From the Beauvau hotel even before the earthquake a word emanated that we did not expect to hear within these walls, “dissolution”: “If this text is not adopted after all the efforts we are making and while it is in the core target of the proposals made by LR for 15 years, the question will arise whether we can continue with this Assembly. It is obvious.” Monday evening, it was Gérald Darmanin himself who noted on TF1: “The majority of deputies do not represent the majority of opinion.”
It’s a term that we generally use a few dozen meters away, at the Elysée Palace. The president is the only one who can decide to dissolve the National Assembly, and he does not need anyone to do so, only to consult the Prime Minister and the presidents of the two Assemblies. Finally free, finally master of your own home! The complete opposite of what happened with this damn immigration bill. “I want an effective and fair law, in a single text that maintains this balance,” announced the head of state in an interview with Parisian, in April. He wants, he can’t: the political crisis is here.
Emmanuel Macron knows the Constitution, and he knows the Fifth Republic. “When you are steeped in history, dissolution is necessarily an option,” noted one of his close friends, in the wake of the National Assembly’s vote rejecting the government text. The president knows that the last one to have risked it was burned there, his name was Jacques Chirac, we were in 1997, and the announced victory of the right, supposed to strengthen Alain Juppé in Matignon, had led to the arrival of socialist Lionel Jospin. The problem at the time was the majority; the problem today is the lack of a majority. But the desire to succeed where his distant predecessor had failed would almost be a sufficient reason to push Emmanuel Macron, whose pride does not run out with the length of his mandate running out, to embark on such a maneuver.
He who played so much with the idea of a referendum without ever taking action also teased that of a dissolution. Rather in private than in public, because a president does not threaten to press the nuclear button on television, that would not be very suitable, as Chirac said, again. In the months following the legislative elections of June 2022 and their relative majority, the cause of so much misfortune, Emmanuel Macron indicated to his faithful, for this to be repeated: if a motion of censure is one day adopted in the National Assembly, resulting in the fall of the government, I will not change the Prime Minister, I will send the deputies back to the voters. His friends suggested he stop: “You have more cartridges.”
At the time of the debate on pensions, in the spring of 2023, the same little music began to resonate again at the Elysée. The president thus wanted to put pressure on the right. Above all, he had succeeded in triggering the fury of the president of LR, Eric Ciotti, immediately calling Elisabeth Borne’s chief of staff, Aurélien Rousseau: “What are these c…? It will make us lose the votes of fifteen deputies LR!” You have to be strong to be threatening. This summer, Emmanuel Macron heard one of his supporters warn him: “If there are elections now, after almost seven years in office, it will be called alternation.”
We do not play with a dissolution, we do not threaten more, in any case more in the political and institutional situation which is that of France in the 2020s. We dissolve, or we remain silent. Being silent, as we will have noticed, is not Emmanuel Macron’s favorite exercise. Sunday evening, Elisabeth Borne was to be the guest of the 20 Hours of France 2. No desire to comment on the latest initiative – or pirouette we no longer know – of Emmanuel Macron, announced in the newspaper The world during a visit to the Pantheon, this “meeting with the nation” in January? The Prime Minister has withdrawn. It’s time to put things in order. And, if we dare after the latest controversy, to rekindle the flame.