Together apart: with no majority, Macron has to rethink his and France’s future

The metaphorical victory trumpets are sounding for almost all French political parties after the weekend legislative elections — except Emmanuel Macron’s depleted movement, Ensemble (Together), that is. It took a blasting from both the far right and left, to the point that it may now be hard to keep the presidential show on the road.

Macron was comfortably reelected president two months ago, but on Sunday he lost his absolute majority in such spectacular terms that he’ll have to rearrange and substantially recast his program for the next five years. But how and with whom?

Needing 289 seats for a majority, Macron’s Ensemble secured 245, according to Interior Ministry figures. Not quite the decimation of the television exit polls, but a thumping nevertheless. The left-wing unity ticket of firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon placed a stomping second, with 131 seats. But Marine Le Pen’s far right National Rally (RN) defied the polls with 89 seats, up from eight in the current Parliament (and a mere duo in the Parliament of 2012).

That is literally a stunning result — democratic France is in shock — and in party political terms the great leap forwards (or decidedly backwards, depending on your point of view). Far more so than for Mélenchon’s New Ecological and Social People’s Union (Nupes), a yoked-together unity ticket of circumstance. Under the lights of parliamentary performance, the Nupes can be expected to splinter when, for example, the Greens are resolutely pro-Europe while Mélenchon’s anti-capitalists are deeply Eurosceptic, Mélenchon is broadly anti-nuclear but the socialists and greens conditionally pro-nuclear. And so on.

Macron lost three ministers at the ballot box and two major faces in the story of Macronian power thus far. But the bigger problem is that the route forwards looms like a series of almighty show-stoppers. If Macron had secured a majority, with either the left or right an unconditional second place-getter, it might have served to focus the presidential mind. To shape the presidential pitch on any subject in terms of the counter-proposition, from either left or right.

As things are, the threat to simply upend the bandstand whatever his proposition will come from one side or the other — or both. In a sense, the results cock a snook at the “truth” of both radical “alternatives”: (a) that la belle France is essentially a country of the right, tempted by the far right, or (b) France is a country of the left, fundamentally attached to cardinal values like égalité — the would-be province of the left. Both have been blown a brass raspberry by the surging results of the “other”.

One would have to, then, call the overall result a mess.

The presidential “out”, though precarious, may be via mainstream right party Les Républicains (LR), the party of former presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy. LR secured 61 seats, so the maths is simple: Macron’s 245 + 61 = 306. Certain tenors of the party have already said they won’t be a “safety net” or a “crutch” for the suddenly beleaguered president. Others, already positioning for the coveted future role of responsible alternative government, have said they’ll consider cooperating with Macron on a case-by-case basis. If France were Germany or Scandinavia, there’d be the likelihood of sitting down at a table to nut out a two-coloured pact on select issues — or even a coalition government. Or why not an arrangement of three colours with the dozen or so reformist MPs not “Nuped” by Mélenchon?

But France is not Germany, and these results confirm the impression that voters have never stopped hearing the clarion call of left and right. Macron’s election five years ago supposedly put paid to the old ideological divisions and the need, as Macron himself said, to vote for extremes.

But the job of French president is two five-year terms and that, according to the constitutional play sheet, is the end, with no would-be Trumpian encores. So Macron is already, strictly speaking, at the beginning of the end of his political career. The question is how much he will continue to want to reform France in the, say, two years he has before the war of succession begins?

Macron’s inclination is for a very French style of “Jupiterian” top-down government, ironically so given France’s cardinal value of equality. But the new colours of the Parliament mean that Macron is going to have to change fast — if he can and if France can — as debt continues to climb, and as educational standards drop in the international rankings.

It looks at this point that the byword of the French Parliament over the next five years will be confrontation. And this being France, that confrontation is likely to move to the street.