Broad coalitions have not been the French way.
Whatever France’s President Macron wanted to achieve by calling parliamentary elections, this was probably not it. Stung by the success of Marine Le Pen’s RN in elections to the EU parliament in June, when the RN took nearly 32 percent of the vote, Macron called for snap elections. The first round of voting, on an unusually high turnout, saw the RN increase its share to 33 percent, while the left/far-left coalition known as New Popular Front (NFP) took 28 percent and Macron’s Ensemble Alliance stood at 20 percent.
It looked as if the RN might be on the brink of power, with a chance of winning the 289 seats needed to have a majority in the 577-seat National Assembly. But a second round of voting was still ahead. To win a parliamentary seat in the first round takes an absolute majority, and the RN had won few of those. There was all to play for in the second round of voting, held yesterday. The initial reaction was that RN might slip through the cracks opened up by three-way fights in the second round, but, in the end, around 200 Ensemble and NFP candidates stood down to give whoever had the better chance of beating the RN candidate that chance. There was to be a “Republican Front” against the RN, and, on the day, it worked.
The RN came in third with 143 seats, Ensemble rallied to 163, and, to many observers’ surprise, NFP came out on top, with 182. The RN’s leaders were disappointed with the result, but it’s worth looking at their tally of seats. The RN (including a group of right-of-center MPs endorsed by them) is now the largest single party in the Assembly, up from 82 in 2022 and seven in 2017. In percentage terms, the party took 37 percent of the vote. Measured against its predecessor, NUPÉS, NFP increased its score too, from 131, but Ensemble fell dramatically from 245 in 2022 and 346 in 2017. Beyond Macron himself, the alliance was the embodiment of Macron’s new center and is now looking more than a little shopworn.
If it was felt that the best way to preserve “republican values” was by excluding a greatly, if incompletely, sanitized RN, the obvious thing would seem to be for a coalition between the NFP and Ensemble. The problem with that is that the leader of the LFI (France Unbowed), the largest party in the NFP, is a man of the far left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. As I mentioned the other day, “he has made too many remarks that could be plausibly interpreted as antisemitic for there to be any serious doubt where he stands.”
Moderate French political parties must form a government coalition without La France Insoumise, Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) president Yonathan Arfi told The Jerusalem Post in an interview after the second round of parliamentary elections on Sunday, warning that the far-left party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon was undemocratic and a threat the republic’s Jews.
In a piece for NR about the election, Veronique de Rugy quotes Quico Toro, writing in Persuasion:
One former advisor, speaking to Politico, described him as “a scale model of a charismatic dictator,” luxuriating over his explosive temper and sporadic excursions into conspiracy theorizing. With political roots in France’s Trotskyist movement, Mélenchon has an undoubted soft spot for dictatorial figures, which has seen him bounce between bouts of softness for Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad. In his own words, he was reduced to tears at a rally for the dictator who forced me out of my own country, Hugo Chávez. . . .
Jean-Luc Mélenchon is, today, the second most powerful person in France. He is, by any reasonable estimation, a far-left extremist. He publicly espouses ideas that, if put into practice, would destroy France’s economy and probably tank the Euro. His comfort around, and admiration for dictators (so long as they are of the left-wing kind) is a matter of record.
Mélenchon likes to pose as a champion of French democracy, a questionable assertion. For the center-Left to continue to play ball with him would be unwise. When “Mensheviks” pal up with “Bolsheviks,” it tends not to end well. Indeed, there may be a debate to be had, given the experience in the Nordic region and Italy in recent years, whether there is any merit in trying to include RN members in a government of national unity, but that’s a debate that’s not going to happen any time soon.
The best course therefore would be to see whether Ensemble and the center-Left (i.e., NFP without LFI and the communists) can cobble together a minority center/center-left bloc that would, at least, have rather more merit as a defender of “republican values” than anything involving Mélenchon, but such broad coalitions have not been the French way. The incumbent (Macronist) prime minister has offered to resign but has been asked to stay on for now.
Mélenchon, pressing his advantage, is insisting that the NFP be given the chance to form a government and that it should stick with its maximalist program, which includes a restored wealth tax, lowering the retirement age, linking public-sector wages to inflation, and other measures besides. With France’s finances in a less than ideal state (debt/GDP of around 112 percent) and the budget deficit standing at 5.5 percent, that’s not something that would thrill financial markets. As a member of the eurozone, and thus a country with no “domestic” currency, France cannot print its way (however temporarily) out of a crisis. There’s no reason for immediate concern, in my view, but it will be worth watching how financial markets react to events in France in the weeks to come.
De Rugy concludes that “France is now ungovernable.” I’m not so sure. Gridlock is rarely the worst thing, especially when compared with the economic policy horrors contained in both the RN and LFI programs. De Rugy seems to expect a Le Pen presidency in 2027. I don’t know. There’s a lot that can happen between now and then. But the issues — above all mass immigration and its consequences, most notably the rise of Islamic extremism — that have done so much to take the RN to its current position are only likely to get worse. If the “republican” answer to that is Mélenchon, that won’t bode well for the republic.