French President Emmanuel Macron, humbled by the drubbing administered by far-right nemesis National Rally leader Marine Le Pen in the EU parliamentary elections, is rolling the dice on his government, his credibility and his legacy.
By calling snap parliamentary elections, he is counting on the French “waking up” to what Le Pen stands for as tensions with Russia rise. However, the risk is that this backfires and leads to more gridlock that neither benefits Europe nor restores Macron’s appeal.
Macron clearly feels there is no other response to elections that seem to confirm the lame-duck status of his pro-EU, pro-reform movement in the twilight years of his second and final term. Le Pen’s roster of candidates got 31.5 percent of the vote, more than double Macron’s and a score not seen in 40 years. Doing nothing would mean accepting a less central role on the EU stage — in its parliament, at least — on top of a gridlocked national legislature where he has lacked a majority since 2022 and the inevitable countdown to a President Le Pen in 2027.
Taking the fight to the far right, the thinking goes, would expose Le Pen and her 28-year-old No. 2 Jordan Bardella as being all opposition and no proposition. It has been hard to glean what the National Rally stands for after years of dropping its most toxic policies to widen its appeal.
It no longer wants to quit the EU after the mess of Brexit, yet does want French exceptions to EU law. It no longer wants to quit the Schengen free-travel area, yet wants a “dual border” for France and the EU involving systematic checks. It no longer supports retirement at 60, yet does not support Macron’s hike to 64 either. All rather vague and estimated by one think tank to add more than 102 billion euros (US$108.1 billion) a year in public spending.
Macron perhaps also hopes to craft a united front out of slabs of the center-left and center-right — respectively scoring about 14 percent and 7 percent in Sunday’s vote — and strike a chord with the kind of silent majority that rallied to former French president Charles De Gaulle after the May 1968 student protests.
However, it is a hell of a gamble. The strong showing for Le Pen’s party in the EU elections indicates support far beyond the anti-Semitic xenophobic incarnation of her Holocaust-denying father’s original vehicle or the anti-globalist populism of her 2017 presidential bid.
Luc Rouban, author of a book analyzing support for Le Pen, said she appealed to those who had difficulty paying their bills and also to those who had a hunger for authority and executive power. In other words, the left behind and the well-off.
This is why there is a high likelihood that these snap elections would look less like 1968 and more like 1997, when center-right president Jacques Chirac lost his own snap election and had to work with a left-wing government.
A leaked internal poll in December last year for the Republicans (the current incarnation of Chirac’s party) estimated that Le Pen’s group would become the biggest party, potentially even with an absolute majority.
The possibility of naming Le Pen or Bardella as prime minister might very well be part of a plan by Macron to get them to own policy failure — or at least marginalize left-wing firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon — but that approaches wishful thinking more than strategy.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is proving pretty adept at stoking culture wars while taking care not to spook markets.
Nobody should wish yet more political uncertainty on France and Europe at a critical moment for the war in Ukraine, trade with China or the possible return of former US president Donald Trump to the White House.
The outcome could see investors rethink their assumption that Europe inevitably advances in crisis and that closer financial integration is a given.
“Macron is asking the French: ‘Do you really mean it?’” European University Institute in Florence Robert Schuman Centre fellow Catherine Fieschi said. “It’s a dangerous question to ask.”
Rather like British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who is also mounting a monthlong campaign to paint his rival as the devil voters do not know, Macron might find this next election fight to be a particularly lonely one.
Lionel Laurent is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist writing about the future of money and the future of Europe. Previously, he was a reporter for Reuters and Forbes. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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