Cécile Alduy
On June 9, Emmanuel Macron gambled his narrow parliamentary majority by calling a snap election. The president did so minutes after it became clear that France’s far right had won 40 percent of French votes in the European Union parliamentary contest. That outcome, Macron thought, would frighten and mobilize his base to turn out en masse in a new national election. He hoped the result would give him a more comfortable majority in the National Assembly and halt the rise of the National Rally—France’s main far-right party. Macron, who sometimes seems to aim to be a kind of god (he once said he aspired to be “Jupiterian”), may also have enjoyed flexing his constitutional powers at a moment when he was losing his grip on the country. The result was the shortest electoral campaign in France since 1958. Parties and candidates had only three weeks to organize, and voters had to scramble to make sense of the new political landscape.
For Macron, the scheme backfired spectacularly. The president’s centrist alliance won just 21 percent of the vote in the first round, coming in third. It is expected to lose between 155 and 210 of its current seats. But the defeat is far more than just Macron’s. The election’s biggest winner is not some other mainstream political party, but the National Rally, which came in first. After the runoffs, it may control a majority. Macron, then, has put France’s democratic forces and republican ideals in jeopardy.
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