France is voting after three weeks of campaigning, backstabbing, attacks on more than 50 politicians so far, some light rioting, promises by the left to reverse the laws of fiscal gravity, worried bond-traders, ranting Trots, green-religionist raving – and, coming up tonight, the decimation of president Macron’s Ensemble group in the National Assembly, and with it his hopes of using the final three years of his presidency to implement his unfulfilled vision of France.
The disorder of France has been exclusively provoked by Macron through his dissolution of the National Assembly on 9 June, after the president’s repudiation in the European Parliament elections. French voters joined Germans, Italians, Dutch and others in a revolt against the political order. In France, it was directed against Macron personally.
Macron advocated wider and deeper EU ties. He was crushed by the rampant Rassemblement National, the National Rally, the one-time neo-fascist Le Pen political dynasty, née National Front, headed by Marine Le Pen, daughter of the notorious Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Marine Le Pen has cleaned up her party of most of the overt racists, abandoned her plan to withdraw from the euro and even cut links with German AfD politicians she considers too right wing. She is still, however, often called a fascist, because she wants to stop migrants, wants immigrants in France to integrate, still doesn’t much like Brussels and is frankly a provincial, who attended none of the right schools. The French establishment dress left but are basically snobs.
Macron panicked after being defeated by this plouc (the derogative expression for a peasant). In a wild bet to reestablish his authority, he dismissed the Assembly elected only two years earlier to seek a new mandate. But he’s not going to get it. He lost the first round of elections for the new Assemblée last Sunday when his party finished third, behind both Rassemblement and the left/ultra-left alliance styled as the New Popular Front. The culminating round of this drama ends this evening at 8 p.m. here in France, 7 p.m. in the UK.
Unless he has a cunning plan beyond the comprehension of mere mortals, Macron has committed the greatest blunder of the Fifth Republic. Whatever provoked the president to throw away his cohort of deputies, jeopardise the credibility and credit of France on the eve of the Olympic Games this month and cut down his bright new prime minister Gabriel Attal? It seems proof that the man who thinks he’s the smartest in the room, usually isn’t.
Brenda Maddox, Nora Barnacle’s biographer, used to say the hidden explanation in the drama of great men might lie with the wife. Brigitte Macron has played an obscure but possibly crucial role in all of this. She is being compared in Paris salons to Lady Macbeth: ‘Madam MacMacron’.
Even from within his own court there are rumblings. The Elysée has started leaking. The courtiers are cornered. It’s sauve qui peut – every man for himself.
‘When historians look at this they will only have one word: complete disaster!’ says the editorial director of Le Figaro. ‘He had almost everything: the Élysée, and three years ahead of him; a majority, relative, certainly, but a majority all the same; a party in order; a narrow but surprisingly solid electoral base; an indisputable authority.’ All now gone.
It’s hard to see any good coming from this election, or even a definitive result after the votes are counted. At least in Britain last week you had a result, no matter that it was predictable. Here in France there are multiple evident scenarios and all of them are troubling. A smooth transition of power is not a likely scenario.
Four directions are possible when the votes are counted this evening. We will know the results almost immediately. (Another contrast to Britain.) In all of them Macron loses his presidential plurality in the Assembly, for his demoralised group to become a besieged minority, outnumbered on the left and right.
Macron is certain that he is the best of all possible presidents
The most probable scenario is that the Rassemblement National and its allies will fail to secure an absolute majority. This will be hailed by Macron as a victory against extremism. The so-called Republican barrage will have succeeded.
But it will be a Pyrrhic victory. Even deprived of an absolute majority, the RN will probably still be the largest party and no possible credible cohabitation seems conceivable between the surviving Macronists and the left, except perhaps in the imagination of Emmanuel Macron. Amidst political chaos, riots would seem inevitable as there are plenty of antifa types just looking for a punch-up with the police.
The events could provoke a financial infarction in the bond market for a country crushed by a €3trn debt. The aftershocks will shake Brussels, Berlin, London and beyond.
Second case: RN does somehow win an absolute majority, and attempts to form a government, but is immediately submerged by an insurrection led by the so-called ‘black bloc’ of the hard-left, with a contiguous mutiny of students, nuttier unions, some civil servants and the banlieus, and sabotaged by Macron himself.
The RN offers essentially a socialist economic programme, a tough approach on migrants and a new attitude to Brussels, prioritising French not community interests. It stops well short of Frexit or leaving the euro. It’s stopped talking about nationalising the motorways.
Yet even moderated, the RN would struggle with the victory it’s wished for. Even though RN prime minister designate Jordan Bardella has tiptoed back on some of the party’s wilder financial promises, his para-socialist economic policy is going to be impossible to afford, and the country practically impossible to govern with Macron obstructing everything, as Mitterrand did to Chirac, between 1986-88.
Then there are the practical difficulties. Who would be the ministers? Have they a clue what they are doing? There are few convincing figures. Bardella seems to have emotional intelligence with his 1.9 million TikTok followers but can he master political dossiers? He wasn’t a brilliant student. Can he overcome the powerful French civil service blob, to implement serious policies on immigration? Would the lawyers or Macron or Europe let him? The RN would lucky to fail to achieve an absolute majority. It might be better off to bide its time.
The third scenario is worse still. The left comprising the Socialist party, communist party, the EELV greens and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s ultra-left La France Insoumise, infested with Trots, extremists, woo-woo Greens, Islamists, superannuated comrades, Antifa activists, Israel haters, America haters, Nato haters, and wokistes, achieves the majority and the reins of government, in cohabitation with the president.
Incredibly, its optimistic militants imagine that they might do this by striking a shadowy deal behind closed doors with the remnants of Macron’s caucus. And Macron isn’t excluding a deal with the left. This manoeuvre might be constitutional but would certain to be seen by RN voters as practically a coup.
Under a left government including influential ultras, French credit enters the danger zone. One hundred billion or much more of social spending could quickly be added to the projected 5.5 per cent national deficit as prices on food and fuel freeze, the pension age is lowered for all and the minimum wage increased. All that has been missing from the offer is free ice cream.
Will bond markets buy this? Can businesses survive it? Will voters? The catastrophe could be epic. France will be coronated sick man of Europe, capital will be in flight, police mutinous, the Army alarmed, yellow jackets redux on the ronds-points, and when students return from the long vacation, campuses will be occupied for Palestine… all the optics of a failed state.
Final sinister possibility: with the Olympics imminent, and France enveloped in a miasma of tear gas, a desperate, cornered Macron declares a ‘state of emergency’ and seizes absolute power for himself under Article 16 of the Constitution.
Will bond markets buy this? Can businesses survive it? Will voters?
I am not climbing the thinnest of limbs to suggest this. I am certain he has thought of this himself – confirmed by his denial. Unfortunately this looks, constitutionally, to be one of the final ways for Macron to reassert the authority, which he desperately lacks, and which at the moment looks not merely battered, but beaten to a bloody pulp.
Yet Macron is certain that he is the best of all possible presidents, in the best of any possible France, and seems still utterly without awareness that he is the author of this debacle and widely despised.
I’m looking for grounds for optimism but finding none. The word from inside the Elysée is that Macron’s temperament has become worse than ever, holding forth interminably to his demoralised advisors. Much as he has spoken to everyone else in France, since 1997.
Perhaps others are more cheerful. Some of my English friends in France insist I am too excitable. James Tidmarsh, a smart British lawyer and astute observer based in Paris, tells me that if the RN is checked tonight, there might not be much rioting, since the left will have won. I disagree. Under the malign leadership of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a Gallic Jeremy Corbyn, the ultra-left will attempt to seize the driver’s seat, in an unholy alliance with the cornered president, and behave worse than ever.
What did this magnificent country, its delightful people, its musical language, its culture, its magnificent buildings, countryside, and fabulous health care, do to deserve this?
Compare with the equally perturbed situation in Washington. Joe Biden also considers himself uniquely qualified for his job, with a wife who loves being first lady, posing for magazines and appearing with her husband on hustings. But Biden’s cerebral problems are those of age, whereas Macron’s are a product of what is something else: an exceptional narcisism, exhibited in a weird performative streak honed by his marriage to his former drama teacher, 24 years his senior, who seems less interested in public visibility than private influence.
A smart French psychiatrist told me he suspects something is pathological about the president’s personality. And his personality is linked inextricably with his wife. There’s a ‘real partnership’ with Brigitte, I am told. When the real story of his schoolboy romance with her finally clarifies, if it does, we may better understand the Macron era and the events now unfolding.
The President’s hubris and refusal to listen has led France to loathe him
All kinds of unpredictable consequences can arise from any of the scenarios I have outlined including colossal surprises such as a presidential tantrum and resignation, temporary rule by the Constitutional Council of superannuated politicians, more elections or even as Macron has himself suggested, in his most deranged statement of his presidency, civil war. Shots fired? Not impossible, especially in the suburbs of the big cities, at the start of a long hot summer, the traditional rioting season.
Macron has been putting butter on my own tartines for some time now and I have grown grateful to him as a muse but I have not changed my initial assessment that there is something not right about his personality. Google the ten or so characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder and he ticks every box.
The president’s hubris and refusal to listen has led France to loathe him. Every move he makes, every step he takes, is increasingly bizarre. From posing in a boxing gym with bulging biceps as Rocky Balboa, to a strolling insouciantly last week through the streets of the tony seaside resort of Le Touquet in a stylishly-cut leather jacket and aviator sunglasses, cosplaying Tom Cruise. Look at Mr. Cool!
It would be a miracle if his presidency tonight is not again decisively rejected by voters. His own candidates have excised his image from their campaign literature.
Macron recently promised to swim in the River Seine before the Olympic Games begin to prove the water is safe. A promise unfulfilled because at the moment the river is dangerously contaminated. If he still dares take a plouff, it would be a perfect metaphor for a presidency that is literally dans la mouise.
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