Let’s be honest: no one expected this. The French in front of their televisions yesterday were caught in the usual drone of election night sets by an unusually brief and severe Emmanuel Macron, announcing: “I have decided to give you back the choice of our parliamentary future through the vote. I therefore dissolve the National Assembly this evening.” Since then, everyone has tried to understand the meaning and the challenge of the presidential decision. What is the plan ? What is the calculation? Riding on the weakness of opposition outside the National Rally, in order to force a recomposition in the face of the Bardella threat? Mobilize a useful vote, and force a central bloc coalition? Or purge the RN hypothesis at the Elysée in 2027, by installing it this summer at Matignon so that it can demonstrate its negligence? We know the president is a fan of tactics, and everyone went from reading this Monday morning to explaining the presidential decision and its timetable.
In any case, France has just entered twenty days of great political intensity. Emmanuel Macron took the opportunity on Sunday of the unprecedented score of the National Rally in the European elections to take note of the political impasse in which the French had placed him two years earlier: during the 2022 legislative elections, they had re-elected a president to whom they had not given, at the same time, a majority to govern, thus forcing him to exercise “impotent power”. In addition to placing the country in a situation of immobility that was difficult to maintain, this situation made the pressure cooker of presidential rejection and illegitimacy trials boil a little more each day. This is why, after trying to convince the Republicans to govern with him, and after several times ruling out the hypothesis of a referendum consultation, Emmanuel Macron chose to dissolve. And to set the first round of legislative elections for June 30.
Two worlds face each other
What will he do with these twenty days? This “return to the people” – which is intended to be a Gaullist gesture – will not resolve much of the deep crisis we are going through, if it only consists of mobilizing electoral segments in the hope, through their addition, of arriving at a majority of fortune. Contrary to what the hackneyed saying says: politics is not arithmetic. Who is it ? A fairly simple promise: that through diagnosis, debate and voting, decisions will be made in the general interest. This requires addressing everyone, and not galvanizing clienteles. This implies taking into account a multitude of diagnoses, including that of sociologies which do not vote for oneself.
Our nation cannot let the cultural, social and geographical divide which is cutting it apart further deepen. A glance at the map, the day after the European election, is enough to understand the extent of the divorce: the RN is in the majority everywhere, except in the metropolises and their immediate surroundings. In Toulouse: PS-Place publique first (21.3%), LFI second (19.8%); in Rennes: PS-Place publique first (24.9%), LFI second (17.9%); in Nantes: PS-Place publique first (23.8%), LFI second (15.4%); in Bordeaux: PS-Place publique first (22%), Renaissance second; in Grenoble: LFI first (21.9%), PS-Place publique second. And it’s of course the same in Paris, Lyon, or Lille. Two worlds face each other. Metropolises, the beating hearts of the service economy, concentrate all the growth and its benefits, like islands “under a bubble” of a France-that-is-doing-well. Elsewhere, the scores of the Lepenist party are impressive. “There is a France where people say to me: ‘Where do you know people who vote for Macron? We don’t see any around us.’ They have the impression that it’s a conspiracy,” sociologist Benoît Coquard, a specialist in rural France, already testified in April 2022.
Faced with a society that is fragmenting, it is urgent for the traditional parties to remake politics. Let them look for other sociologies, other geographies than those, each time smaller, of their electoral support bases. Even if it means shaking, sometimes, some of their faithful! Who would have said that de Gaulle had barely come to power and was going to give Algeria its independence? Instead, for years we have been witnessing an “archipelago” of electoral segments. It looks like politics, it tastes like politics, but it’s not politics. Politics intends to “metabolize” divisions – without claiming to erase them; clientelism exacerbates them to titillate emotions and create militant mobilization.
This is why many French people greeted the announcement of the dissolution with the anxiety of diving back into the deleterious circus that our electoral campaigns now constitute. A country on its teeth is preparing to once again launch into this fracturing machine that we today call political debate. What can come out of this in such a short time? In many ways, last night we plunged into a dizzying unknown.
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