Is Macron considering using France’s emergency powers?

Does Emmanuel Macron have one more joker to play? Perhaps. His petulant decision to dissolve the National Assembly has been difficult to understand. His political movement looks like it will come third behind the rightish Rassemblement National and the ultra-leftist New Popular Front, a coalition of trots, Antifa activists, and loopy greens.

Privately, the polling companies are confessing a lack of confidence in the numbers so far, which show Rassemblement leading, the left trailing in second and Macron’s party in third. We’re waiting for some more authoritative polls at the end of week. The pollsters are struggling to make sense of, in effect, 577 separate elections held across two rounds. But it’s a reasonable conjecture that when the polls close and the votes are counted in the second round on July 7, no party will succeed in winning an absolute majority and it could quickly get very dicey.

So what can Macron do next? He’s traded a fairly modest position with a relative majority in the assembly, for a likely untenable position in which his political foes are ascendant.