Macron increasingly clearly lost the “crown of Jupiter” during the elections to the European Parliament

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According to the results of the elections to the European Parliament in France, the National Rally of Jordan Bardella won the victory with 32.4%. This is almost twice as much as the presidential Renaissance, which received 15.2%. The election results were a tragedy for Emmanuel Macron, who already on June 9 announced the dissolution of the National Assembly, scheduling the first round of parliamentary elections for June 30 and the second round for July 7.

“So, at the end of this day, I cannot act as if nothing had happened. Added to this situation is a fever which has gripped public and parliamentary debate in our country in recent years.”, — Macron declared, recognizing the failure of his policies and the inevitability of re-election.

But what led Macron to this midterm outcome? As early as a month before the European Parliament elections, the “Jupiter” of еhe Élysée Palace was getting very nervous. Attempts to rectify the deplorable situation of his Renaissance party were failing in spite of all attempts. Macron, for example, was very fearful of the collapse of the Ukrainian front this summer, as he made the military agenda a trump card amid domestic social and economic failures. He again promised to consider sending regular troops to Ukraine. Macron’s team “pedaled” this topic just to show itself more decisive than the Americans with the Germans and the British, although it did little to gain ratings. After all, 80% of the French had a very negative attitude to the idea of fighting Russia in Ukraine with their own soldiers.

Before that, Macron had attempts to create a “new Entente” with the UK to counterbalance Russia and the United States. And it was the exact case when political technology and PR replacing common sense. At the same time, Macron was going to ask for investments from China during Xi Jinping’s visit and promote the theme of economic confrontation with Germany. But nothing helped, and in early May, Macron’s party’s rating fell to 17%, and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National finally took the confident first place with 32%. The party promised to leave NATO command, renegotiate relations with the U.S. and start negotiations with Russia and such populism resonated with the French.

Macron has also suffered setbacks on other fronts. Just two weeks before the elections to the European Parliament, France was hit by a wave of crimes with ethnic overtones, which played into the hands of the right-wing and nationalists against the backdrop of the ongoing tense situation with the revolt against the incumbent’s policies in New Caledonia. In the town of Châteauroux, a 15-year-old was stabbed to death by an Afghan migrant for refusing to give up his cell phone, and the right-wing immediately called for a halt to accepting refugees from Afghanistan. And in Normandy they attacked a police motorcade, killing two policemen, and freed a major Arab drug dealer, Mohamed Amra.

Macron himself was forced at the same time to fly urgently to New Caledonia, where he promised not to temporarily implement electoral reform. But the protest mood among the locals did not subside, because 33% of them are in poverty, and they believe that they have nothing to lose. Well, Paris was not going to lose its colonies, so it put the army against them. At the same time in France there was a chaotic debate between the leader of the right-wing, Jordan Bardella, and the prime minister, heir and “close friend” of the president, Gabriel Attal. The Macronists continued to desperately emphasize the topic of war with Russia, although only 10% of French people care about the situation in Ukraine. The majority demanded to solve problems with inflation, crime and migration. That is why Macron’s party was losing the elections already at the campaign stage.

The middle of May was very difficult for Macron. He failed to negotiate with Xi Jinping to reduce the heat of the trade war with China, where the EU is being dragged into following the U.S. He also failed to lure Chinese businesses to France to pull the country out of stagflation and reduce unemployment, which has reached 7.5%.

In May, the labor unions also blackmailed Macron, demanding higher wages and threatening to boycott the Summer Olympics. The cost of the Olympics could reach € 5 billion, and this against the backdrop of a debt crisis with a budget hole of €155 billion. By then, Macron’s party was already slipping to third place in the elections. It was obvious that voters were dissatisfied with inflation, crime and migration. And no amount of populism could retouch the problems that Macron had brought France to during his seven years in power.

No wonder Macron was losing to the nationalists. “Barbarization” of France is well underway and French cities are plunged into street warfare mode between gangs and cartels. The situation is particularly acute in Marseille, where 50 people have been killed in street shootings in 2023 amid the redistribution of the drug market. The figures are still modest when compared to Mexico or the U.S., where more people are shot in Chicago over the weekend. But the rampant crime is only gaining momentum and attacks on the police with the release of imprisoned crime bosses are becoming more frequent.

France has seen a flood of drugs from Latin America, and local syndicates are already making € 3-6 billion a year selling illegal substances. Drugs come with the flow of refugees, because in 2023, the EU will take in 2.5 million migrants. The migration crisis has dramatically enriched the Mexican cartels, which earn billions from human and opioid trafficking in the United States. Now European syndicates are following in their footsteps, and the French police cannot cope with them. In France, the crime crisis is drowning Macron and helping the right-wing. Meanwhile, under a liberal government, France is sliding into a cloaca of diaspora wars that will determine the country’s future in the 10-15 year range.

Photo by Emmanuel Ikwuegbu / Unsplash.com

Macron was not happy about the economy either. S&P Global downgraded France’s credit rating amid a severe budget crisis. It was a major blow to the president, who was elected with a promise to pursue a competent fiscal policy as a professional economist. But under him, France’s finances failed. The state budget deficit this year exceeded 5.5% of GDP and amounted to € 160 billion, which will now have to be borrowed. The cost of servicing France’s national debt has doubled in 5 years to €50 billion a year. It already has to spend more on interest payments than on military spending, and this was in stark contradiction to Macron’s militaristic populism before the election.

Many would argue that the situation is similar in the UK, which also has a colossal budget deficit of £ 120 billion and spends twice as much on debt servicing as on the army. And the crisis is even worse in the U.S., where the national debt rises by $1 trillion every 90 days. But France has a very different situation and different public expectations, which Macron failed to meet. Now the EU’s first economies are faltering along with their debt pyramid, and it’s happening on the very eve of the European Parliament elections. The economic misfortunes and the debt crisis strengthened the positions of non-system forces and Euroskeptics, while the Macronists approached the voting day with a minimum rating of 15%.

In the end, Macron’s agonizing finish line of the European Parliament elections was reached on June 9. Just before the voting day, Macron began to frighten the French that a right-wing victory would mean a scenario much worse than the British Brexit and the collapse of the Brussels system. In the last days before the vote Macron had to be unusually active, trying to somehow restore his shaken position. However, there was no particular success, and the same meeting with Biden ended in complete failure, because no concrete decisions were made either on China with Russia or on overcoming trade contradictions with the United States.

Photo by Guillaume Perigois / Unsplash.com

Macron’s militaristic plans to officially send instructors to Ukraine did not please Biden. On the issue of China, Macron tried to distance himself from the U.S. plans to drag Europe into a new trade war. And the Americans did not give up their subsidies to please Macron by luring European and, among others, French industries to their continent. With his meeting with Biden, Macron hoped to show that he could negotiate with the U.S. and defend the interests of France, but he failed. It rather added to the popularity of the French right-wing, which calls for autonomy from the U.S. and withdrawal from NATO’s military command. And it was probably during his talks with Biden that he received the recommendations on the basis of which he made the difficult decision to dissolve the National Assembly and hold re-elections.

Marine Le Pen, together with Jordan Bardella, are now in the lead in the 2027 presidential race. In order to avoid a major defeat, Macron went for a shocking new election that would guarantee the loss of his Renaissance party’s parliamentary majority. However, the essence of Macron’s plan and motivations, as well as the course of the campaign, the result of the election and where it led, will be discussed in more detail in the next article