Palace coup in Paris
Macron is dead, long live "Macronism"
Emmanuel Macron’s presidency is over. He still commands the armed forces – although not their budget – and is France’s chief diplomat, but his seven-year rule ended even before the results of the two-round legislative election came in.
Since he dissolved the national assembly on June 9, Macron has been, as a bitter British minister once said of his estranged boss, “in office but not in power”1. The president’s instinct – to force the French electorate to choose between marrying or dumping right-wing nationalism after its long and undignified flirtation with the Le Pen family – was sound. His timing wasn’t.
Instead of the rip-off-the-sparadrap clarification Macron craved, dissolution has delivered a hung parliament in a country where “coalition” has been a dirty word since the collapse of the Fourth Republic in 1958. At extraordinary speed, power has haemorrhaged from the Élysée Palace to Palais Bourbon – the assembly’s home on the left bank of the Seine. This may not seem obvious as the assembly fails to assemble a majority but will become so once the parties regain muscle memory of 70-year-old powers and responsibilities.
Secret coalition
It’s been a week since the second round of the election and the parties can’t even agree on the message voters sent them. Was it, as the left claims, a mandate for socialism? Having unexpectedly overtaken Marine Le Pen’s RN and secured 182 assembly seats, the left-wing NFP alliance declared itself the winner then spent a week squabbling over who to nominate as prime minister.
There are a few holes in the NFP’s argument. First, their 182-seat tally is 107 short of a majority. Second, the NFP only won the second round because more than 200 challengers stood down in three-way races to allow its candidates a clear run against the RN. Hardly a mandate for the NFP’s programme. Third, the NFP isn’t a party; it’s a jerrybuilt alliance of convenience between more than four parties and one of these – Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s LFI – is as hated and distrusted as the RN.
Most importantly, while LFI commands the majority of seats within the NFP, it is the old centre-left PS – the party of former presidents François Mitterrand and François Hollande – that bagged the most gains. Between the 2022 and 2024 legislative elections, the PS jumped from 27 to 59 seats. And this came soon after the elections to the European Parliament on June 9, when the PS regained leadership of the left by securing 14% of the national vote to LFI’s 10%. That PS revival was achieved by an unashamedly europhile and anti-antisemitic campaign led by Raphaël Glucksmann. For 30 minutes on June 9, the secular, EU-embracing centre-left – split since 2017 between the rump PS and the left of Macron’s Ensemble coalition – looked poised to reunite. At the same time, the Macronist right – led by former premier Édouard Philippe and Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister – were bound to converge with Les Républicains (LR – the movement founded by Nicolas Sarkozy) as the 2027 presidential elections approached.
All Macron had to do was allow time for this realignment of the centre-right and centre-left to get underway, manage European diplomacy through the US election and the most delicate stage of the Russian-Ukrainian war, pass an unambitious budget, and call a legislative election next spring. Instead, he took a European Parliament election message seriously, which is always a bad idea and was convinced by political advisers that an early election would be clarifying. Either the RN would win a majority, misgovern or betray its voters for three years so sinking Le Pen’s 2027 presidential campaign, and allow his successors three years to campaign from the luxury of opposition. Or, faced with the genuine prospect of an RN legislative victory, French voters would scurry back to the presidential majority.
On this second calculation, he was half-right. The French voted for a pro-EU, centre-hugging, and relatively fiscally responsible coalition made up of Ensemble’s constituent parties (Renaissance, Horizons, and MoDem) together with LR and the PS. But this is not Macron’s majority anymore. The day he dissolved the assembly without consulting them, he lost all authority over the Ensemble parties. MoDem was always independent while Philippe’s Horizons will re-merge with LR over time. Most intriguingly, as of today, Renaissance – the core of Macron’s original 2016-17 left-of-centre movement – is in the hands of his once-loyal prime minister Gabriel Attal. Promoted to the premiership in January because of his youth, communication skills, and ability to speak to LR voters, Attal has re-found his PS-right soul with the help of left-leaning advisers. Together with the Renaissance leadership - Olivier Dussopt and Stéphane Séjourné - Attal is positioned to explore convergence with Glucksmann. By the way, anyone who thinks Glucksmann has no base among left-wing voters should take a look at the latest Elabe poll.
These are medium-term developments. Today, France’s new locus of power – Palais Bourbon – has big decisions to make. For a start, it has to allow an executive of some kind to be formed once the Paris Olympics are out of the way in mid-August. And, in October, that government has to present a budget that at least makes a nod at stabilising public debt, which will rise to 114% of national output next year in the absence of new fiscal measures. The PS leadership is still talking about spending increases and will need some market discipline before coming into line or dividing.
Pick of the pods
Tired of politics and trying to get an hour's daytime sleep on July 5, I clicked on the BBC Documentary Podcast - Journey to Sepharad - that had just landed in my inbox. Sepharad, it turns out, has come to mean Spain in Hebrew and Ashkenaz Germany. I say "come to mean" because it's thought the words originally referred to unspecified western and northern lands. In this podcast, Michael Goldfarb, an Ashkenazi Jew, explores the oral history of Sephardim in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco and finds "Catholic" families puzzled by traditions and habits passed down over centuries.
Back to politics. I’ve heard more entertainingly outraged takes after Joe Biden’s career-ending debate performance but I learned the most from Chuck Todd’s conversation with Jonathan Martin on the The Chuck Toddcast. Todd, a Democrat-leaning veteran political journalist, says: “Looking at his behaviour now, in clinging to this, I think the entire narrative on Joe Biden is going to change, in that everything’s always been about his ambition and his ambition comes first”.
In Michael Kofman's latest The Russia Contingency three-part podcast ($) - Fresh Impressions from the frontlines in Ukraine - he and Rob Lee report back on the state of the battlefield after a field trip (together with Franz-Stefan Gady) close to the front line in Donbas. You won’t hear a more thorough, expert, or grounded analysis of the war outside a situation room. Just one warning: these two specialists are so impatient to tell you what they’ve seen that they should be listened to at x0.75. Lee especially needs a glossary that would include “vidge” (advantage) and “keemeye” (keep in mind).