Democracy the loser as French voters shun the polling booth

If the French aren’t that much interested in their parliamentary elections, where does that leave the rest of us? Just 47 per cent of the electorate bothered to turn out yesterday for the first round of elections to the National Assembly – the lowest level of participation so far this century. Yes, next Sunday’s run-offs should see the total nudging towards 60 per cent. But as things stand, it’s a landslide for Don’t Care. It’s not Emmanuel Macron or his lacklustre opponents who are in trouble, it’s French democracy. 

In brief, Macron looks as if he will just about hold on to his absolute majority. The President’s coalition, styling itself Ensemble, made up of La République En Marche and allies, won just under 26 per cent of the unpopular vote first time out, as did its principal challenger, the Green Socialist Union, led by Jeremy Corbyn’s soul-brother, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. 

In the second round, with the lower-placed candidates eliminated, the expectation is that Ensemble will end up with between 275 and 300 seats against some 200 for the Left. In that event, with the Far Right and the centre-right picking up most of the remaining seats, the President will have the majority he needs to keep on governing much as he has for the last five years. 

There remains, of course, a chance that an ambush of the disaffected, anxious about rising prices and a worsening energy crisis, will change everything a week from now, forcing Macron to appoint Mélenchon as his prime minister. But don’t bank on it. Much more likely, the technocrat Elisabeth Borne, appointed three weeks ago as a safe pair of hands, will carry on regardless, pushing a legislative programme that makes sense but falls well short of inspirational. 

No sooner had Sunday’s results been confirmed than Mélenchon called on voters to turn out in force next time to reject the President’s “disastrous” policies. He is counting on the Anyone but Macron tendency to translate into Everyone for Mélenchon. 

For his part, Macron needs to win at least 289 seats to hold on to his parliamentary majority. Should the combined Left outpoll him, then unless the centre-right, with its estimated 50 or so seats, comes to his rescue, he could end up having to appoint Mélenchon as prime minister, ushering in a period of dysfunctional government known to the French as cohabitation. 

Macron, as the country’s newly-re-elected chief executive, wants to cut taxes, raise the retirement age and introduce far-reaching public sector pension reforms. Mélenchon, by contrast, would freeze prices in the shops, raise taxes on the wealthy, lower the retirement age and enhance existing pensions. Macron is pro-Nato and enthusiastically in favour of further EU integration. Mélenchon would like to pull France out of the Atlantic alliance and has threatened to ignore EU rules that, in his view, do not benefit French voters. 

In short, the pair are almost comically incompatible. 

The good news, if there is any, is that the Far Right National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen, has missed her target yet again – though not as definitively as the even further right Éric Zemmour, heading the anti-Muslim Reconquete party, who fell at the first hurdle yesterday in his southern redoubt in the Var. Le Pen seems to have lost her appetite for the struggle since losing out to Macron for the second time in last month’s presidential contest. She will be relieved to have outperformed the once mighty Republicans but frustrated still to be without the numbers to put Macron on the rack. It will be interesting to see if she can summon up the blood for confrontation in the years ahead or if, as has been speculated, she is ready to hand over to a new generation. 

For the moment, the future of the Left is stuck on hold. It will either bond together over the next ten days or else revert to its constituent parts. If Mélenchon succeeds in stymying Macron in the days ahead, he could yet, aged 70, emerge as the most significant Socialist politician since his old mentor François Mitterrand, and the least likely. On the other hand, given that he has not stood for election to the Assembly, pinning everything on being appointed prime minister, he could equally find that his time in the sun is almost up. 

For Macron, who seems somehow always to find a way, the outlook is far from certain. He is fated to remain President until 2027 but will be praying that he does not end up imprisoned in the Élysée, in office but not in power. 

What happens from here on in depends very much on the electorate, who on the basis of yesterday’s showing continue to hold politics in low regard. The weather forecast for the weekend ahead suggests temperatures reaching into the thirties celsius, inclining millions to head for the beach rather than the polling booth. Neither populism nor popular support have ever been so unpopular.