Macron’s post-party politics will weaken France in next years

Most of those who don’t know France or ?read French think the only French election that matters is the Presidency: the man (they have all been men so far) who enters the Elysée.

However France’s parliamentary elections now currently being fought hard by Emmanuel Macron and his opponents are as important as Congressional elections in the US. A French President, like his US counterpart, loses much of his power if he does not also control the National Assembly.

And in France Emmanuel Macron is worried that his control of who becomes a minister and what laws are passed may slip away from him in the two-round National Assembly elections that take place over the next two Sundays.

Two of his predecessors — Fran?ois Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac — had to live with a National Assembly controlled by the opposition. The French Socialists won a majority in June 1997. The first five years of Tony Blair’s Labour government 1997-2002 coincided with five years of French Socialist government.

Today the wish which is father to the thought of the Paris elites — including most Anglo-American commentators on France — is that French voters, having rejected the hard-Right Marine Le Pen and the Corbynite Leftist Jean Luc Mélenchon in April’s presidential election, will give the re-elected President Macron a parliamentary majority too.

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The problem is that Macron has accelerated the demolition of traditional French party politics such as it existed between 1945 and 2017 when he was elected President without a party and appealing over the heads of normal party structures and their media networks directly to the French people.

If voters follow the 2017 French election pattern, when Macron first won the presidency and then parachuted in devotees who won most seats in the National Assembly, that is a reasonable assumption. But supposing in 2022 they do not??Old parties and old politics were rejected five years ago, but what replaced them is no longer new.

Macron has named a woman Prime Minister, Elizabeth Borne. She is a respected civil servant who has worked for the state all her life and never done anything so vulgar as seek election until this Sunday when she will seek to be elected as a National Assembly deputy in a small town in Normandy.?

Mme Borne is a tough can-do manager who was a functionary for the last Socialist President of France, Fran?ois Hollande. Macron’s spinners are using this fact to present her as a woman of the Left. I worked reasonably closely with French socialist ministers, deputies, MEPs and party officials over the last 25 years. I never heard her name mentioned.

It is far from clear that naming Mme Borne as PM will pull in a single Left voter for Macron. The problem for Macron is that there are hardly any Socialist voters left. ?Indeed the biggest party in France now are the non-voters. Macron only got 30% of votes in the first round of the presidential election when he had to stand against other political leaders. To be sure in the second round of the presidential contest when his opponent was a woman representing a party with deep roots in racism, even anti-semitism who was funded by Vladimir Putin, and wants France out of Nato and the European Union it was an easy win for Macron.

The Socialist presidential candidate Anne Hidalgo got just 1.8% of the first round vote. 10 years ago the French Socialist Party won the Elysée for the third time in 30 years as well winning government majority in the National Assembly.

The French Socialists decided to commit one of the slowest most public suicides in European history as the party collapsed into factions, some based on ambitious personalities, others on ideological refusal of all social democratic compromise. It ended with the election of a non-politician, Emmanuel Macron.

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The lost tribes of French politics – the government right descended from General de Gaulle which produced presidents like Jacque Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, the government left forged by Francoist Mitterrand with loose links to the Green who also reject any loyalty to a common leader and the anti-system parties of the hard right and hard left which now occupy the place once filled by the French Communist Party which between 1945 and 1978 regularly polled up to a third of all French votes with a focus on nationalist statism, opposition to European partnership and wider EuroAtlantic alliances.

In the National Assembly elections Macron’s main worry is the post-socialist left. There are 11 constituencies reserved for 1.5 million French voters living overseas. They have already voted in the first round while mainland France will vote this Sunday. In 10 out of these 11 seats, the Left — now formed into a loose alliance of disaffected ex Socialists, Trotskyists, Communists, Greens and a few Socialists ?still carrying the tattered flag of the French Socialist Party — came a close second to the pro-Macron candidates.

Now a brief technical note on French elections. There are 577 deputies in the National Assembly, elected using a two-round system based on single-member seats. If a candidate gets at least 25% of all eligible voters and a majority, he or she is elected in the first round. Few manage this and to go into the second round you need 12.5% of?eligible?voters.

Macron has abolished normal party politics and weakened intermediary organisations like political parties, trade unions, regional or city leaders. So there are no interlocuteurs between the Elysée and?la rue?— the street. The streets and especially roundabouts are where the gilets jaunes, anti-vaxers, and now nurses and doctors have mobilised, causing him so much trouble in his first presidency.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leading figure on the Left, has insisted he should be made Prime Minister and form a government because he came third to Macron in the presidential contest. It is an odd argument — especially as Mélenchon is not even running for a seat in the Assembly.

The main question is who gets though to the second round. The two far-Right candidates, Marine le Pen and éric Zemmour, will split their vote. The centre-Right Les Républicains — the sister party of British Tories before the arrival of Boris Johnson, the English version of Donald Trump,– got just 4.8%. They may hope local factors or personalities will help them in these National Assembly elections.

But the chances are that next Sunday night, those who hate Macron — and there are many of those in France — will have to decide whether to hold their noses and votes for the Left-Green-Communist alliance headed up by the 70-year-old Mélenchon — a demagogic Gallic combination of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders.

If voters really, really hate Macron they may decide to make his second term impossible by refusing to give him a majority. He is talking vaguely about holding endless citizens assemblies and creating a “National Council to Refound France,” using the language of wartime. In 1944-45 the National Council of Resistance helped shape the early politics of post-war France.

But that was headed by General de Gaulle, France’s Churchill, and Macron is no De Gaulle. He has lost his status and authority in Europe. When he addressed the European Parliament last month and urged an abolition of the national veto in key EU decision-making on foreign policy and defence, he was instantly repudiated by 13 EU prime ministers who signed a joint letter opposing his ideas. He is widely criticised in European circles for his talks with Vladimir Putin his calls for a settlement that does not “humiliate” the Kremlin’s tyrant.?He has so far refused to visit Kyiv to show any solidarity with the beleaguered Ukrainian President Zelensky though France has delivered missiles and howitizers, (heavier weapons than Britain has so far sent to Kyiv), and taken in far more Ukrainian refugees in contrast to Boris Johnson who has made it very difficult for Ukrainians to come to the UK.

Macron is not popular with the London establishment and especially its commentariat. The EU is (falsely) seen in England as under overbearing Parisian influence, if not full control.

But a France without a strong government and without stable political institutions, including widely representative political parties, will soon be Europe’s loose cannon. France remains a major pillar of the western community of Euro-Atlantic democracies and rule-of-law values. These National Assembly elections could leave la rue deciding French policy, rather than broader national and geo-political interests.

Soon the question will arise of France après-Macron. This is his last term. He has not shaped a party in the normal sense of a political grouping in a democracy with a mass membership who selects on the basis of internal democratic elections its candidate for every post from local village councillor, city mayors, national law-makers and the Presidency.

Macron has invented a post-party politics which suits his style and gives him far more power than any German Chancellor or British Prime Minister who has to ensure a parliamentary majority at all times for policy choices or new legislation.

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Europe is going through a tiple crisis of a major war on its ?soil; the end of the ultra-liberal Enrichissez-vous (Get Rich) era proclaimed at Davos every year following the Reagan-Thatcher destruction of the post-1945 settlement based on social rights and public investment;, and major challenges of adapting to the climate emergency and the arrival of new immigrant Europeans including 44 million Muslims.

Macron will be plagued by his own succession question as European politics is based in party-networks and alliances and Macron’s updating of Louis XIV’s “L’état c’est moi” – the concept of all democracy turning around one individual is not exportable or even understood or accepted in the other 26 members of the EU, let alone Britain where normal political processes are busy sending its populist nationalist England-first prime minister to the dustbin of history.

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Macron will probably get a majority in the National Assembly elections but maybe not a big enough one to let him legislate as he desires. France after five strong purposeful years is going to be a confused, uncertain nation with shaky politics at a dangerous time for the European and wider global democratic world.