By all metrics, Emmanuel Macron’s supreme gamble at the recent French legislative election failed in spectacular fashion. Granted, the Rassemblement National failed to win a majority – but this was not to Renaissance’s benefit at all. Indeed, Macron may even presently find himself wishing that the RN really had won it all, so that he, the Supreme Technocrat, protégé of the Establishment par excellence, having passed through, in succession, the doors of the École nationale d’administration, the Inspectorate General of Finances, and the Elysée Palace (under Socialist administration), could have exposed and obliterated the RN’s flagship populist policies on tax, immigration and energy as the shambolic, incoherent fever-dreams of the rabble-rousing masses. Instead, Macron got neither the satisfaction of the prospect of letting the RN make a fool of itself, nor the ability to have his own party command the National Assembly outright. Instead, Macron got a hung parliament, and a second-place result for Renaissance, pipped to the post by the Nouveau Front Populaire – a coalition of France’s most prominent left-wing parties hopelessly divided on a myriad issues from NATO to the environment, yet united nonetheless in their disdain for the RN’s perceived chauvinism, as well as their disillusionment with neoliberal macronisme.
However, the election officially changed little for Macron, le Président himself, who is still firmly seated upon the president’s throne until his term expires in 2027, his ability to avoid committing treason permitting. Indeed, Renaissance’s failure to win a majority hardly signalled a rupture with past precedent. Instead, it merely continued the state of affairs that had begun back in 2022, when Renaissance and its allies in the coalition Ensemble had its number of deputies whittled down to 244 from the 308 Renaissance itself had successfully installed in 2017 when losing its electoral virginity (298 constitutes a majority in the National Assembly). Since 2022, Macron has proven himself more than comfortable with the art of minority governance, having already invoked article 49.3 of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic numerous times in order to push a total of twenty-eight bills through the National Assembly without a vote a mere two years into his second presidential term – avoiding, with each instance, the threat of a motion of no confidence requiring the support of a mere ten percent of deputies within twenty-four hours.
However, emblazoned upon the manifesto for the Nouveau Front Populaire was the promise to “abroger le 49.3” – to abolish article 49.3. Here, then, is a sobering warning for Macron – that he should think very, very carefully before seeking to bypass the representatives of the people once again in an attempt to impose his dictatorial will upon the nation of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Yet the likelihood that the NFP will actually exercise its ability to defeat some neoliberal scheme or another by invoking the motion de censure is exceedingly slim, for the motion de censure effectively triggers the forced resignation of the incumbent prime minister and government. The NFP may detest Macron, but it detests the RN even more. Its candidates graciously backed out of seats in which only Ensemble could challenge the RN, with Ensemble’s candidates reciprocating in constituencies witnessing a straight contest between the NFP and the RN, thereby setting up a robust cordon sanitaire with which to keep the RN firmly locked out of power. With the RN having succeeded in winning just under 150 seats and achieving a respectable third place behind the NFP and Ensemble, the NFP will be exceedingly careful to refrain from recklessly destabilising the Overton-window-friendly government to be formed by whichever sufficiently moderate candidate Macron deigns to name as France’s next prime minister following the resignation of Gabriel Attal, lest weakening Macron bolster the ranks of the RN and its supporters in the run-up to the presidential election of 2027.
In fact, the last – and only – time a motion de censure was raised in the Fifth Republic was during the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, who rejected the resignation of prime minister Georges Pompidou wholesale, choosing instead to dissolve the National Assembly and call a snap legislative election. Granted, it is unlikely that Macron will resort once again to calling a snap election in order to reset the political playing field during the remainder of his second presidential term, especially with his first attempt having failed so spectacularly to yield the desired results. Yet even the prospect thereof is no doubt too distressing for the NFP to even imagine. Another untimely dissolution of the National Assembly, caused this time by NFP scheming in response to yet another unpopular bill of Macron’s, would entail far too much risk for both parties involved. In suggesting the general incompetence and unfitness-to-govern of both electoral camps, it could potentially propel the RN to instant power on the basis of pure resentment for the other options available, in a manner akin to Keir Starmer’s not-so-grand victory founded upon sheer frustration with the Tory party.
If a bullish Macron bill is met with a motion de censure in the near future, it will not be the NFP that triggers it, but the RN; a party which prides itself, above all, on speaking for the common man, even against the personal convictions of its leaders. The RN may not have made a formal promise in its election manifesto to abolish article 49.3, but it exists only insofar as it speaks for the French people, rather than any particular political ideology, or set of formative values. The election manifesto of the NFP signalled, on the very first page, its intent to “break with the politics of Macron” and “respond to social, environmental, and democratic emergencies for the cause of peace”, while Ensemble chose a different set of core priorities, namely “work”, “purchasing power”, and “the environment”. The RN, on the other hand, chose not fixed values, not foundational principles, but the volonté générale itself, in all its awful inchoateness and instability. “The people will express itself between the 30th June and the 7th July and all must respect its choice and consent to its will in keeping with the intangibility of universal suffrage”, read the first paragraph of the RN’s manifesto.
In this sense, the RN has nothing to lose from triggering a motion de censure in response to an attempt by Macron to bypass the National Assembly, while the NFP has everything to lose. The RN’s voters expect it to stand up against the politics of the few, of the elite, of France’s technocratic ruling class until it gives out, far more than they desire the realisation of any concrete policies beyond reducing immigration, both legal and illegal: the RN’s manifesto came out with around half the word count of the NFP’s. The RN’s voters will no doubt reward the RN for fighting their corner to the point of triggering the resignation of the next prime minister (read: a macroniste crony representing les riches) or even yet another legislative election (a golden opportunity for the RN to win a majority outright). By contrast, the NFP can only expect punishment from daring to challenge the injustice of the semi-presidentialism of the Fifth Republic so rashly, even though its election manifesto promised, of all things, to usher in the age of the parliamentary Sixth Republic.
How, then, will Macron fend off the threat of the RN? Quite possibly by leaning towards their major talking points – as he has previously shown himself capable of doing and willing to dare. His immigration bill of December 2023 discriminated between citizens and legal migrants when determining eligibility for benefits and was welcomed by Marine le Pen as an “ideological victory for the Rassemblement National”, ultimately passing through the National Assembly thanks to support from RN deputies after causing a split within Renaissance itself. Ironically enough, if Macron chooses to embark upon this path, then he will expose himself as the direct mirror of the RN – a post-ideological figure with no political interests other than the interests of the nation, an empty vessel without a real vision of its own motivated solely by necessity, by expediency – for, as those with a political memory superior to that of a goldfish will no doubt remember, Macron initially ran for his first term as president back in 2017 on an explicitly pro-immigration platform, voicing loud and unabashed support for Angela Merkel’s open-door policy on refugee and migrant asylum seekers. The only difference between Macron and the RN would, at this juncture, be, on the one hand, the diametric opposition between the charismatic leadership and individualistic stewardship of the great man, prevailing boldly over the confusion and incoherence of the parliamentary process in order to put the nation first, and, on the other, the rule of the people, by and for the masses, encapsulated in Le Pen’s plebiscitary vision, which would see issues ranging from the death penalty to constitutional change put to the popular vote in referenda. As Le Pen declared in a 2022 interview with The Telegraph, “I want the referendum to become a classic operating tool”.
It is hard to see how this would not spell the end for Macron and his entire political legacy – Renaissance, Ensemble, Attal, along with any future appointed successors. The French currently seem well and truly exhausted of the cult of the individual. They turned out in droves to vote for either a coalition platform promising the end of presidentialism and the parliamentary rebirth of the nation, or the post-ideological party of the people and the plebiscite. Indeed, as Le Monde reported in the run-up to the first round of the election on the 30th June, Ensemble MPs hoping for re-election had removed Macron’s face from their campaign posters. “Emmanuel Macron is like an artist who has gone out of fashion”, Patrick Vignal, the Renaissance candidate for Hérault, complained to Le Monde. But French voters appeared tired of far more than just Macron the man himself on the 7th July. They were tired of the concept of the single individual in power itself; ultimately unable, perhaps, to forget the smarting insult to the nation issued by Macron in September 2018, a gaffe which demonstrated the most abject disconnect from the life of the ordinary Frenchman possible. Then, Macron had laconically told a young, unemployed gardener speaking candidly about his difficulties finding work that “I can find you a job just by crossing the road”.
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