Macron’s mission impossible

Can the president win without winning?

Yesterday evening a shockwave rippled across Europe. It wasn’t caused by any of the results coming through from the European Parliament elections held in the EU’s 27 member states. Instead all eyes were on French President Emmanuel Macron as he declared the dissolution of the French Parliament’s lower house, making way for snap elections to be held on 30 June and 7 July (in keeping with France’s two-round system).

For many people looking on, including within France, the decision provoked an array of emotions - mainly confusion, disbelief and horror. Macron’s party and its allies had just suffered a major defeat at the hands of the far-right. The party of Marine Le Pen won over 30% of the vote in the European elections, about double the score of the Macron list. It was only by the skin of their teeth that the Macronist alliance managed to avoid being beaten into third place by the centre-left Parti Socialiste. It hardly seemed like the most auspicious context in which to be launching an election campaign, when you could just as easily hold tight and spend another three years trying to turn the ship around before the next scheduled elections.

Yet this was not a rash decision born out of a night of political turmoil. There can be little doubt that within the highest levels of the French government, there had already been discussions on just such a course of action. After all, the European Parliament election result was not a surprise. The polls were pretty much spot on and no one closely following the elections could credibly claim that the writing hadn’t been on the wall for several weeks already.

So if the decision to call early national elections in response to very poor European election results was not a sudden act of madness then what is the logic at play here?

Perhaps the simplest explanation is that Macron’s team do not really expect to win these elections.

Now, that is not to say that they are deliberately handing over the reins of government to the far-right. Suggestions from various commentators that this is all a clever ploy to make the Rassemblement National take charge of a divided and dysfunctional parliament in order make them look weak and incompetent in the public eye seem too clever by half. There is little guarantee that the far-right politicians, who are certainly able to manage political communications, could not spin such a situation as ‘Paris elites’ frustrating ‘the will of the people’.

No, what I mean here is that even if the government does not believe they can win, they could reasonably hope that Le Pen can lose.

How would this work? It’s important to keep in mind that this election is not about Le Pen and Macron alone. While so much of French politics since 2017 has been built around the duel between these two personalities, France remains a dynamic multi-party democracy and legislative elections involve more than just the big two.

That means there is plenty of scope for voters to decide that they do not wish to endorse either Macron or Le Pen and instead will give their vote to other moderate parties, like the Parti Socialiste, Les Républicains or the Greens.

Already Macron’s government has made a significant overture towards these parties, with the Foreign Minister, Stéphane Séjourné, saying that they would not stand in constituencies where MPs from these moderate forces were now seeking re-election. Unlike in the presidential election, Macron and his team are not demanding that all moderate voters lend them their support, only that everyone work together in a sensible and practical way to block the far-right.

This then is how Macron can fail to win and also ensure that Le Pen loses. By building up democratic and moderate opposition parties (those groups who would come under the banner of ‘republican values’ in France), Macron can stabilise French politics and kill the far-right’s momentum. The pro-Macron group of parties may not become any stronger, indeed they may still lose seats, but it would be to the benefit of parties other than the far-right; parties that the Macron government could then talk to, negotiate with and compromise with to deliver a calmer and less polarised form of politics.

In others words, this is not a campaign for a Macronist parliament, but for a moderate one.

We shouldn’t assume this will be plain sailing. When Macron won the presidential election in 2017 he did massive structural damage to France’s old centre-left and centre-right. The two parties have mostly stagnated since then and only in the last few months have we seen the first green shoots of revival for the Parti Socialiste. The liberal/nationalist divide that Macron helped establish has also taken on a life of its own and spread into other countries – escaping it to reestablish a left/right form to French politics is not necessarily within Macron’s gift. Still, it is almost certainly his goal now and probably the best way to halt the far-right’s seemingly constant growth.

Macron came into French politics in 2017 promising revolution, a whirlwind to tear up the old and bring in a new order. Now the revolution feels like it may be only an interregnum. With some reforms under his belt and various investment programmes underway, Macron can credibly claim to have changed the long-term direction of France’s economy. But as for its politics, Macron’s final task may be to try and leave it more or less as he found it.