French President Emmanuel Macron has set two contrasting records within three months. In April, he became the first French president in two decades to win a second term at the Elysee Palace, then in June, he became the first newly elected president in 20 years whose party failed to win enough seats to maintain its absolute majority in the National Assembly. The rout of the presidential party in the second round of parliamentary elections shocked everyone. In 1988, President Francois Mitterrand’s Socialist Party also failed to cobble together enough votes to constitute an absolute majority in the National Assembly, but at that time Mitterrand and his party had already anticipated their electoral setback. However, the quantum of rebuke from the French voters has surprised Macron and his team because the most recent pre-election opinion polls were predicting Macron’s center coalition, Ensemble, to win around 330 seats. However, it managed to only capture 245 seats in the 577-member assembly – losing the absolute majority it had enjoyed since 2017.
But the results of the second round have drastically changed the whole complexion of the parliament. The left-wing and Green alliance, Nupes, led by the veteran far-left polemicist Jean-Luc Melenchon, made significant advances by winning 133 seats – almost double compared to their share in the previous assembly – and became the biggest opposition force. Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally made astounding progress from eight to 89 seats (more than a 10-fold jump). She was never expecting such a huge tally of seats in the assembly after her defeat in the presidential election two months back. In fact, her participation was visibly half-hearted. But Macron’s predicament is further aggravated by the fact a big number of his close associates also lost their seats, including Richard Ferrand, the president of the National Assembly, and Amelie de Montchalin, his minister for green transition. A "democratic shock" is how Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire described the election results, while "The Slap" was the headline on the front page of the left-leaning daily Liberation. The results were indubitably a big shock for Macron who had been pleading for a strong mandate – against the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine war that has triggered a global energy and food crisis. Although it is too early to clearly demarcate the factors behind the unusual success of more radical opponents of Macron, one thing is quite certain: the war on the eastern flank of Europe has started affecting the political outlook of the inhabitants of the continent.
Macron aggressively propagated that he intends to gradually raise the retirement age from 62 to 65, he also intends to raise the minimum pension to 1,100 euros ($1,130) from 917 euros. Ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, he has made the "deepening of the European Union" a key element of his foreign policy and used this as the "unique selling point" to pledge to French voters. He tried to utilize the Ukraine war and the proposed EU expansion in the Western Balkans as the main topic of his electoral rhetoric. "Foreign policy" became his main bludgeon to attract the French voters. After winning the presidential election, he spent more time on foreign policy matters than on the election campaign for the National Assembly. But his campaign was lackluster. He believed that voters were more concerned about the Ukraine war and its fallouts and, therefore, he should utilize his frequent trips to neighboring capitals and Kyiv and photos with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as the main plank of his election campaign. He also pitched himself as the "most suitable moderator" between Moscow and Kyiv to bolster his image at home as an insightful statesperson. But all this was shattered in the third week of June, when French voters surprised him by supporting his opponents on both extremes of the political horizon, creating almost a hung parliament. But, seen as out of touch by many voters, he could not identify the true needs of disenchanted and divided voters.
His main opponent Melenchon's Nupes alliance was campaigning for freezing the prices of essential goods, reducing the retirement age, capping inheritance and banning companies that pay dividends from firing workers. While his opponent in the presidential race, Le Pen, a symbol of historic association with racism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, amplified her bench strength in the assembly more than 10-fold. The recent electoral success of Le Pen is a result of her drive to detoxify her party’s reputation, convincing the public to forgive and forget its baleful past. These results have exposed deep division within the political spectrum of France where "extremism" has emerged as the new normal. The Ukraine war has also directly played a role in augmenting this chasm within French society. Though Le Pen enthusiastically labeled the electoral results as the beginning of the end of "the Macron adventure," all is not lost for Macron. He has a handsome majority in the parliament. The only problem now will be the compromises that he will have to make with other parties while pushing his favorite legislation through the National Assembly. For the last five years, having more than an absolute majority in the National Assembly, Macron practically used it as a rubber stamp through his "top-down" leadership style. Now his second term will be disrupted by compromises in parliament. Most probably Macron will seek support from the conservative Les Republicains, which is more compatible with Ensemble, to have a working relationship on a case-by-case basis rather than a coalition-kind of arrangement. Indubitably, Macron enjoys a big fan-following at home who see him as a far-sighted statesman trying his best to establish France’s leadership role within the EU and as a global power in the midst of the Ukraine crisis. However, France's political landscape is passing through an intricate evolutionary phase of tussle between the extremists – on both sides – and the centrists.
Given the unique configuration of the French political system, which amalgamates the presidential and parliamentary forms of government into an atypical equation, political acrimony seems to be deeply embedded in these election results. Macron’s opponents, particularly Le Pen and Melenchon, who are literally in a state of ecstasy over such an astounding victory in the elections, are expected to display excessive arrogance to create more problems for Macron in the coming days. At this time, when the European continent is whirling down in the quagmire of a war, fuel crisis, skyrocketing inflation and the looming threat of recession, French voters have pushed their political system into a serious kind of turbulence and uncertainty – the real testing time for Macron and his opponents. There are interesting times ahead for French politics.
*Op-ed contributor based in Karachi, Pakistan