For an hour on Sunday evening, after the announcement of the cataclysmic results of the European elections for the majority, the main sentence hammered out by political leaders of all sides was one formula: “Macron, it’s over.” The second five-year term would be over before it even reached its midpoint. Then, at 9 p.m., deus ex cathedra, the president spoke. To do the opposite of what he said a month ago, in La Tribune Sunday, regarding the meeting of June 9: “It is the election of European deputies. The conclusion will therefore be first and foremost European.”
“In any case, everywhere and immediately, civic action must be organized. […] France is in fact threatened with dictatorship. […] Well no, the Republic will not abdicate, the people will pull themselves together, progress, independence and peace will prevail with freedom.” On May 30, 1968, General de Gaulle, just returned from Baden-Baden , dissolves the National Assembly, the 2024 dissolution is inspired by this one. Emmanuel Macron has never ceased in his intervention to denounce the parliamentary idiocy, almost the democratic idiocy, and the weight of the. The extreme right is equivalent, in his words, to “the threat of dictatorship” mentioned by the general.
A final face-to-face with the extreme right
Immediately the entourage of the Head of State worked to demonstrate that the gesture of dissolving, which supposes “audacity, surpassing, taking risks”, was “at the heart of [son] Political DNA”, in a pinnacle of post-rationalization – a great specialty if there is one for Macronie. Because it is less a last burst of Macronism than an attempt to twist the arm of voters in a final face-to-face with the extreme right.
Of course, “we must not be afraid of the French people”, said Jordan Bardella, then spokesperson for the National Rally (in 2018, to defend the RIP, the popular initiative referendum) – sorry, the supporters repeated by Emmanuel Macron all evening Sunday. But the idea, by quartering the Nupes once and for all, by surprising the right, by shaking up Renaissance, the MoDem and Horizons, is to force “the republican forces”, as they say at the Elysée, to “go and find a majority”.
The legislative campaign that he did not lead in 2022, Emmanuel Macron will lead it in 2024. With a delay, therefore. And it was in another dissolution, the most recent, that of 1997, that he found reason for hope. That year, the results at the end of the campaign were the opposite of what the polls predicted on the evening of Jacques Chirac’s announcement. He wanted to comfort his Prime Minister Alain Juppé, he found himself with Lionel Jospin at Matignon.