the notion that wisdom belonged “neither to the right nor the left” but in the center he had staked out as his own, finds himself deprived of the majority he needs to govern a country whose center has not held.
