Of the 20 or so opinion polls since France’s president Emmanuel Macron announced a snap election this month, the vast majority put Marine Le Pen’s right-wing party ahead. The Rassemblement National and its allies are predicted to get around 35 per cent of the vote, with the left-wing coalition Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) on 29 per cent and Macron’s centrist coalition Ensemble pour la République trailing on 20 per cent. Barring a black swan moment, Jordan Bardella’s RN will win the most seats in the chamber. But no one party is likely to have an absolute majority. Bardella announced on 18 June that, without a working majority, he will turn down the premiership, which he has every constitutional right to do. What will happen next?
Emmanuel Macron evoked the astonishing possibility of ‘civil war’ after the forthcoming elections
Pollsters predict that the RN will be some 30 seats short of an absolute majority. Bardella’s announcement, backed by the party’s vice-president, indicates that the RN expects no favours in governing the country. The party’s business will be caught in a scissor blocking movement twixt hostile chamber and president from day one. Despite mutual antipathy, the NFP – the likely second largest grouping – will ally with Macron’s severely diminished coalition to bring down the RN on a censure motion, let alone wrecking everyday legislation. Macron will then collect his high-risk bet of demonstrating to the country that the RN is no new broom and that less extreme heads should prevail.
By refusing to form a minority government the RN is also taking a gamble. The president will have to turn to a more consensual figure than Jordan Bardella to form a new government who, as in the past, need not have a seat in parliament. That prime minister will then have to garner the confidence of, most likely, a baroque combination of Macronists, putative NFP dissidents from its moderate socialist wing and a few centre-right stragglers. Could Francois Hollande return as prime minister in a government badged as of ‘national unity’ in a David Cameronesque comeback?
Should Macron be unable to build such a coalition, then the RN is on the way to winning its bet. At first, they wagered that Macron be forced to resign morally – though not constitutionally – as president. But he has stated, and re-stated, that he will not do so. Another RN wager is still on. The constitution requires that, until a prime minister who commands a majority can be found, the Council of State oversees the running of daily business with present day ministerial teams continuing to carry out policies, but without implementing new ones. Within a year, the president must dissolve the National Assembly. Until then, the boot will be on the other foot with the RN expecting political paralysis, financial turmoil and voter frustration to return a clear majority in the reconvened 2025 legislatives and for Marine Le Pen to go on to win the presidency in 2027.
For pundits eager to find cook-book historical recipes to explain what might await France in the event of a show-down between president and a majority RN, that of the so-called ‘coup d’état of 16 May 1877’ is regularly cited. That Third Republican political and institutional crisis saw the monarchist president of the Republic Marshal Mac Mahon pitted against a republican majority in the Chamber of Deputies. The crisis broke on 16 May 1877 when Mac Mahon chose as premier a figure who identified with his political views, but not those of the chamber. The stand-off lasted until December 1877, when president Mac Mahon acknowledged his political defeat and bowed to the will of the chamber. What made the crisis of such portent was that the Third Republic was barely established and susceptible to a monarchist restoration had the motley crew of Bonapartists, Orleanists and Bourbons been united. The republicans who had seemed such a radical option became the moderate norm for the next seven decades, the president of the Republic’s executive powers slipped into abeyance and the royalists dwindled.
For those seven months in 1877, tension in the country was high, exacerbated by France’s recent violent experience of revolution and reaction. France today is racked by uncertainty, frustration and palpably rising tension against a background of gilets jaunes agitation, strikes and riots. The question then, as now, was: can France hold? Last Monday, Emmanuel Macron evoked the astonishing possibility of ‘civil war’ after the forthcoming elections. That may be another gambit in Macron’s ‘project fear’. Heaven forfend, though, that it be a preamble for invoking emergency powers under article 16 allowing the president to rule by decree. Even Mac Mahon did not go so far.
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