(8 minutes read)
‘There is no reason why [Macron] should not be able to cohabit with Marine Le Pen. She would leave to him the State dinners and official trips. He would let her govern.’ Prof. O. Roy, European University, Florence (Financial Times)
A week today people will be voting in the first round of the most dangerous (and unnecessary) set of Parliamentary Elections under France’s Fifth Republic.
Six pollsters (over the last 4 days) have continued identifying party support broadly where it’s been for several days:
- National Rally (Le Pen) + Ciotti’s head-bangers 33% – 36% (4 give the Far Right 35%, the most recent is 36%)
- New Popular Front (Left) 26% – 29.5%
- Macron’s Minority (Right-ish) 19% – 22%
Psephological Health Warning: translating national polls into National Assembly seats is seriously challenging. The just-published Euro-Elections data are of limited use because the Legislative Elections will have 30%+ bigger turn-out. (There’ve already been a record one million proxy vote demands: the (worried) middle classes are organising proxies.)
The actual seats configuration is better done post-1 July when we’ll know whether Macronite and Left candidates finishing third will stand down, not go through to the run-off, and make it a straight fight with the Far-Right.
Four pollsters have produced broadly similar national voting figures since mid-week. BUT the pollsters’ guesstimates of National Assembly seats vary wildly; here are the respective ‘calculations’ of Harris, Ifop, Odoxa, and Elabe :
- National Rally (Far Right) : 235 – 280 / 200 – 240 / 250 – 300 / 250 – 280
- New Popular Front (Left) : 135 – 165 / 180 – 210 / 160 – 210 / 150 – 170
- Macron’s centre-Right : 95 – 130 / 80 – 110 / 70 – 120 / 90 – 110
If voting intentions don’t substantively change, we can confidently say that:
- Macron made one of the worst decisions in political history – destroying his non-existent party and handing political leadership to le Pen’s Far-Right
- Le Pen’s National Rally is dangerously close to an overall majority of 289, and
- ‘France is going to the dogs’ (Finance Minister Le Maire quoted in Le Figaro)
All exactly as everyone predicted.
Everyone, that is, bar President Macron.
The man who ‘doesn’t believe’ in polls. Maybe he’ll repent at leisure on his whim.
The photograph which says it all
The tweet below contains a Photo of the Decade: deeply gloomy people, each with an awful lot to be gloomy about, with the feel of a latterday Last Supper.
In Year Zero, Soazig de la Moissonière became Photographer Royal at the Court of the President.
Present at every Memorable Macron Moment, Moissonière produced many iconic images:
- sleeves up during lock-down
- lounging expansively, too many buttons open on his brilliantly white shirt, revealing his extraordinarily hirsute torso
- the latter outdone for bravura machismo by Macron pulverising a punching bag (a perplexingly-Putinesque image).
But the photo we’ll remember longest is her latest, the night Macron dropped his Dissolution bombshell.
Reacting counter-intuitively (should that read ‘reacting brain-deadly’?) after his party’s shellacking by National Rally, Macron complacently assumed that The People, confronted by A Far Right Victory, would revert to Nurse (for fear of something worse).
Oh no they haven’t.
And oh no they won’t, M. le Président.
Weirdly, the Elysée (in an act of gratuitous self-harm) promoted that Election Night photo on social media.
Moissonière took the photo during the late-night meeting when Macron told his Ministers what they needed to know about his decision. His gamble was instantly recognised by all (the purblind protagonist himself excepted) as causing the President unparalleled jeopardy, and France near-certain disaster.
[A reminder for those reading my posts as emails: photographs in my blog are always copied tweets. Copyright fees are out of reach and I don’t ‘steal’ photos. So the actual photo can only be seen by reading my posts on my website https://frenchpoliticstoday.wordpress.com rather than email. I’m well aware my prose is sublime. Still, Moissonière’s photos are sublimer.]
Moissonière’s photo was taken from behind President Macron. Beside him is The Man Who Knows Where All The Bodies Are (Alexis Kohler, Secretary-General).
Macron’s facing an elegant mirror, but his face isn’t seen there because directly opposite is grim, poker-faced, wunderkind Gabriel Attal, staring through his President.
[Wunderkinds Note: Attal was France’s youngest-ever Prime Minister when nominated in January (Bardella, 7 years younger than Attal, announced he’d only accept Prime Ministerial nomination if he gets an overall Parliamentary majority. That’s telling The Voters.)
Meanwhile, this week, Attal was infantilised by Macron when working the crowd.
A child asked Macron if Attal was his brother. ‘He could be my little brother’ comes the paternalistic reply: ‘I see him a bit like that.’ Then, more seriously: ‘But he’s my Prime Minister. He’s been with me since the beginning.’ Finally: ‘He is sort of my little brother.’
Perhaps, though, this was Presidential payback.
The day before, Attal (High Street flesh-squeezing) encounters An Older Passer-By. The latter, speaking truth to power, produces golden pay-dirt.
‘I will shake your hand because you’re really good’ says The Older Passer-By to Attal, ‘but you really must tell the President to shut the hell up.’
Taken aback, Attal splutters: ‘These are legislative Elections, we’re voting for a Prime Minister’. (Linguistic analysts will note the absence of any ‘defence’ of His President.)
The Older Passer-By then tells Attal he was a really good Education Minister.
But the quickfire exchange ends when The Older Passer-By delivers this final comment on M. le Président: ‘He’s the one really screwing things up here.’
Out of the mouths of Older Passers-By …]
That Election Night photo
It freezes the moment when those capable of serious thought understood this is Day One of our Twenty-One-Day calvary.
Attal is apparently listening to His President. Though his arms are folded across his chest in total resignation. He’s reflecting on losing Prime Ministerial office after five months, and crushing his 2027 Presidency dreams.
Equally though, Attal just might be feeling utterly pissed.
It seems Attal knew zilch about The Coming Dissolution until Kohler phoned him at 18:45 on Euro-Election night. He wasn’t even worhty of a Presidential call.
Another Presidential wannabe out of the loop was Bruno Le Maire. But then, you’d hardly expect Macron’s Finance Minister for 7 years to be on the in-side.
Le Maire commented more forthrightly than his colleagues: ‘Dissolution is the decision of one man, and one man alone: the President of the Republic … His decision, his prerogative.’ So far, so factual.
But then, bitternes: [However] from what I see, this decision has created anxiety, incomprehension, and even anger in our country, and for our people everywhere.’
Le Monde claimed that upon learning of the Dissolution Decision, Attal offered Macron his head.
Such self-sacrifice would have enabled Attal to fulfil the classic French Prime Ministerial role: fall guy and sacrificial lamb served up to an angry nation, all intended to ‘distract’ from Presidential failure.
But Macron had none of it, after doing that in January to little effect.
The President and his group of politically-motivated men (we’re talking France, they’re inevitably men) would not be diverted from The Lemming Strategy, or what Le Figaro‘s editorial called ‘Emmanuel Macron’s hara-kiri dissolution.’
Un Président ne devrait pas dire ça (again and again)
Macron’s original Dissolution strategy contained the seeds of an idea.
Throughout the Euro-Elections, the Left (Socialists, Greens and Communists on one side, hard-Left France Unbowed doing their own thing) bad-mouthed each other. Vituperation was frequently Level 10.
France Unbowed’s Godfather, Mélenchon, decided the Israel-Gaza war was His Main Issue. He only mentioning the EU to say it sucked, contrasting with the critically europhile Left parties.
Macron assumed he’d reinforce the Left – Hard Left chasm, ensuring Legislative Election run-offs between his own (centre-)Right candidates against the Far-Right Le Pen-ists. Voters, doing the honourable thing, would vote for Macron’s candidates, giving him another National Assembly overall majority.
But Macron didn’t take account of the remote possibility of lions and lambs laying down together.
The New Popular Front (NPF) emerged over four days.
The Hard Left accepted that Hamas were terrorists and the EU was not the source of all evil. ‘Socialist’ ex-President Hollande and three-times Presidential candidate Philippe Poutou (New Anti-Capitalist Party, formerly the Revolutionary Communist League) became fellow-candidates for the NPF’s very big tent (no ‘broad church’ for these secularists).
Macron’s strategy? Non-existent.
It wouldn’t be Left voters holding noses voting for Macron’s candidates, to prevent Le Pen naming the Prime Minister and Government. Rather, Macron’s candidates would be squeezed between Left and Far Right; his voters would determine the run-offs.
Then Macron, confirming his absence of scruples, fought dirty.
He’s done nothing but talk of the two ‘extremes’. He’s spoken of ‘unholy alliances at the two extremes’ (though the Conseil d’Etat ruled that while Le Pen’s party is indeed ‘extreme’ or ‘far’ Right, France Unbowed is neither ‘extreme’ nor ‘far’ Left). Welcoming punters to the Elysée for the Fête de la Musique, campaigning Macron referred to ‘extremes which cannot be allow to pass’.
Macron’s even started childish culture wars.
Disappointingly (predictably?) an initial attack concerned the NPF’s ‘manifesto’ on ‘extending women’s and LGBTQI rights’. One provision refers to ‘Granting the right [for a trans person] to change their birth certificate free of charge at a Town Hall’ (not to have to go to Court).
Macron characterised this as a ‘proposal to change one’s sex in a Town Hall … That’s one vision of society, but it’s not mine’.
Next day, he referred to ‘some totally ubuesque things, such as having a sex change in the Town Hall.’
Broadening the attack, with language straight from the Far Right playbook, he then accused NPF of a ‘totally immigrationist programme’.
It’s unsurprising that most ‘Presidential’ candidates use pictures of Attal, not the President, on their campaign literature.
Other news
- 3,600 health professionals urged people to vote for the New Popular Front
- 88-year-old renowned Nazi-hunter, Serge Klarsfeld, a huge figure in France’s Holocaust memorialisation, announced that in an electoral run-off ‘between an antisemitic party and a pro-Jewish party, I will vote for the pro-Jewish party’. [And no, he’s NOT voting for the Left.]
- ‘Macronism is finished, if it ever really existed’ delightedly opined ex-President Hollande, insisting he spoke ‘without rancour’
- Socialist Glucksmann urged that every Left candidate finishing third in the first round, and who cannot defeat the Far Right systematically withdraw, while re-confirming that Mélenchon would not be the Left’s Prime Minister
- Macron’s initial Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe (yet another Presidential hopeful) said Macron had ‘killed off the Presidential majority’
Antisemitism
Marine Le Pen began detoxifying the Front National’s image a decade ago. In 2014, addressing French Jews, she wrote that her party is ‘not only not your enemy but is certainly the best shield to protect you. It will be at your side defending your freedom of thought and worship in the face of the one true enemy, fundamentalist Islam.’
The 7 October Hamas attacks, followed by the Israel – Gaza war, led Hard Left France Unbound and its leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon into ever-stronger pro-Palestinian support and anti-Israeli Government opposition. The Israel – Gaza War was virtually the sole issue on which France Unbound fought their Euro-Election.
However those perfectly proper hard-Left political positions were regularly accompanied by jibes, above all from Mélenchon, which were (at best) wholly ambiguous, and at worst antisemitic. It was particularly unbelievable when France Unbound became the only major political party refusing to support last November’s national demonstrations against antisemitism.
Le Pen has successfully built on these differences between her party and the hard-Left presenting herself as a bulwark against antisemitism. Now Klarsfeld is far from the only (Jewish) person publicly declaring that faced with a choice between Far-Right and Hard-Left they’d vote ‘Le Pen’.
I don’t know what these words do to fellow-French nationals who initially had another nationality, but by God they frighten me
Misquoting Wellington may not be a good start.
Personally though I’m little reassured by Jordan Bardella’s comment this week: ‘I want to reassure everybody: compatriots of ours from other countries, or people of other nationalities who live in France. Those who work, pay their taxes, respect the law, and love our country, have absolutely NOTHING to fear from our policies.’
Background to the Legislative Elections 2024
To read about France’s Legislative Elections, it’s all available here.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau got it right in 1769
Quos vult perdere Jupiter dementet (Whom Jupiter destroys, he first make mad)
French politics today 
Leave a comment