France is descending into chaos – and Macron is no latter day De Gaulle ready to save it
Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call an election that he is almost certain to lose has blown apart his own party, his presidency and perhaps his country’s political system.
To paraphrase Marshal Bosquet’s observation on the charge of the Light Brigade: “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la politique.”
There is a spectre haunting France: the revenge of Vichy on the Resistance. It was to forestall the revival of the authoritarian regime of Marshal Pétain that Charles de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic in 1958.
“Macron has done exactly what De Gaulle would have done,” a leading British historian of France told me this week, “by forcing the country to choose its destiny: does it want to be a liberal democracy or not?”
But the circumstances for this experiment are about as unpropitious as possible. With just a fortnight’s campaigning until the first round of voting on June 30, the only party that is united is the one Macron wants to keep out of power at all costs: the hard Right National Rally (RN).
Polls suggest that after the second round on July 7, Marine Le Pen’s party will triple their seats in the National Assembly, but may still fall short of the 289 needed for a majority.
Yet if her rivals across the political spectrum continue their internecine feuds, Le Pen’s lead is bound to grow.
Within days of Macron’s dramatic announcement, after his defeat in last weekend’s European elections, French politics descended into chaos.
The Macronistes are at Macron’s throat, openly accusing him of “hubris”. Some want the President to stay out of the election, lest he find himself in “cohabitation” with those he had just denounced as enemies of the Republic.
Meanwhile the centre-Right Republicans are hopelessly split, after their leader, Éric Ciotti, put out feelers to Le Pen and was promptly sacked by his own party. Macron accused him of a “pact with the devil”, but Ciotti has refused to accept his dismissal. A Republican collapse benefits Le Pen.
Further to the Right, Marine Le Pen’s even more hardline niece, Marion Maréchal, has just left Reconquête (Reconquest), the anti-Muslim party founded by the maverick journalist Éric Zemmour. But Maréchal also refuses to join Le Pen, whom she dismisses as a “demagogue”. Reconquest appears to be imploding and its voters, too, will gravitate to the RN.
On the equally fissiparous Left, there is an attempt to recreate the anti-fascist Popular Front of the 1930s. This quest for unity is vitiated by the doyen of the far-Left, Jean Luc Mélenchon, 72, who refuses to yield to the more moderate rising star, Raphaël Glucksmann, 40.
This son of the philosopher André Glucksmann wants the Left to get behind Macron, in order to see off Le Pen. But they resist his charismatic leadership because he defends Israel and Ukraine against, respectively, apologists for Hamas and Putin.
Macron has defended his decision robustly, acknowledging the “anger” of his compatriots, but insisting that even if Le Pen and Barbella triumph, he will not resign.
The next three weeks will witness France plunged into its greatest postwar crisis. It will be no surprise if political passions spill out onto the streets and we hear echoes of the bloodthirsty revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat: “Man has the right to deal with his oppressors by devouring their palpitating hearts.”