You’re joking – not another one
‘Brenda from Bristol’ is a folk hero of recent British political history. Interviewed in a BBC vox pop (after Theresa May called a General Election), Brenda pronounced, in a wonderful local accent: ‘You’re joking – not another one … There’s too much politics going on at the moment’.
Last Sunday evening, at 8pm precisely, every Euro-Election exit poll confirmed what everyone had known for weeks. President Macron’s Minority (centre-)Right Government had been humiliatingly drubbed by Marine Le Pen’s far-Right populist National Rally. Making matters yet worse, the cumulative far-Right vote exceeded 40%.
It took less than an hour for Macron to proceed with what we’ve since learned was a long-planned constitutional coup de théâtre.
Macron announced on television (to the amazement of everyone, especially the members of his own shell-shocked party) that he would immediately dissolve the National Assembly and call Legislative Elections.
‘I have confidence’, said Macron, ‘in the capacity of the French people to make the best decision for themselves and for future generations’ during the coming elections.’ He then added this hollow-sounding peroration: ‘My sole objective is to help my country which I love so much’.
Since Sunday night there’s been non-stop politics, and a lot of manoeuvring.
The Right and Far Right on Manoeuvres
Macron’s two Presidential Election victories effectively destroyed the traditional (centre-)Right party of French politics (latterly called Les Républicains) by increasingly adopting the Right’s policies, as well as persuading several of the Right’s leading political figures to become some of his most senior Ministers.
After Macron’s first election, 117 Républicains Deputies were elected, out of 577. In 2022, Les Républicains were reduced to a near-rump of 61 Deputies.
Eric Ciotti was elected leader of Les Républicains in December 2022. Ciotti has always made clear his sympathy for the Hard Right, the Harder the better. In 2017, he proudly announced that he hadn’t voted for Macron in the Presidential run-off against Marine Le Pen. He repeated that abstention in 2022, except this time he announced he’d be abstaining in advance of Election Day.
So it was scarcely a total surprise when on 11 June Ciotti called for an alliance between the (traditional-)Right Républicains and the Far-Right National Rally. He claimed his decision was necessary in order to ‘preserve’ a group of Deputies in Parliament because Les Républicains are currently ‘too weak to resist the two most dangerous blocs’ (presumably the Far Right and the Left).
Ciotti said ‘We need an alliance with National Rally and its candidates, while remaining separate’, saying ‘the vast majority of Républicains want such an agreement’. But all that was no more than code: Ciotti meant he was too weak to defeat the Far Right candidate in his own seat in Nice.
There has never previously been any formal alliance in France between the traditional Right and the Far Right. But that evening, Jordan Bardella (National Rally leader) confirmed that there would be an agreement between National Rally and Les Républicains, saying that ‘several dozen’ Républicain Deputies would be ‘supported’ by National Rally, that their joint programme would concentrate on the three priorities of the cost of living, law and order, and immigration, and that National Rally would accordingly not stand candidates against them.
Marine Le Pen added her ha’porth, welcoming Ciotti’s ‘courageous choice’ and ‘sense of responsibility’, saying she hoped that ‘a consequential number’ of senior Républicain leaders would follow Ciotti: ‘The pseudo cordon sanitaire which has made us lose so many elections over forty years is about to disappear’.
Don’t prepare for Governement just yet Mme Le Pen. Within minutes of Ciotti’s first statement, several of the most senior Républicain Party figures publicly repudiated Ciotti, totally rejecting any such alliance with the Far Right and calling on Ciotti to resign from his presidency of Les Républicains.
Invective flew. Former Républicains Presidential candidate Valérie Pécresse (after her 4.8% and 5th place in the Presidential Election, the worst result in the Right’s history, she’s returned to the day job of running the Greater Paris Region) went all Biblical, accusing Ciotti of ‘selling his soul for a plate of lentils’.
Since at least 50 Républicains Deputies have spoken out against an alliance and called on Ciotti to resign his Party Presidency, there seems increasingly little chance of it being formalised, despite Ciotti emailing all supporters, announcing ‘an alliance with those who share the true values of the French Right’.
Indeed, there’s every chance that – following today’s emergency Executive Committee meeting of Les Républicains (plus an article by 10 leading Républicains Party figures published in today’s edition of the Right’s house-Bible Le Figaro firmly rejecting Ciotti’s proposed alliance) – that Ciotti will be on the verge of being thrown out of office, even though there’s no provision for such action in their rules. On the other hand, Ciotti seems to have caught his internal opponents short by tweeting that the emergency Executive Committe was ‘in flagrant breach of the Party’s rules’ since such meetings must be called either by the President, or by a quarter of the Executive, and will be held no later than 8 days after the demand. Ciotti’s chums let it be known that he wouldn’t attend this non-meeting.
Were Ciotti to be thrown out that would be the first half-honourable thing Les Républicains would have done in decades, but maybe M’ Learned Friends will need to be involved in this farrago first.
Even so, the Right’s supporters and voters are far from being as of one with their leadership. Pollster Odoxa finds 50% of those who see themselves as ‘on the Right’ support the idea of a pact with the ultra-Right nationalists … so they may well all go and vote National Rally regardless what happens to the cowardly bigot, Ciotti.
While Le Pen’s National Rally Party did its best to enhance its chances of winning an overall majority by forming an alliance with Les Républicains, another possible alliance was a step too far for Le Pen.
Marion Maréchal (Marine Le Pen’s niece and leader of the Euro-candidates’ list of the overtly racist ultra-Right Reconquête Party) rushed to meet Le Pen and Bardella at the National Rally HQ on Monday. Maréchal emerged from the meeting expressing her ‘strong wish’ that ‘the means could be found for us to get together’, but within a day it was suddenly all over when Maréchal tweeted that ‘Jordan Bardella told me this afternoon of their change of position and that National Rally has in principle turned down any agreement’. She then put out a lyrical statement regretting that ‘This sudden decision overturns our several exchanges and preparatory work: it neither meets the moment nor the hope aroused among the French’.
Bardella was more straight-forward, he said the problems were Zemmour’s
- statements throughout the Euro-campaign
- constant anti-National Rally insults, and
- sometimes over-excessive political positions.
All of which led Maréchal to conclude: ‘Despite my attempts at negotiating, it’s a matter of regret that the argument put forward is that they [National Rally] do not want any association, either directly or indirectly, with Eric Zemmour’. Evidently, even the Far-Right has certain ‘standards’: racism is fine provided it’s not too overt. Thus was Zemmour thwarted in his wish to set up what he called ‘a great and enormous union of our three parties to win these legislative elections’.
The Left and Hard Left on Manoeuvres
In the first round of the 2022 Presidential Election, hard-Left Jean-Luc Mélenchon (22.0%) came within 400,000 votes of Marine Le Pen (23.1%). Winning would have put him in the run-off against Emmanuel Macron.
So it was unsurprising that when The Left agreed to ‘coalesce’ for the purpose of fighting 2022’s Legislative Elections that Mélenchon’s hard-Left should fight the most winnable seats and take effective leadership of the so-called NUPES alliance.
The hard-Left Deputies of Mélenchon’s France Unbound Party, led by Mélenchon, though not a Deputy, became increasingly strident in their political positioning. Their traditional Trotskyist line of permanent Parliamentary opposition wearied their NUPES partners (and was a stark contrast to the discipline and measured approach of the far-Right National Rally.
Over the months, the strains between the (democratic) Socialists and Greens (on one ‘side’) and the Hard Left became increasingly untenable. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Hamas attack on Israel (France Unbound refused to qualify Hamas as a terrorist organisation), Israel’s war on Gaza, and attitudes to the EU led inevitably to NUPES’ collapse by the end of last year.
The Socialists, Greens, Communists, and France Unbound then fought the Euro-Elections as separate, individual parties.
In the Euro-Elections, the revived Socialist Party (13.8%) almost succeeded in beating Macron’s party (14.5%) into third place. The Socialists were 190,000 votes behind Macron’s list, with the hard Left France Unbound a further million votes behind on 9.9%. However, Raphael Glucksmann’s 15 minutes of fame as the person largely responsible for this astonishing turn-round in the Socialist Party’s fortunes, was almost instantly forgotten when Macron announced the dissolution of the National Assembly.
Within 24 hours, a new Front Populaire (which in 1936 produced France’s first Socialist Prime Minister, Leon Blum) was born: The Left agreed to put up a single candidate for every constituency and so maximise their chances of success. Within a further 24 hours, even some of the ‘Loony Left’ came aboard, with the New Anticapitalist Party announcing its participation in the Popular Front.
The coming days need to produce, no later than 18:00 on Sunday afternoon when candidates’ names must be submitted, agreement on
- which individuals and parties will fight those 577 constituencies?
- which party will fight the most winnable seats, with the need to recognise the Socialists’ defeat of the hard Left?
- who is the putative ‘leader’ of this Popular Front … and thus the potential Prime Minister? One thing’s for certain it cannot be Yesterday’s Man, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, though he’s trying to maintain his front-line poisition
- and maybe (not wholly an afterthought) the Popular Front’s policies?
All that stuff will be decided in non-smoke-filled-rooms asap.
President Macron and His (Centre-)Right on Manoeuvres
It wasn’t just we punters who were caught short by his Jupiterian Thunderbolt on Sunday evening. The word is that even Prime Minister Attal was not told in advance what was about to happen: must make people feel really great working for and ‘with’ President Macron.
President Macron continues to insist (in the face of some fairly solid recent evidence to the contrary) that he doesn’t believe in opinion polls. Well, he’s obviously got to keep up his spirits somehow. As for myself, I believe in them implicitly: as long as they’re not treated as forecasts, they do give a very good snapshot of public opinion at that moment in time. And when every opinion poll produces an identical snapshot, it’s likely to be remarkably close to the then truth.
It’s really not very relevant I know, but Macron’s insistence that things will somehow be dramatically different this time round reminds me of the wonderful Bertolt Brecht poem, ‘The Solution’:
‘After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?’
French politics today 
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