“Alone, abandoned, in this populous desert that they call Paris”: only Emmanuel Macron remains, the child prodigy of French politics, whose risk (or too much pride?) of calling early elections after the electoral defeat in the EU elections of June 9th now risks turning out to be a merciless political boomerang, the possible decline of a certain idea of France and Europe. Many, in these last weeks of the lightning electoral campaign with the République on the verge of a nervous breakdown, have tried to make sense of the announced dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale, considered by many to be incomprehensible if not downright self-defeating: what is the need to call elections? anticipated, consigning the Union’s second largest economy to the unknown of the extremes, when Macron could have continued to govern (albeit without an absolute majority in parliament from 2022) for another three years?
Among the most popular answers, in this crazy Parisian summer that in less than a month will host the 2024 Olympic Games without yet knowing who will be at the helm of the government, there is an almost sacrificial reasoning: “Better to cohabit now with Jordan Bardella’s Rassemblement National than to leave the keys to the Elysée in 2027 to the far right (Marine Le Pen).” This would be the poker move of the youngest president of the Fifth Republic, increasingly misunderstood at home and abroad, just think of the international outcry caused in February by his statements on sending troops to Ukraine.
A very risky move, that of the polls, whose real effectiveness will therefore be appreciated only in three years, in the race for the 2027 Elysée, unless the president currently the ‘scapegoat’ for all the country’s ills leaves early, as Le Pen herself would dream. The early political elections of June 30 and July 7 are “an act of confidence in our people, a historic moment for our country”, assures Macron, now at rock bottom in popularity in front of a Jordan Bardella with the wind in his sails, adding that “the return to the sovereign people was the only republican decision” possible.
Video France, Macron and his wife Brigitte vote in Le Touquet
A moment of “clarification” for the whole of France, is Macron’s reasoning, in a context in which “the forces of the far right are around 40%. Something we cannot ignore”. Returning the word to the polls, the president in crisis continues to hope for a great republican ”leap”, the unity of the French against all forms of extremism, be it embodied by the Rassemblement National or by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise ( one of the main components of the left-wing cartel Nouveau Front Populaire), as at the time of the ‘Front Républicain’ of 2002 in the run-off between Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen. Another era, and another perception of the French. Who in this case do not seem to want to comply with Macron’s appeal in any way, exasperated by a president accused of arrogance and considered too distant from the people.
The Rassemblement National? ”He has never governed. For once we want to try something different”: this is one of the most frequent responses, as if the Lepenist choice were above all a choice of alternation after 7 years of Macron at the Elysée. While there are those who wonder whether beyond the level of competence or otherwise of the various presidents gradually in office through the five-year terms (and each time regularly detested: before Macron, Hollande and Sarkozy were no less) it is not the verticality itself of the French Fifth Republic, which gives the holder of the Elysée powers of a ‘republican monarch’ that are uncommon in Europe, so as not to cause a rift between the president and his citizens.
Reproduction reserved © Copyright ANSA
