Keep me from my friends, as for my enemies, I’ll take care of them. On Monday, July 8, Emmanuel Macron gave his instructions to the leaders of his party, Renaissance: “We’re not moving in the group. We have to leave Sylvain Maillard president until September.” Around the table at the Elysée, no one contradicted the leader. But as soon as he took his plane to go to the NATO summit in Washington, history accelerated. Without him. Gabriel Attal went on the offensive and five days later, he was elected head of the group. “In a hussar fashion,” the Elysée regretted.
On Friday the 12th, the president returned to his palace. In front of him, Gérald Darmanin was a bit annoyed, who said to him: “Loyalty doesn’t pay!” The Minister of the Interior quickly drew the conclusion of the episode: “Okay, we understand how it works now.” The extent of the change must be measured.
For the first time since 2017, the master of Macronie is no longer called Emmanuel Macron. Every man for himself. The head of state wanted to delay the deadline for his succession at all costs. With the dissolution, he accelerated it. Each step is a fight between Emmanuel Macron and Gabriel Attal. The election of two vice-presidents stamped as Macronists in the Ensemble pour la République group is hailed as a victory for the Elysée. “Attal forced the presidency of the group, but he does not control the whole group,” a Macronist immediately notes.
On the other hand, opinion polls are called upon to show that nothing is as it was before. The champion of Macronie is no longer called Emmanuel Macron. In the latest Elabe poll, Gabriel Attal reached 5 points more than the president with his electorate in the first round of the 2022 presidential election (at 79%) and up to 6 points more with that of the second round (at 59%).
Emmanuel Macron and Gabriel Attal have one thing in common: they do not recognize that the majority lost the legislative elections. “The president has an interest in showing that no one won, he wants to post-rationalize the dissolution and knows that people will be angry with him for appointing an NFP, observes a minister. So he is creating a balance of power. He has a year before finding the dissolution button again, so he is buying time. If we wait until the start of the school year to have a Prime Minister, that will be two months. There will only be ten left.”
“We are greatly helped by the New Popular Front”
Appointing a head of government? “It could take some time,” confided Emmanuel Macron on the eve of the weekend. “We are only at the very beginning. We need a change of perspective,” insists one of his close associates. On the move? It’s over. Today, inaction is the mother of all virtues. Abandoned by his own camp, the president is only finding oxygen thanks to the left. “We are greatly helped by the New Popular Front, it gives Emmanuel Macron excuses,” notes Gérald Darmanin, who can’t believe it. To win a showdown, it is recommended to have an arm. To impose a name, it is recommended to have a name. Ten days after the second round, the NFP allies are only effective on one point: taking down every potential figure for Matignon.
Really keep me from my friends, as for my enemies, I will take care of them. Friday, July 13, Pierre Jouvet packed his bags and returned to Valence. Before leaving the negotiating table, the socialist turned to his rebellious counterpart Manuel Bompard: “We are not going to discuss all night. We can stay in a room for eight hours, going over our arguments. I am not going to convince you, you are not going to convince me.” Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s henchman agrees.
Here are the PS and LFI, the two main forces of the New Popular Front, in agreement on their disagreements. In the midst of the watch, ecologists and communists fly in the wind of their affiliations, sometimes rebellious, sometimes socialist… and never decide for one or the other. They say the country is blocked, it is above all the left. The same people who boast about having managed to produce a common legislative program in a few days cannot agree on the essential: a name for Matignon. The rebellious do not budge: Olivier Faure is no. Johanna Rolland, the number two of the PS, is also no. Boris Vallaud, the leader of the socialist deputies, is still no. Martine Aubry, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, no and no again. And when Marine Tondelier suggests Cécile Duflot, the former environmentalist minister of François Hollande, the eyebrows of the Insoumis are raised. Still no.
Macron-Mélenchon, same fight?
Anything remotely close to a rose is vetoed by LFI negotiators. Or worse. As the Laurence Tubiana hypothesis becomes clearer, as civil society, unions or environmentalists applaud with both hands, the Insoumis find themselves isolated and balking. It is up to Sophia Chikirou to send the signal on social networks. She accuses Tubiana of being a loyalist of François Hollande. “Hollandism is like bedbugs: you used drastic measures to get rid of them, you believed in them for a while and you resumed a healthy life (on the left) but in a few weeks, they itch again and come out everywhere…” The armada of anonymous insurgents on social networks follows suit to denigrate the candidate for Matignon who is so popular with the rest of the left.
“Our biggest problem with the Insoumis is that they only like unity when it is done behind their backs,” sighs a PS bigwig after more than a week of nocturnal procrastination. Do they really want to govern? Isn’t the “old man”, as they all now call Jean-Luc Mélenchon, playing something else? Always the same questions that torment the rest of the New Popular Front. Doubt, constant. “There is a community of interests between Emmanuel Macron and him,” deplore communists and socialists in one voice.
Saturday evening, the eve of the national holiday, Jean-Luc Mélenchon invites himself to a small meeting between the party leaders. A first. They are still discussing Huguette Bello for Matignon, the most rebellious of the communists. He does not say a word, listens to Manuel Bompard recite the prayer: in any case, it cannot be a socialist since LFI is the majority force of the coalition in the National Assembly. Time never ends and the horizon of Matignon is moving away for the left. Time, friend of Emmanuel Macron. And what if his initial bet, that of a left incapable of uniting, was the right one?
Macron heading for resignation?
The blockage calls for an appeal, the president wants to believe. “Everyone will turn to the arbitrator, the guarantor, hopes an advisor. There are plenty of institutional tools, from the appointment of a government to the quasi-automatic renewal of the renewed budget.”
But the blockage is also a risk, it is called the resignation of the president. The Elysée began by breathing a sigh of relief on the evening of the second round. “We feared that there would be more calls for Macron to leave, in the end only Jean-Luc Mélenchon mentioned it”, rejoiced an advisor to the Elysée. The subject did not disappear, however. The next day, the president of Renaissance, Stéphane Séjourné, warned the head of state: “I am against a motion of censure immediately to bring down the government, we must let it demonstrate its incompetence. Otherwise we will create instability and they will demand your resignation.”
Resignation of the president? “Who knows,” says LFI MP Paul Vannier. Be ready for anything, leave no scenario aside, “arm yourself for all the fights,” says another Mélenchon loyalist. As early as July 8, the day after the legislative elections, the same people happily shared a poll on voting intentions for the first round of the 2027 presidential election: 4% for Marine Tondelier or Fabien Roussel, 5% for Olivier Faure; 17% for Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Proof, they say, that he remains the best on the left, whether the presidential election is played out tomorrow or in three years, whether there are one, two or three dissolutions between now and then. Confidence of an insubordinate negotiator to a socialist in the middle of a night of negotiations: “It’s not Matignon that’s at stake, but the legislative elections in a year.”
The blockage will not only be political. Depending on the political balances that will be found by the start of the school year, faculties and high schools could react. “And what will the police do if LFI is in government? Will they lay down their arms?” wonders a Beauvau official.
“We only die in the grave”: Gérald Darmanin is not one of those who bury Emmanuel Macron. Around the president, there are even close friends who think they know the end of the film. A left-wing government that falls quickly, replaced by a right-wing government that does not last much longer and then the reasonable ones who sit around the table. “You know that in the end, Macron will win!”, a former member of the Château recently said to a new MP. At the Elysée, a precedent is called to the rescue: the Waldeck-Rousseau government, composed of right-wing and left-wing republicans facing the anti-Dreyfusards, and which had the good idea of lasting almost thirty-six months. That was only 125 years ago…
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