The overconfident president got what was coming when his party suffered a massive defeat in the first round of the national election
French President Emmanuel Macron, as reported by Le Monde, believed he could defeat the anti-establishment right by triggering a national election after their victory in the European parliamentary elections last month. He assumed that French voters, despite favoring Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party to counter Brussels’ Eurocrats, would find the so-called “far-right” too extreme for a national election.
This gamble, however, proved to be one of the most foolish and avoidable blunders in political history.
Despite an Ipsos survey in May revealing that French voters were motivated by a desire to rebuke Macron in the EU elections, he dissolved parliament and challenged them to repeat their action. Perhaps he enjoys being challenged, or maybe he should avoid gambling in Las Vegas. The French seized his challenge and used it to completely undermine his authority.
Macron’s party failed to even secure second place in the first round of voting, coming in third with an estimated 20% of the vote. The anti-establishment right National Rally party, led by Le Pen, emerged victorious with an estimated 28% of the vote, while the anti-establishment left New Popular Front coalition came in second with about 28%.
Not only did the widely condemned “far-right” anti-establishment win this round of voting, but there’s even speculation that they could secure between 260 and 310 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly. This could potentially grant them a majority government, according to an Elabe polling .
With Macron’s establishment party eliminated, leaving only the anti-establishment right and left, the political landscape is shifting as we head towards the second-round vote on Sunday, July 7, which will determine the true ideological direction of France.
This electoral defeat practically guarantees a tumultuous final three years of Macron’s presidency, where he will struggle to maintain legislative authority and negotiate with whichever political faction ultimately joins his government. Both sides of the anti-establishment divide are celebrating this outcome.
“This vote inflicted a heavy and undeniable defeat for the president, his candidates, and the so-called presidential majority,” leftist coalition leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon, stated. He then urged his party’s candidates, currently in third place heading into the final round, to withdraw their candidacy if the National Rally has a chance of winning, even if they meet the threshold (12.5% of registered voters) to advance to the second round.
This decision would effectively equate to Melenchon’s team supporting the Macronist establishment candidates. This is leftist logic: we defeated the establishment, but now please vote for them over our anti-establishment rivals.
If you find that logic appealing, just wait to see how they apply it to economic policies if they ever gain power. Two plus two equals… who really cares when you’re the ones footing the bill?
Even though the globalist establishment has been effectively sidelined, its specter of influence continues to linger over the French political landscape heading into the final vote. They simply don’t learn from their mistakes.
We’re already witnessing Team Macron, including Macron himself and Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, urging French voters to support the National Rally’s opponents in the second round, even if it means voting for the left, apparently.
“Tonight’s lesson is that the far right is on the brink of power… Never in our democracy has the National Assembly been at such risk of being dominated by the far-right as it is this evening,” Attal said as the results were announced. “Not a single vote should go to the National Rally… If we want to live up to the French destiny, it is our moral duty to do everything possible to prevent the worst from happening,” he .
Have they not considered that they and their establishment allies are now viewed as the real extremists, which explains their repeated rejection by the electorate?
They seem to think voters are naive and unaware of genuine threats. However, voters are sending a clear message, for the second time in as many months, that they are already facing existential threats, which they consider worse than any imagined threats conjured by the establishment. They hold Team Macron responsible for these threats.
French citizens are struggling to make ends meet due to radical and misplaced priorities that prioritize Ukraine spending and domestic “economicidal” measures under the illusion that they will result in a Ukrainian victory on the battlefield. These measures include contemplating sending French troops to fight Russia in Ukraine, initially as “trainers” teaching randomly selected Ukrainians how to do exercises, preferably near a missile launch firing mechanism. But now they’re considering deploying troops who don’t even have to pretend to be in a war zone to perform physical exercises – who knows what’s next. Not the French, because Macron prefers to maintain “strategic ambiguity.” Or as regular people call it: shadiness.
It’s not like Macron’s downfall wasn’t foreshadowed. The French Yellow Vest protests, which began in November 2018 after Macron’s decision to re-impose carbon taxes on car fuel, lasted for months, only ending with the Covid lockdowns. This should have been the first indication that the French weren’t willing to sacrifice their financial stability for ideological nonsense. But Macron and his elite Eurocrat allies persisted with increasingly restrictive climate change policies that disrupted the price and availability of food for the French people. There’s nothing radical about that, right?
Despite claiming to support democracy, Team Macron pushed through unpopular laws using the Article 49.3 constitutional clause, forcing their passage. It’s now a mystery why the French are no longer deterred by Macron’s accusations that the opposition is extreme. And what has he done about the escalating immigration and insecurity situation, which French voters largely consider to be interconnected and one of the top three issues in this election, alongside purchasing power and France’s international image? Clearly not enough.
Now he’s trying to woo the left, treating them as the last hope to save voters from themselves and from the things they keep telling him they want. I’m sure they’ll eagerly obey whatever he commands them to do. Twice now, French voters have heeded Macron’s electoral demands and told him to get lost. But third time’s the charm, right?