The axe of the first round of these early legislative elections will have claimed more than one victim. Emmanuel Macron’s former ministers, obviously, and a host of candidates labeled Ensemble defeated this Sunday, June 30. With this dissolution, Emmanuel Macron played poker empty-handed and lost everything: his flock certainly, but also and above all his political identity. This “Macronism” that was living its glory days in 2017 has given up the ghost. Here lies this “both right and left” that allowed him to cast a wide net to form his successive governments with former LR as much as former socialists, and even former environmentalists. A dissolution within the dissolution.
If you look closely, each component of Macronism is returning to its childhood loves. No more “at the same time”! Thus those who grew up in the arms of the late UMP and then LR have chosen “neither LFI nor RN”. But the principled positions of the Parisian feathered hats sometimes do not stand up to individual consciences and the reality on the ground. In Seine-Maritime, Laurent Bonnaterre, Horizons candidate, announced his withdrawal to make LFI MP Alma Dufour win against the RN.
In the 8th constituency of the North, the candidate Ensemble Tarik Mekki, who came third and was unable to continue in the second round, claims that “not a single vote [devait] go to the RN”. And goes even further: “Personally, I will vote for David Guiraud.” Guiraud, Dufour… Two candidates who are all the more problematic in the eyes of the right because they have never deviated from the Mélenchon line and have held positions described as anti-Semitic since October 7.
Attal and Mélenchon are on a boat
If there are almost as many centrisms as centrists, there are also almost as many Republican Fronts and neither-nors as there are Macronists. François Bayrou is not spared from these hesitations. The one who chose not to choose between Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal in 2007 before falling for François Hollande five years later, in the second round of the presidential election, calls for a case-by-case basis. Some Insoumis like François Ruffin find favor in his eyes, others, too close to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, do not. A line that is not that of the first of them either: Emmanuel Macron. In front of his ministers on Monday July 1, the President of the Republic asked that there not be “a voice on the extreme right”. And to add: “We must remember that in 2017 and in 2022, opposite, on the left, everyone carried this message. Without that, your servant and you would not be here.”
And when the compass goes off the rails, everyone thinks they know where the North leads. What was ambiguous yesterday is no longer so. The New Popular Front read in Gabriel Attal’s words an outstretched hand, a call to withdraw when the left, including LFI, is able to prevail against the RN. Proof, if any were needed, they say on the left, the Prime Minister used the same words as a certain Jean-Luc Mélenchon in 2017: “not a single vote for the RN.” At the time, however, many people attacked the rebellious leader, accusing him of creating ambiguity with words that did not frankly call for a vote for Emmanuel Macron in the second round against Marine Le Pen. Different times, different modesty.
A hodgepodge of positions, opinions, neither-nors, principles. The grand finale of a political recomposition started by and with Emmanuel Macron seven years ago. We thought he was an actor in it, but in the end he was only its ultimate victim. Macronism, dead from its leader’s inability to invent an assumed narrative, which is built on something other than the leader’s sole individual success, also dead from owing its survival only to the existence of a strong extreme right. “Overcoming” has never been stronger than the mechanics of the metronome of French politics. It implodes in the face of a truth that we thought had disappeared: there is the left and there is the right, sometimes more extreme, sometimes less. Those who boast of being able to step over this reality are only ephemeral. A political parenthesis in the Fifth Republic is closing.
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