Can Mélenchon spoil Macron’s party?

Just five days to go until the first round of the French parliamentary elections and the nation can barely restrain its indifference. The campaign so far has come down to a contest, mano a mano, between the newly re-elected President, Emmanuel Macron, and his would-be nemesis Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the hastily cobbled-together coalition of the Left known, by virtue of its French acronym, as La Nupes. 

This being France, neither man is actually contesting the election. Macron, as head of state, is constitutionally barred from so much as setting foot in the National Assembly, while the 70-year-old Mélenchon, eschewing personal scrutiny, is betting everything on the Left winning a majority of the 577 seats, thus (as he sees it) obliging the President to appoint him as prime minister. 

La Nupe (Nouvelle Union Populaire, Écologique et Sociale) has brought together France Unbowed – essentially a Mélenchon tribute band – the Greens, the Communists and what remains of the once-powerful Socialist Party in a bid to make the Fifth Republic practically ungovernable. 

To succeed, it has to defeat Macron’s En Marche party, unconvincingly branded as La Renaissance, a feat which most commentators believe highly improbable, but not – intriguingly – impossible. In that event, the President could no longer turn automatically to one of his own as prime minister, charged with delivering the En Marche agenda. Instead, he would have to appoint the leader of the party, or faction, capable of assembling a parliamentary majority. 

Step forward Jean-Luc Mélenchon – or so he would have us believe. Yet standing in his way will be not only En Marche, but the underperforming centre-right Republicans and the eternally disappointed Marine Le Pen, still after all these years heading the far-right National Rally. 

The most recent polls suggest that the Nupes will do well, but probably not well enough. They could win perhaps 175 seats – some say more – but not the 289 that would make Mélenchon a shoo-in for the Matignon. Le Pen, meanwhile, is hoping to increase her representation in the Assembly from just eight deputies (an ongoing anomaly) to as many as 50, while the Republicans could see their number halved, to 60 or less. 

Given that Le Pen defeated Mélenchon, albeit narrowly, in round one of April’s presidential elections, it might be supposed that she would be En Marche’s most feared opponent in the parliamentary contest. But no. France’s disaffected voters (which is most of them) are fickle creatures. In May, a third of them threw in their lot with the Far Right. Six weeks later, on the basis of Anyone but Macron, they look to have swung 180 degrees to the left. 

Even so, the likely reality, in the midst of the theatrics, is that En Marche and its allies in the smaller Movement for Democracy – known collectively as Ensemble (Together) – will scrape home, narrowly out-polling both extremes. This would allow the President to keep on as his PM the recently-appointed Elisabeth Borne, a fellow technocrat, whose mission in life is to establish Macronism as the all-purpose Gaullism of the 21st century. 

Received wisdom informs us that the French don’t warm to cohabitation – a President and prime minister from competing parties – in which electoral dynamics are stretched to breaking point. They like to know in which direction they are at least supposed to be heading. But the same experts who predict a points victory for En Marche over the course of the next two weeks (with round two of the Assembly elections on June 19) also tell us that voters have never been so uncertain of themselves or more likely to go off script.  

In the meantime, one of the odder aspects of the French system is currently playing itself out. Every candidate in the elections comes complete with a running-mate, or suppléant, who in the event of their being appointed to the government (requiring them to resign their seat), or their death or resignation – or arrest – replaces them without need of a by-election. 

Suppléants are unpaid. They have a vestigial constituency role, standing in for the titulaire at local functions and helping take care of the paperwork. But for the most part they are, like Dr Johnson’s lexicographers, harmless drudges, living for the chance that one day they may be called on to answer their country’s call. 

Macron, of course, remains a one-off. The idea that he might have a suppléant ready to steal his thunder would be, to him, literally unthinkable. In that sense, he is not unlike Boris Johnson, whose role as Volodymyr Zelensky’s best friend has been a stone in Macron’s shoe ever since his best friend, Vladimir Putin, decided to ignore his advice not to invade Ukraine. Johnson’s discomfiture this week is sure to have provided him with much unalloyed pleasure. 

Away from the international arena, which has not been working well for him in recent times, the President’s single-minded goal is to remind the French people that he is listening to them and has plans to spread his net more widely in the coming five years. Do they believe him? Probably not. But they probably don’t believe the equally vain Mélenchon either. When they cast their votes this Sunday, it will not just be warily, but wearily. 

After round one of the election comes round two – the playoffs – in which, assuming that no candidate has won more than 50 per cent of the vote, the top two in each constituency face off in the final. It is, arguably, a form of proportional representation in that those who gave their first preference to lower-placed candidates get a second chance at picking the winner. But, as in the UK, it means that most of the time only a minority of voters end up satisfied by the outcome.  

The fact is that while anything could happen in the course of the campaign, it probably won’t. Voters know that, which is why the hustings have been so lack-lustre and why the abstention rate, already worryingly high, looks set to rise higher still. 

On the other hand, you never know…