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FRENCH ELECTIONS

French left vows ‘total break’ with Macron policies

France's left Friday vowed a "total break" with President Emmanuel Macron's policies if its new alliance wins historic polls that could propel the far right to major gains in parliament.

Published: 15 June 2024 12:12 CEST
French President Emmanuel Macron gestures as he speaks to the media during the G7 Summit at the Borgo Egnazia resort in Savelletri, near Bari, Italy
French President Emmanuel Macron gestures as he speaks to the media during the G7 Summit at the Borgo Egnazia resort in Savelletri, near Bari, Italy, on June 14, 2024. An alliance of French left-wing parties has vowed to break with Macron's polices if it wins the forthcoming election polls. (Photo by Ludovic MARIN / AFP)

Far-right figurehead Marine Le Pen, also making a pitch to voters, pledged a “national unity government” if her party takes power in the snap legislative elections.

Macron on Sunday stunned France by calling polls after Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) scored more than double his centrist alliance’s result in last week’s European elections.

Left-wing groups including hard-left France Unbowed (LFI), the Socialist, Communist and Green parties on Thursday agreed an election alliance called the New Popular Front.

On Friday, they unveiled a joint manifesto, whose headline measures included jettisoning Macron’s controversial immigration and pension reforms if they win the polls, which open on June 30 with a second round on July 7.

They also promised to “rise to the climate challenge” — without agreeing on whether to go ahead with modernising France’s fleet of nuclear plants — and to maintain support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion.

“It’s going to be either the far right, or us,” Greens party leader Marine Tondelier told reporters.

READ ALSO: Podcast special episode: What now for France after Macron’s great election gamble?

The coalition won backing from leading left-wing politician Raphael Glucksmann, 44, who led the Socialist-backed list in the European elections.

“We can’t leave France to the Le Pen family,” he told broadcaster France Inter.

The name of the alliance is a nod to the Popular Front, a political alliance founded in France in 1936 to combat fascism.

Opinion polls suggest Le Pen’s party will massively increase its parliamentary presence from its current 88 out of 577 seats.

She took over the National Front — founded in 1972 by a former SS member — from her father in 2011, renaming it and standing three times as its presidential candidate.

‘Hate and discrimination’ 

Francois Hollande, the Socialist former president, backed the new union, saying the left-wing forces had “got beyond our differences”.

It remained unclear however who would lead the New Popular Front and become prime minister in case of victory. Glucksmann ruled out the LFI’s abrasive leader Jean-Luc Melenchon.

Aurelien Rousseau, a former health minister under Macron, announced on Friday he was switching his allegiance to the Popular Front.

“The RN must not come to power,” he said, adding that only the Popular Front was capable of stopping it.

Hitting the campaign trail in the Pas-de-Calais region of northern France, Le Pen claimed the RN could win the elections and form a “national unity government”.

“We need to pull France out of the rut,” said the 55-year-old, who is expected to run for a fourth time in the 2027 presidential election.

The country was in a “catastrophic situation”, she added.

The far right suffered one setback Friday in the shape of an Instagram post from one of France’s top YouTubers, Squeezie — the alias of 28-year-old Lucas Hauchard.

“I’ve never wanted to talk to you about politics,” he told his almost nine million Instagram followers.

“But I think firmly opposing an extremist ideology that preaches hate and discrimination goes beyond any kind of political positioning,” he said. The post garnered almost 900,000 likes within a few hours.

‘Profoundly wrong’ 

Other right-wing forces were mired in infighting.

Eric Ciotti, leader of the conservative Republicans, broke a historic taboo this week, announcing his party would form an electoral alliance with the RN.

The rest of the party leadership promptly expelled him, confirming the decision with a second vote on Friday according to party sources.

But Ciotti appeared to have successfully challenged their decision Friday. A Paris court suspended the decision against him pending a more in-depth ruling within eight days.

The 28-year-old RN chairman, Jordan Bardella, said the far-right party and the Republicans would put up joint candidates in 70 of France’s 577 parliamentary constituencies, hailing what he said was a “historic agreement”.

READ ALSO: Paris stock exchange sinks amid France’s political turmoil

Macron remained defiant, defending his decision to dissolve parliament and call snap elections.

Speaking at a G7 summit in southern Italy on Thursday, he said his G7 counterparts had praised his move.

“They all said: ‘This is courageous'”, Macron told journalists.

He took time too, to take a swipe at the programmes of both the Popular Front and the National Rally, describing them as “totally unrealistic”.

Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Thursday accused Macron of seeking to score points with voters at home, saying it was “profoundly wrong” to use the G7 summit for “campaigning”.

France’s stock market suffered its worst week since March 2022 and the first weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The CAC 40 index fell 6.23 percent between the election announcement and close of trading Friday.

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FRENCH ELECTIONS

French election breakdown: TV clash, polling latest and ‘poo’ Le Pen

From the polls latest to the first big TV election clash, via a lot of questions about the French Constitution and the president's future - here's the situation 17 days on from Emmanuel Macron's shock election announcement.

Published: 26 June 2024 08:15 CEST
French election breakdown: TV clash, polling latest and 'poo' Le Pen

During the election period we will be publishing a bi-weekly ‘election breakdown’ to help you keep up with the latest developments. You can receive these as an email by going to the newsletter section here and selecting subscribe to ‘breaking news alerts’.

It’s now been 17 days since Macron’s surprise call for snap parliamentary elections, and four days until the first round of voting.

TV debates

The hotly-anticipated first TV debate of the election on Tuesday night turned out to be an ill-tempered affair with a lot of interruptions and men talking over each other.

The line of the night went to the left representative Manuel Bompard – who otherwise struggled to make much of an impact – when he told far-right leader Jordan Bardella (whose Italian ancestors migrated to France several generations back): “When your personal ancestors arrived in France, your political ancestors said exactly the same thing to them. I find that tragic.”

But perhaps the biggest question of all is whether any of this matters? The presidential election debate between Macron and Marine Le Pen back in 2017 is widely credited with influencing the campaign as Macron exposed her contradictory policies and economic illiteracy.

However a debate ahead of the European elections last month between Bardella and prime minister Gabriel Attal was widely agreed to have been ‘won’ by Attal, who also managed to expose flaws and contradictions in the far right party’s policies. Nevertheless, the far-right went on to convincingly beat the Macronists at the polls.

Has the political scene simply moved on so that Bardella’s brief and fact-light TikTok videos convince more people than a two-hour prime-time TV debate?

You can hear the team from The Local discussing all the election latest on the Talking France podcast – listen here or on the link below

Road to chaos

Just over two weeks ago when Macron called this election, he intended to call the bluff of the French electorate – did they really want a government made up of Marine Len Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party?

Well, latest polling suggests that a large portion of French people want exactly that, and significantly fewer people want to continue with a Macron government.

With the caveat that pollsters themselves say this is is a difficult election to call, current polling suggests RN would take 35 percent of the vote, the leftist alliance Nouveau Front Populaire 30 percent and Macron’s centrists 20 percent.

This is potentially bad news for everyone, as those figures would give no party an overall majority in parliament and would instead likely usher in an era of political chaos.

The questions discussed in French conversation and media have now moved on from ‘who will win the election?’ to distinctly more technical concerns like – what exactly does the Constitution say about the powers of a president without a government? Can France have a ‘caretaker government’ in the long term? Is it time for a 6th republic?.

The most over-used phrase in French political discourse this week? Sans précédent (unprecedented).

Démission

From sans précédent to sans président – if this election leads to total chaos, will Macron resign? It’s certainly being discussed, but he says he will not.

For citizens of many European parliamentary democracies it seems virtually automatic that the president would resign if he cannot form a government, but the French system is very different and several French presidents have continued in post despite being obliged to appoint an opponent as prime minister.

READ ALSO Will Macron resign in case of an election disaster?

The only president of the Fifth Republic to resign early was Charles de Gaulle – the trigger was the failure of a referendum on local government, but it may be that he was simply fed up; he was 78 years old and had already been through an attempted coup and the May 1968 general strike which paralysed the country. He died a year after leaving office.

Caca craft

She might be riding high in the polls, but not everyone is enamoured of Le Pen, it seems, especially not in ‘lefty’ eastern Paris – as seen by this rather neatly crafted Marine Le Pen flag stuck into a lump of dog poo left on the pavement.

Thanks to spotter Helen Massy-Beresford, who saw this in Paris’s 20th arrondissement.

You can find all the latest election news HERE, or sign up to receive these election breakdowns as an email by going to the newsletter section here and selecting subscribe to ‘breaking news alerts’.

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