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22 June 2022
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It is perfectly possible that on Friday, the day our car thermometer recorded a temperature in motion of 45 degrees, French people were gathered together in small crowds animatedly discussing the parliamentary election run-offs scheduled for Sunday. If so, my reporting skills failed to locate them. The conversations I overheard were all about shade, fatigue and cold, cold beer.

As the last results trickled in early on Monday morning, it was evident that la canicule (the heatwave) – or some other source of disaffection – had indeed kept more than half of registered voters away from the polls on this, France's fourth election Sunday in just over two months. But it was also clear that something politically potent had been quietly germinating in the heat. Emmanuel Macron, Europe's senior statesman, had been maimed: at least insofar as his domestic power is concerned. France had been thrust into what could be a long period of uncertainty, even turmoil.

Macron's En Marche movement, rebranded (again) as Ensemble (ENS), remains the largest party, but has lost the overall majority it had held, despite defections, for the past five years in the Assemblée Nationale. It won 246 seats, well short of the 289 needed for an overall majority. Several notables, including Health Minister Brigitte Bourguignon, were swept away in the torrent. By contrast, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the far-left France Insoumise, freshly anointed at the head of an improbable but formidable left-Green alliance, NUPES, now commands the principal opposition grouping of 142 seats, compared with his previous handful.

With everyone watching the Macron-Mélenchon confrontation, the big surprise of the evening was the 89 seats (up from just eight) won by Marine Le Pen's far-right Rassemblement Nationale (RN), formerly the National Front. This gives RN the status, for the first time, of a formal parliamentary group, entitled to state funding, staffing, office space, speaking time, debate initiation and a guaranteed proportion of seats on key committees or special commissions. It is a big advance towards respectability for the party she has struggled to detoxify since inheriting it from her father.

Arguably, this should not have come as such a surprise. Le Pen had just emerged as runner-up in the presidential race for the second successive time. She had seen off, for now, a challenge from off-the-scale right-winger Éric Zemmour, and broadened RN's support from its traditional northern stronghold. Besides which, as our more attentive readers may recall, Scottish Review did suggest at the time of Macron's re-election that there were many voters minded to put him back in the Élysée Palace in preference to Le Pen, but to clip his parliamentary wings thereafter. So it has turned out.

What is perhaps most surprising is that, as I write, nobody seems very sure what happens next. For the past 20 years, conventional wisdom has held that the days of Presidents having to endure 'cohabitation' with a disobliging Prime Minister – Mitterand with Chirac, Chirac with Jospin – were over, because the presidential and parliamentary elections had been realigned to take place within the same few weeks, and presidential momentum was likely to deliver a congenial parliament for the successful occupant of the Élysée. Besides, a two-round voting system generally favours the political centre-ground. When the choice is pared down to just two candidates, voters usually incline to keep out the daftie.

What subverted this in 2022 were two factors. First, the presidential election revealed a country split not into halves but into thirds: France Insoumise, Rassemblement National and La Républic en Marche all ran one another mighty close in the first round. Second, Mélenchon followed up the election by pulling off the near impossible: persuading the main left and Green parties to bury their innumerable hatchets and work together in an electoral coalition of agreed candidates and on an agreed policy programme. Mélenchon's declared aim: to gain sufficient seats to demand the prime ministership from Macron.

The first round of the legislatives, held on 12 June, made this look beguilingly plausible. Mélenchon's colourful combo scored virtually an identical percentage to the Macron grouping, with Le Pen this time trailing some distance behind. Yet, it is never wise to infer too much from these provisional outcomes. You cannot read across from first-round percentages to second-round seat tallies. Why? Because, essentially, this contest is 577 elections, not one.

In principle, the legislatives work the same way as the presidential election. Assuming no-one passes the required threshold in the first round, the two highest-scoring candidates go head-to-head in the second. But the calculation is made for each individual constituency outturn, not nationally. In addition to needing 50% of the poll, each constituency winner needs 25% of the registered electorate, an increasingly high hurdle given falling turnouts. So finishing, as Macron and Mélenchon did, neck-and-neck nationally after round one, did not mean that the pattern was cloned down into every constituency. Far from it.

On the contrary, it showed that the fragmentation of political loyalties can make for quite micro divisions. Lacking anything like the British class system, French local elections were always hard to codify, and often come down to personalities. This is now translating up the scale into national politics. Our city, Montpellier, is as solid as can be for Mélenchon, despite being a prosperous, high-tech, fast-growing metropolis. Yet many of the surrounding communes and neighbouring towns are doggedly loyal to Le Pen.

So what happens now? Mélenchon's claim to supplanting the respected but uncharismatic Élisabeth Borne, Macron's new Prime Minister, looks unlikely to progress. The President's first instinct will be to feel out the prospects for coalition. Exploratory talks began on Tuesday, amid little confidence. He might try to peel the Greens away from Mélenchon, pointing both to his own consistent climate change record and to Mélenchon's somewhat uncollegiate personality. But they seem unlikely to want to play: not, at least, at an acceptable price.

A more likely coalition partner, reportedly already tentatively approached, are Les Républicains, the traditional conservative party of Chirac and Sarkozy, who have 64 seats. They would welcome Macron's pro-business economic agenda and a higher pension age, but be less happy about carbon neutrality, civic assemblies or raising the minimum wage. It would also be painful politics for Macron. Ever since he – foolishly – repealed the Mitterand wealth tax shortly after taking office, he has struggled to shake off accusations of being a closet conservative, too in awe of mammon.

Perhaps the most likely scenario, at least in the short term, is minority government, patching together deals on an issue-by-issue basis with sympathetic groups. The decision of the NUPES parties to operate individually in the Chamber may be of help. But, like coalition, it would be prone to knock the edges off Macron's reforms. It would also require supreme political deftness, especially on the part of the Prime Minister, a quality in which Élisabeth Borne is, shall we say, untested. She has offered Macron her resignation, which he has so far refused. 

Meanwhile, there are reports that those around Macron are muttering about dissolving the Assemblée perhaps a year down the line and calling fresh elections. This would assume that things were better for him then than now. It is not immediately easy to see why this should be so.

It is hard not to feel some sympathy for Emmanuel Macron. He burst into a jaded French political scene in 2017 with a radical domestic agenda and an audacious vision for Europe. His first term was derailed by lingering recession, poujadist protests, Brexit, and, above all, Covid, which he handled adeptly. Now, with the pandemic over, the economy recovering, an EU reinvigorated by the Ukraine invasion, and Angela Merkel no longer head girl, it is the voters of France who have got in his way.

Keith Aitken is a journalist, writer and broadcaster

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