Between the two rounds of the legislative elections, Bruno Le Maire talks with Emmanuel Macron. “How do we make sure you hold on? I told the president, it’s the only real political question.” Danger on the keystone of the Fifth Republic and therefore danger to the institutions. Already Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon have shown perfect convergence. “The only way out of the political crisis will be to resign,” said the Pas-de-Calais MP even before the first round. “The solution to get out of the impasse would be for Emmanuel Macron to resign. That would be logical, he is responsible. There would be an early presidential election,” declared the rebellious leader last Thursday.
The warning did not fall on deaf ears. On Sunday evening, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, triumphant, and Marine Le Pen, dejected, retained, not the power to do, but the power to undo. He benefited fully from the republican front, she suffered from it to the maximum. A republican front that worked very well, much more than in 2022, including for the benefit of the Ensemble label; a republican front despite Macron.
On June 11, the president has lunch with Gabriel Attal, Edouard Philippe, Stéphane Séjourné and François Bayrou. The latter puts his foot down: Emmanuel Macron must learn to be silent. And that will take him time. Omnipresent in the campaign, he ends up keeping quiet in the week before the second round. No sound, no image. When the president plays the invisible man, his camp stands up…
The Elysée, Matignon and the Assembly, all weak
Emmanuel Macron has lost his majority, but no Prime Minister has a majority. It is a deadlock. Let us remember, on March 17, 1986, François Mitterrand intervened unannounced on television, barely 24 hours after the legislative elections, which that year were held in a single round. “You elected a new majority of deputies to the National Assembly on Sunday. This majority is small numerically, but it exists. It is therefore from its ranks that I will call tomorrow the personality that I will have chosen to form the government, according to Article 8 of the Constitution.” He thus gives the instructions for cohabitation, a system that was then unprecedented in the Fifth Republic. Which was repeated in 1993 and 1997, in a similar form: the president belongs to one camp, the absolute majority to another. Article 8 is demonetized: it is no longer the president who really chooses the Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac, Edouard Balladur and Lionel Jospin are imposed for Matignon.
This time, Emmanuel Macron is faced with a new kind of cohabitation. The president is weak from his failed dissolution, the future prime minister will be weak from his relative majority, or he will be weak from coming from a hastily constructed coalition. And the National Assembly will be weak from its divisions. The addition of three weaknesses has never constituted a strength.
It is no longer June 22, 2022. That evening, in a televised address, Emmanuel Macron draws lessons from the legislative elections which “made the presidential majority the leading political force in the National Assembly”. He asks to “never lose the coherence of the project you have chosen” during the presidential election and concludes: “To move forward usefully, it is now up to the political groups to say, in complete transparency, how far they are prepared to go. […] In light of the first choices, the first expressions of the political groups of our National Assembly, we will begin to build this method and this new configuration.” He gives them 48 hours, which will be of no use, Elisabeth Borne will therefore govern with a relative majority. We know the rest.
But since Sunday 8pm, Renaissance is no longer the leading force in the Assembly and the president no longer has the power to impose his choices. For Emmanuel Macron, we must measure the upheaval that the new political situation born of the dissolution brings. Going from Jupiter to the Venus de Milo requires a certain adaptation. On the evening of the first round, Macron was still saying: “It’s not done, we can still do something.” Now he can no longer do it, forced to stay in the background, overlooking. The sensational declarations of Gabriel Attal and Edouard Philippe, turning the page on Macronism, show that even in his camp, the will is strong to keep him away from the scene.
Accept losing his hand, to avoid losing his head. Demonstrate that he has know-how in politics, and also in law, which he has been careful not to show until now. “Macron is straight as a J”: the expression is funny, which comes from one of his close friends. We could also call him Hector, like the character of The Trojan War will not take place from Giraudoux: “Law is the most powerful school of imagination.”
Because now that he no longer has a majority in the Assembly, the President’s own powers are limited. We have seen that Article 8, on the appointment of the Prime Minister, is devitalized when the National Assembly does not rely on a presidential majority. The referendum is held “on the proposal of the government”. Article 12, on dissolution, is inoperative for one year. Article 18, which authorizes him to communicate with Parliament by messages or a Congress, is not a big deal. The President can refer a law to the Constitutional Council (but so can the deputies from his camp). Even the President, Head of the Armed Forces, cannot act alone since it is the government that informs Parliament of the decision to commit troops abroad.
Law is what people make of it. On July 14, 1986, François Mitterrand refused to sign an order on privatizations. At the time, no one knew if he had the right to do so and, to tell the truth, we still don’t know today. He didn’t sign it and he wasn’t brought before the High Court of Justice for treason…
After these abracadabra legislative elections, never has the situation seemed so blocked, and never would a blockage be so perilous. For the country, for the president. There is a risk for Emmanuel Macron, thus summed up by one of his (ex-)ministers: “Everyone will turn to the president and say that there is no solution to the problem because the problem is him.”
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