Across France over 100,000 people have taken to the streets in protest of what they perceive as a stolen election, the will of the people ignored, and their voices silenced. The decision to appoint Michel Barnier as Prime Minister buys President Macron a brief stay of execution from the coming storm of French politics, but further tarnishes an increasingly unpopular image.
French President Emmanuel Macron, the one-time mercurial tour de force of European politics, is a man under substantial political pressure. Latest polling by Politico suggests that 70% of his fellow countrymen disapprove of his leadership. Indeed, the appointment of Michel Barnier, the man in charge of the European Union’s Brexit negotiations, took Macron almost two months following the dramatic results of the July snap-election.
Barnier is the 5th Prime Minister of Macron’s 7-year Premiership and the first since Édouard Charles Philippe that can be described as on the right of French politics. Mr Barnier’s appointment may seem surprising to those who have not followed French politics keenly over the last couple of years, indeed his party only received 47 out of 577 seats at the French National Assembly, hardly a majority fit for a king. But France is an increasingly fractured country, the centrism personified by Macron and his Renaissance Party seems to have died a slow and bitter death.
In 2017 the party and Macron was riding high, France had elected a young and charismatic leader, experienced in politics and yet unsullied by the weight of tradition and partisanship. At 39, Macron was the youngest French Head of State since a certain little-known Corsican called Napoleon Bonaparte, many in France felt that they had found their Obama, here was a young leader, capable of enacting the politics of the centre, inspiring hope, and rejecting extremism. The juxtaposition between Britain and France was stark, Macron symbolised that pan-European ideal of the European Union, a man as European as he was French, elected a year after Britain had voted to abandon that European dream. Macron’s popularity has been eroded by numerous protests against his desire for a renewable energy transition and the famed ‘Gilets jaunes’ (yellow vest) protests caused by rising oil prices and anger at the fuel tax.
Perhaps it is ironic then that Macron has turned to Barnier, the man charged by the European Union with making an example out of Britain's callous decision to leave that European dream, in his darkest political hour. In truth, Macron appears to have had very few options, the 2024 National Assembly Elections created such a fractured legislature that it will be a miracle if any legislation is passed at all. Why then, given his unpopularity, did Mr Macron choose to call a snap election? The answer is as simple as it is frightening for Macron, Marine Le Pen.
The spectre of Marine Le Pen has hung over Emmanuel Macron for the entirety of his premiership, despite beating her at the 2022 Presidential Election by 17.1%, Macron is all too aware of the rising wave of popular support for her and her Rassemblement National (RN) Party. The daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, a Holocaust denier and runner-up in the 2002 Presidential Election, Marine has focused her political career on changing the image of her party. She has rejected her father’s antisemitic beliefs and renamed the party from the Front National to Rassemblement (Rally) National. Miss Le Pen is the archetypal populist, and she stands in complete opposition to the kind of technocratic and Europhilic centrism for which Macron stands. She has repeatedly weaponised Islamophobia for political gain and has focused the majority of her recent political career on critiquing immigration, keen to label any influx of Islam into France as a ‘Green Invasion’.
The RN has undergone a period of substantial legitimisation and increasing electoral success in France. Le Pen’s populist rhetoric, focused on defining the pure French people in a Judeo-Christian mould against the foreign and ‘other’ influence of Islam has struck a chord with the poorer deindustrialised departments in France. In the two elections held before 2010 and Marine’s assumption of the party leadership, the 2007 Legislative Election & the 2009 European Union Election, the RN received 0 seats and 3 seats respectively. In comparison, in the 2024 EU Election, Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s 28-year-old protégé won 31.4% of the vote and 30 seats out of 81.
It was the size of this victory, coupled with the disintegration of Renaissance support, that spooked Macron into calling the snap-election. It was a massive gamble, Macron risked handing the legislative agenda to the RN, effectively ending the utility of his premiership, on the other hand, he hoped that the EU election results in Europe would galvanise the French left and centre to mobilise against the rise of the far-right in France.
Bizarrely, both happened. RN, despite winning the most votes, finished as the third largest party, only winning 142 seats. Whereas the newly formed left-wing party NFP (Nouveau Front Populaire) & Renaissance led coalition Ensemble won 180 seats and 159 seats respectively, despite much lower vote totals. This was made possible due to NFP and Ensemble collaborating during the Second Round of Run-Off elections, with 134 NFP candidates and 82 Ensemble candidates withdrawing from the race in an attempt to unify anti-RN support.
The consequent fracturing of the National Assembly created a situation where none of the three largest parties could hope to achieve a workable majority, and where consequently a Prime Minister from any of the three factions would create a deeply vitriolic response and a dysfunctional Parliament. As such Macron has chosen to elect Barnier to the post, who is leader of the fourth largest party – Les Republicans, the party founded by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2015. The move buys Macron time but does not solve the issue of political dysfunction, nor does it arrest the rise of RN.
In fact, in an attempt to stymie Le Pen in 2024, Macron has offered her a spellbinding populist narrative for the 2027 French Presidential Elections for which she is already favourite. The failure to appoint a RN PM means the party is unsullied by the position of power, clean from the elitist malaise of a political system many in France despise. It means that Marine can continue to position herself as an anti-establishment candidate, a champion of ‘the people’ rather than the Champs-Élysées. Furthermore, the blocking of her party, the collaboration by the NFP and Ensemble, only serves to feed into her argument that the political system is rotten, corrupt, and anti-democratic. It offers Le Pen the opportunity to argue, justifiably, that the very core of French democracy is rigged against her and her party. Populists thrive on conspiracy, they thrive on the creation of the enemy within, and with the efforts of the French centre and left to block the rise of the RN, Le Pen has found her perfect narrative.
Whilst thousands of mainly left-wing activists may take to the street, angry at the undemocratic nature of Barnier’s ascension to Prime Minister, it is worth remembering it will be Miss Le Pen who will most effectively politicise those sentiments to finally reach her nirvana of the Élysée Palace.
Image: Flickr/Web Summit
Image changes made: cropped.
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