Macron has taken a pummelling – but he’s not done yet

It has become fashionable in recent years to try to discern from the mess left behind by any election that fails to produce an obvious winner what it is that the voters were trying to say. It is not enough to conclude that some wanted one thing and others something else. Without even knowing it, those who took part in Sunday’s second round of elections to the National Assembly were apparently leaving a message, and only when that message is fully understood can progress be made. 

But what if the message is that France doesn’t know its own mind and is desperately in need of leadership? Sunday’s vote, which divides the new Assembly into three mutually disdainful blocs, gave a lot of pleasure not only to those who rejoice in seeing Emmanuel Macron receive a well-deserved kick in the teeth, but to those – quite possibly a majority of the electorate – for whom politics itself has become a dirty word. 

Any consideration of where we go from here has to start with the reality that 54 per cent of voters couldn’t be bothered to turn out. The other 46 per cent, meanwhile, split into three camps – those who either support Macron or feel that he’s the best of a bad bunch, those who would not be unhappy to see the country flirt with Fascism, and those who favour the creation of a Socialist workers’ republic. 

If there is a message hidden in that hardline trichotomy, it is hard to see what it is. 

By making France ungovernable at a time of high inflation and international uncertainty, it is the people themselves who have ensured that nothing substantive gets done in the months ahead. And when nothing gets done, there will be widespread resentment leading to angry street protests and a wholesale demand for change. 

Who then will get the blame? It won’t be Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose ramshackle coalition of the Left is already falling apart, and it won’t be Marine Le Pen, whose National Rally has moved into pole position on the Right. Nor will it be Christian Jacob, the latest little-known deputy to claim the leadership of the centre-right Republican Party. No. Responsibility for everything that goes wrong will be heaped entirely on Emmanuel Macron despite the fact that he was re-elected as President, by a comfortable margin, as recently as 24 April. 

That’s democracy for you. But now it is time for the tea-leaf readers to quit the scene and make way for the horse-traders. 

On Tuesday, Macron met with Jacob, best known for his expertise on farming and country pursuits, who two years ago featured in Paris Match dressed in full hunting gear. Jacob, aged 62, has been a member of the Republicans’ inner circle for many years, having served as minister for the civil service in the final years of the presidency of Jacques Chirac and subsequently as leader of the party in the Assembly. 

In the presidential contest, the Republican candidate, Valérie Pécresse, came away with less than five per cent of the vote and lost her deposit. She is now an un-person. Jacob, at the same time, decided not to run for parliament again and thus, like Mélenchon, finds himself on the outside looking in. 

Unfazed by his own lack of high-grade credentials, Jacob gave Macron short shrift. The Republicans, he said, would look carefully at the President’s proposals to reform state pensions, increase the retirement age and cut taxes. But they would not join him in any kind of pact. Instead, as keepers of high principle (unlike their previous leaders Nicholas Sarkozy and François Fillon, both convicted of imprisonable acts of fraud), they would remain part of the opposition. 

Marine Le Pen’s rejection of a place at the governing table was hardly unexpected. Macron had let it be known that he would not work with her under any circumstances. For her, the future held something far more intriguing – the possibility that as leader of the largest single faction other than Macron’s En Marche (now absurdly renamed Renaissance), she could end up as chair of the parliamentary finance committee. Should she succeed in this, she would not only be assigned a grand office and staff in the Palais Bourbon, but the right to conduct inquiries and to demand access to otherwise confidential government papers.

It could be the start of the most substantive chapter in Le Pen’s long career. Seemingly wiped out in April, she is back with a vengeance.  

No such joy for Mélenchon, whose triumphalism, on full display on Sunday, has thus far been revealed as something of a three-day wonder. His France Insoumise Party, on its own, won just 72 seats on Sunday to the National Rally’s 89. Mélenchon had hoped for a scale of victory that would justify his demand that he be appointed prime minister, replacing Macron’s choice, the technocrat Elisabeth Borne. Instead, after standing with him on the hustings, the other leftist parties, Socialists, Communists and Greens, have decided to go it alone, meaning that the 131 seats the four won in alliance no longer count in the race for second place. Not only will Mélenchon not take Borne’s job at the Matignon, he will not even have his own seat in the Assembly. 

It seems fair to say that Macron will not be troubled by Mélenchon’s discomfiture, which was entirely of his own making. But the President won’t gloat for long. Even as he sits down with the 70-year-old marxist to explore whatever quantum space the two may somehow share, his mind will be turning to what agenda he and his prime minister can conjure up that could command a majority in the chamber. 

Renaissance (seriously?) and its close allies won 245 seats on Sunday, 44 short of an absolute majority. If the Republicans, with their 61 votes, support the set of proposals the government is bound to put forward on pensions, the age of retirement and pro-business tax cuts, much will have been accomplished. But the Conservatives, used for so long to being top dogs, will drive a hard bargain, hoping to present themselves as the power behind the throne. They could demand a level of change that many in Macron’s own ranks would be unwilling to support. 

In the meantime, by way of an unspoken devil’s bargain, the Left and the Far Right look set to vote together on a pan-populist agenda based around workers’ rights, later (not earlier) retirement, higher levels of subsidy for food, fuel and heating, and – at least among some – resistance to the workings of both NATO and the EU. 

On paper, the combined Left, plus the National Rally and a selection of “others” and independents can probably call on the backing of some 250 deputies, enough to trouble the government, but not enough to outvote them on core issues so long as the Republicans don’t decide to go for broke. 

The understanding in government circles is that the President is prepared to listen more to parliament and to govern as pragmatically as possible, blurring some of his own red lines while taking on board the concerns of parties other than his own. He will almost certainly find this hard. For the last five years, as an ardent egotist, he has enjoyed the benefits of a supine, three-figure majority in the Assembly, causing the media, as well as the Opposition, to pour scorn on his supporters. 

Against that, he might find that having left his prime minister and Cabinet to deal with those things that can probably be accomplished on the home front, he will be able, as President, to concentrate on such challenging issues as the war in Ukraine, national defence, the outworkings of Brexit and (rhetorically at least) the further integration of Europe. The constitution of the Fifth Republic gives him, as head of state, a great deal of virtually untrammelled power in the conduct of national security and foreign relations. Like a second term US President elevating himself above day-to-day domestic concerns, he may see the restoration of his country’s place in the world as the opportunity he needs to secure his legacy. 

If so, he must hope that the day-to-day does not intrude as it did throughout the entirety of his first mandate, when the gilet-jaunes, the rail-workers, the unions, anarchists, Covid-19 and, most recently, Ukraine, combined to transform the Élysée Palace into a round-the-clock crisis management centre. 

Évenéments, mon gar, évenéments. Barack Obama would understand the problem. So would Tony Blair. Macron’s years in office have left him, aged just 44, with greying temples and deep lines on his forehead. 

If over the course of the next 12 months things do go hopelessly awry, one option open to him will be to dissolve the Assembly and hold fresh elections. He would in that event be betting everything on the hope that the voters’ message next time round would echo his own – that good government is impossible without strong leadership at the top and the proper support of a majority in parliament.