Building of the Assemblée Nationale, the French lower house of parliament, in Paris. Source image: Wikimedia Commons / Jarosław Baranowski
Why the French Election is no Reason for Left-Wing Celebration
Following the results of the French elections on 7 June, the media and the political establishment breathed a sigh of relief as Le Pen's party was supposedly seemingly defeated. But the reaction of French media paints a much more sober picture: that of a political stalemate.
Political Games
The last French election was, as it were, a battle between three entities. On the one hand, Marine le Pen's right-wing party, Rassemblement National (RN); on the other, the left-wing occasional coalition led by Trotskyist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Nouveau Front populaire (NFP); and somewhere in between, Ensemble, the coalition that includes the party of incumbent president Emmanuel Macron. Everything seemed to point to Le Pen's party becoming the largest. Fearing that, the NFP and RE had joined forces. Macron tactically withdrew candidates from certain districts so that his supporters would then prefer to vote for the NFP rather than the RN. This political chess game had the desired outcome: the NFP won the election as hoped, and the RN did not become the largest party. But is this really the case?
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Paper Tiger
At first glance, the NFP is indeed the winner of the elections with by far the most seats. But sober dissection of the political landscape soon makes this picture fall apart. One must constantly keep in mind that the NFP is not a single party like, say, the RN or RE, but a coalition of several parties. When this is taken into account, it is Le Pen's RN that, as a stand-alone party, won the most seats by far. As Dominique Reynié, a French professor of political science, clarifies in an interview, ‘...the total number of votes cast for the NFP candidates in the last second round was only 25.7%; if we add in all the left-wing votes, we painstakingly arrive at 27.3%, or 17.1% of registered voters.... It is impossible to see this as a victory.’
Stuck despite Victory
What about the RN? As a party, they won the elections. Not only are they bigger than ever before (from 89 to 142 seats in the French lower house of parliament), they are also by far the biggest as a stand-alone party: the NFP and Ensemble, the two far-left and centre-left groups larger than the RN, are both coalitions of several smaller parties. Good news for Le Pen and her party, one would think. Not really. The RN may now be the largest party, but they have not managed to win an absolute majority, and no other party wants to work with them. Le Pen therefore cannot go into government. Her situation could be compared to that of the PVV in the Netherlands over the past almost two decades: too small to govern alone, and not big enough not to be left out. Reynié agrees, but still sees the situation as positive for the RN: ‘The RN won these parliamentary elections, albeit without coming to power. But it achieved an electoral level that was unprecedented in its history.’
Red House of Cards
So should it be over the left, with Mélenchon as the new occupant of the Hôtel Matignon? Even that chance seems to be getting smaller by the day. Now that the euphoria of electoral victory is over, the cracks in the NFP are starting to grow wider and wider, and the coalition appears divided to the bone. With his hard left rhetoric and irreconcilable attitude towards opponents, Mélenchon is unpopular with both his fellow coalition members and political opponents. Even François Hollande, the socialist ex-president, said of him, ‘If he really wants to help the NFP, he should step aside. He should just keep his mouth shut.’ Will the NFP then collapse like a house of cards? Reynié suspects so: ‘The NFP is an electoral feat. Hastily cobbled together, it will not last. The left parties are electorally weaker than ever and in tatters, while their economic and social ideas are incompatible with the reality of our situation.’
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Political Stalemate
So how next? The French political situation does not seem nearly as set in stone and rosy as the mainstream media makes it seem. The NFP, a roaring origami tiger, is on the verge of collapse. Whether they will hold out long enough to negotiate with the moderate Ensemble remains to be seen, if they are interested in doing so at all. The RN, the real winner of the elections, has been placed in a cordon sanitaire without pardon by the entire political puppetry. Big enough to form a government on their own they are not, and so they have no choice but to bow their heads. Macron's party has been dealt a huge electoral blow and, it seems, is looking the cat out of the tree for now. The resounding left-wing victory as celebrated by the media thus turns out to have much more nuance than significantly thought, and the political games of Macron and the NFP have led to nothing but a political stalemate in France.
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