It is difficult to see how France will emerge from next month’s election peacefully. Flames are licking at the edges of the Republic and the man who lit the tinder was Emmanuel Macron when he called a snap election for 30 June and 7 July.
Macron held a most unpresidential press conference on Wednesday in which he lashed out at his enemies but offered no explanation as to why he reacted the way he did on Sunday evening. There are some in France who believe it was a temper tantrum. Emmanuel Macron has suffered few humiliations in his effortless rise to the top. Sunday’s battering in the European Elections was the first and his response was one of petulant rage, like the small boy who destroys his toys on being denied what he wants. As Robert Menard, the mayor of Beziers, explained to an interviewer, Macron’s ‘narcissism is stronger than his political logic’.
France is fracturing along class lines
He has unleashed chaos; in a week of mayhem, Wednesday was the most deranged day yet. It began with Macron’s febrile press conference. In criticising the decision of the centre-right Republicans to ally with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, Macron described their leader, Eric Ciotti, as having made ‘a pact with the devil’.
Does that mean the 31 per cent of French who voted for the NR in Sunday’s European elections are devil-worshippers? As Le Pen said last week: ‘Every time Macron opens his mouth he sends more people to my party’.
Macron also attacked the Communists, Greens and Socialists for forming their own coalition, with Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise. There was a further addition to this coalition on Wednesday: the New Anti-Capitalist party. (NPA). It is a relatively small party, but its extremism is well-documented. It celebrates attacks on the police and it issued a statement in October the day after Hamas murdered 1,200 Israelis in which it expressed its ‘solidarity with resistance struggles against oppression and occupation’.
NPA banners and Palestinian flags were among those carried by the thousands of demonstrators who have marched through the streets of Paris, Lyon, Toulouse and other cities this week in a show of strength against what they call the ‘fascism’ of the National Rally. In Nantes, a French flag was ripped from a balcony and destroyed.
The NPA describes itself as a party of the working class but in truth the majority of the working-class vote for Le Pen. The demonstrators, many of them masked and clad in black, are predominantly bourgeois. Among them may well have been members of the Union of Magistrates, which represents a third of magistrates in France.
They issued a statement on Tuesday calling on its members ‘to mobilise against the rise to power of the far right’. It is not the first time this union has marched; last September they joined a demonstration against the police, worsening relations further between the judiciary and the police.
This is a civil war of class. It is not the ‘fascism’ or ‘racism’ of Le Pen’s party that upsets the left, it’s the fact that most of her voters are provincial working-class. This is a problem, too, for the centre-right Republicans, or at least the grandees of a party that are as haughty and out of touch as those of Britain’s Conservatives.
On Tuesday, the president of the party, Eric Ciotti, announced that he wanted an alliance between the Republicans and the National Rally. On Wednesday, he was banished from the party after an emergency meeting. Ciotti appeared on television on Wednesday evening to claim he was the victim of a ‘putsch’, one orchestrated by among others François-Xavier Bellamy.
Bellamy led the Republicans’ European elections campaign and he shares Marine Le Pen’s views on immigration and Islamism. Bellamy, however, is a professor of philosophy from the more upmarket area of Paris. He may not want to be associated with the riff-raff that vote for the National Rally.
The final drama on an astonishing day was the implosion of Eric Zemmour’s Reconquest party. His vice-president, Marion Marechal – the niece of Le Pen – was expelled after she denounced Zemmour’s decision to run candidates against the National Rally in the election. Unity, not rivalry, was her message, supported by two other senior figures in the party. Zemmour launched a vicious tirade against Marechal in a TV interview. Accusing her of breaking the ‘world record for betrayal’, Zemmour said she was abandoning the party activists ‘like dogs… to join her family clan’.
The rupture almost certainly ends Zemmour’s foray into politics. Without Marechal and other senior figures, the Reconquest party has little attraction. One of the main reasons it never took off was Zemmour; he could never connect with voters beyond his own metropolitan bourgeois milieu. A good journalist but a poor politician.
France is fracturing along class lines. It is the Anywheres against the Somewheres, the Progressives against the Traditionalists, and what Melenchon calls his ‘New France’ against the Old France.
For the moment the civil war is being fought with words. But it is hard to see how such a bitterly divided country will be able to heal after the election.
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