The second round of French elections this weekend will not mark the end of Macron as president, nor will it be the end of his MPs in the National Assembly. But the radical centrist movement that carried him to power – on a neither left-nor-right mantra – is no more.
What happens now? Macron’s potential successors are deeply divided. Edouard Philippe, former prime minister, Bruno Le Maire, a finance minister and Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister, all want to rebuild from the centre-right. Gabriel Attal, the prime minister, wants to anchor it on the centre-left. All of them seem to have turned the page on Macron already.
All of these backroom deals and electoral pacts may prove to be too clever by half
But none of them incorporate Macron’s vision any longer. None are capable of provoking the left and the right (like Macron did) in order to rule from the centre. Without Macron’s tactical skills or an ideological underpinning, there is not much there to hold the party together once its founder leaves the political scene. It was a party built around, and for, one man: Macron himself.
This is not the end, at least not just yet. A poll by Harris Interactive interviewing over 3,300 people the past two days suggests that Macron’s Ensemble could take 110 to 135 seats, coming third after the Rassemblement National (RN) with 190 and 220 seats and the left New Popular Front (NPF) with a group of 159 to 183 MPs. This is thanks to tactical voting.
Centrists have been mobilised by the need to prevent the far-right from winning an outright majority – so they can now hope for a more respectable outcome, instead of the abysmal 90 seats predicted early this week. They are starting to make electoral pacts, so as not to split the anti-RN vote. From those 308 candidates of the left-wing NFP group, 130 have withdrawn to give centrists a chance of winning against a leading far-right candidate.
But there are fierce debates within the anti-RN blocks about who should get together with whom. Attal faces opposition from within his own ranks about doing any kind of pact with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFO). At the end of the day, Macron has offered a compromise: his party will support the LFI in the elections (to thwart RN) but would not include them in a new government.
Politicians pacts are one thing, but will voters follow their logic? It depends on how much they agree with the ultimate goal of blocking the RN from power. Will LFI accept such a lame offer? They may not be as powerful in the left alliance as they were under the Nupes agreement, but they still have more MPs in the race than the Socialists, and can withdraw their support for the new government formation. This will be a loyalty test for the NFP, and for the Socialists in particular.
This whole week has been devoted to thwarting Marine Le Pen’s party from coming to power. With some success: there are now 409 two-way, 89 three-way, and two four-way elections. But none of the parties seem to be bothered about the voters. About 10 million voters chose the RN in the first round, many of them voting for the first time. Have any of the parties addressed those voters?
It’s far from clear where votes from the eliminated parties will go. What will Les Républicains voters do? There has been no recommendation from the party to its supporters of how to vote. Would they not be compelled to vote RN, if the alternative was a candidate from the left? What is a centrist voter to do after Macron’s zigzag course of neither denying support to the LFI nor engaging them in government? Are they to forget LFI’s violent language against their government during the pension – or the immigration reform – and now vote for an LFI candidate to prevent the RN from getting that seat? Or do they just stay at home?
All of these backroom deals and electoral pacts may prove to be too clever by half. There is no clear line: just an alliance of circumstances with only one goal – to stop RN winning a majority. This may succeed. But Emmanuel Macron’s movement has already ended up the loser.
This article was first published in the EuroIntelligence morning briefing. For a trial subscription click here.
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