New parliamentary elections: a gamble or Macron’s clear plan?

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Immediately after the bad results of the elections to the European Parliament, Emmanuel Macron began to look for a way out of the deadlocked political situation. Under pressure from the revolting population, he dissolved the National Assembly to the delight of the opposition. Macron then announced early parliamentary elections for June 30. With the help of a cunning scheme, he wanted to emerge from the current critical situation as a winner.

In the summer 2022 elections, Macron’s Renaissance party lost its majority but still came first. Since then, it has been pushing the laws the president wants in parliament. Most of the important laws, which included the scandalous pension reform, managed to pass. After that, the announcement of elections no longer threatened Macron with a “legislative deadlock”.

By the time the new elections started, it was obvious to the liberal elite that the results would be quite different from two years ago. It was predicted that Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National party would get 30% or more, while the leftists and Macronists would get an average of 15-20% each.

*Photo by Arnaud Jaegers / Unspalsh.com*

At the same time, a chance and a fear for Macron was the majoritarian two-round electoral system. This meant that the first party in the polls, which was Rassemblement National, could win a disproportionate number of seats. But previously, everyone united against the party in the second round. The Élysée Palace had a plan to set up a “cordon sanitaire” and enter into an unnatural alliance with the left. The main thing was to prevent the opposition from gaining an absolute majority and forcing them to compromise with the president.

If the plan to create parliamentary chaos failed, Macron could hope that the right would quickly lose popularity and be forced to negotiate with the much-hated Macronists. Ideally, by the 2027 elections, their ratings would be down and Macron and his protégé Gabriel Attal would have a chance to hold on to power.

Macron took a massive hit in the European Parliament elections and after that, he raised the stakes almost daily. For example, he threatened to resign if his party lost the parliamentary elections. It was in a way blackmailing voters, especially those on the left. It boiled down to a simple idea: if the population elected the right-wing, they would immediately take the presidency and establish a “dictatorship”. However, such rhetoric rather added to their popularity. In an earlier poll, the rating of Marine Le Pen’s “Rassemblemen National” was 34%.

*Photo by Frederic Köberl / Unsplash.com*

In case of defeat in the parliamentary elections, Macron risked losing the threads of control over domestic politics, and the “path of heroism” in international affairs, where things were not going well for him, would remain open to him. That is why there was talk of his early resignation, and Macron was not averse to shifting the responsibility for the deplorable state of France to the right.

Two weeks before the election, Macron was already trying to shift responsibility for the acute debt crisis to the right-wing. The French bond market was rattling, and the president was scaring the French with the threat of a debt pyramid collapse if Marine Le Pen’s party won. The state budget deficit in 2024 will exceed 5.5% of GDP and reach 160 billion euros. The cost of servicing the national debt has doubled in 5 years and amounts to 50 billion euros a year. This is already more than all spending on the country’s defense in the context of aggravation on the background of the Ukrainian war. Credit agencies are actively downgrading France, and Macron has no positive agenda. Even the Macronists begged him not to participate in the parliamentary campaign, because his unpopularity was lowering the rating of the Renaissance even among convinced liberals.

However, the desperate French are no longer frightened by the “specter of fascism” or even the “spirit of Stalinism,” and electoral models gave the Right 230-260 seats in the National Assembly, while the Macronist faction was to be halved. And at once 39% of the French wanted to see Jordan Bardella, a rising star of the Right, as the future French prime minister. It was clear that Paris was in any case facing a major political crisis that would undermine Macron’s position before 2027, turning the next three years into a “bloody harvest” for him.

Jordan Bardella
*Photo by Sarah Meyssonnier / Reuters*

Liberals in Brussels were also worried about Macron. The upcoming French elections evoked a sense of déjà vu. It was a repeat of 2016 with the Brexit referendum and this time the consequences for Brussels could be more serious, because the basic elements of the EU were at risk. To help Macron, European liberals launched an aggressive campaign to intimidate the electorate similar to the Brexit campaign. Because of this, French bonds were sold off en masse and the French financial markets lost 210 billion euros during the election campaign. The capitalization of the 3 largest French banks: BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole and Société Générale, collapsed by 15% during the election week. The creative intelligentsia and sportsmen were also hysterical, and in their interpretation, if they won, the Right would privatize French TV channels and start kicking foreign actors out of the country, which would bring down the entire French film industry. The right-wingers, if we return from scary tales to reality, promised to lower taxes, increase social benefits and cancel Macron’s pension reform. On the eve of the election, the Right had about 30% and the Left was in second place with 28%, while the Macronists had just 18%. If the right-wing had won, France’s financial system would have been in for a big shake-up, and the consequences could have been very severe for the entire European Union.

Amid the chaos in France, the financial system of the European Union shook. The cost of insurance against French default rose to unprecedented heights, the debt market was “sick”, the capitalization of French banks was falling, and financial markets were losing money. Central banks of other countries were actively dumping euros from their reserves, so much so that the share of euros in their holdings dropped to 20%. Given the erosion of confidence in the financial system amid the controversy over the seizure of Russian assets and the instability of the European Union, Brussels was in danger of further turmoil. Euro-bureaucrats even promised to punish France in case of a right-wing victory by imposing punitive sanctions on the country because of its acute budget deficit. True, Germany, Italy and almost everywhere else are having problems with this. The entire European Union would have to be sanctioned and dissolved, because it was understood that this was just politically motivated blackmail and a kind of political technology.

Before the elections, the most pessimistic mood prevailed in Paris and Brussels. Macron’s shaky liberal coalition was crumbling, and in public rhetoric even his close associates, like Prime Minister Gabriel Attal‘s “close friend”, began to withdraw. In the next National Assembly, Macron’s faction could shrink from the current 245 seats to a couple dozen, and his coalition partners began to seek alliances with other parties, while big French business began to make contacts with Marine Le Pen for the first time in history.

Gabriel Attal
*Photo by Ludovic Marin / AFP / Le Monde*

For business, a victory of the left with its plans to build a “new socialism” would be very dangerous. So business had to negotiate with the right, which hopes to form a majority, although the financial markets in France are in crisis. But times have changed, and if earlier sponsors shied away from the “National Union” and Le Pen sought support in Russia and Hungary, now the Right has become a force that can even engage in local lobbying, and therefore is interesting for investments from any actors. Against this background, the whole of Europe froze in anticipation of political chaos in France and quickly forgot about Macron’s militaristic statements about sending instructors to Ukraine, which were supposed to create a heroic image of him among the right-wing electorate, and the “Ukrainian issue” as a whole ceased to play any role in French and European affairs.

A week before the French elections, Macron’s tentative hopes for a decline in the right-wing’s popularity did not materialize. Then, in the polls, the ratings of Marine Le Pen’s party updated records of 35-36%, and the gap between the right-wing and the left-wing coalition, which had 27-38%, increased dramatically. Macron’s Renaissance party was far behind with 15-16%. Electoral models then gave Marine Le Pen’s party 250-280 seats in the National Assembly, just slightly short of a majority of 289. Macron’s campaign to intimidate the electorate with cataclysmic events in case of a right-wing victory failed. Marine Le Pen is still leading in the economic confidence polls.

Macron’s coalition found itself in a very difficult situation, and his supporters even refused to use Macron’s photo in their campaigning, hiding the fact that they were elected from the ruling party. The Euro-bureaucracy, holding its breath, was waiting for the disastrous results of the election, and in Brussels there was a split, which could disrupt the re-election of Ursula von der Leyen. Viktor Orbán, having won the presidency of the European Council, has promised to put sticks in the wheels of his opponents in Brussels, and now the right-wing in France may form its own government with Marine Le Pen as foreign minister, which would undermine the shaky status quo in the European Union.

Photo by Lionel Bonaventure /AFP / Politico

Yet von der Leyen was elected, and Macron was not about to give up. He changed his tactics and started scaring the centrists of the beginning of a “civil war” in France between the right and the left, which would win the overwhelming majority of seats in the National Assembly. In this logic, it was only necessary to vote for the liberal centrists to prevent radicalization, or at least for the left to stop the horror of ”nationalism”. At some point it seemed that, despite these efforts, Macron’s situation was becoming hopeless, so he had to adopt the theses of the U.S. Democratic Party, which similarly frightens Americans with civil war if Trump wins, and a whole movie called Civil War was produced. Meanwhile, the French Ministry of Defense tried to hastily conclude agreements with Germany and Poland on arms purchases for Ukraine, because there was a threat that very soon the French government will be reformatted and it will no longer give permission for this. After all, if the Right won, Jordan Bardella could become the next prime minister and Marine Le Pen the foreign minister, and France’s policy would change dramatically. The right has already promised to “sovereignize” France’s armed forces and focus less on NATO.

But Macron became a very experienced politician during his presidency. He continued to use the services of experienced American advisers, and the future showed that the split between the left and the right had not been overcome and the president remained a very weak arbiter in it. Both rounds of voting brought Macron many pleasant surprises and showed that his plan, although it looked uncertain, turned out to be effective. We will continue to talk about that topic in the next article.