Politique a la Carte
Politique a la Carte
France shifts to the left, risks policy paralysis; Macron’s camp plots unlikely comeback amid French election chaos; French election gridlock means yet more uncertainty for Europe
France shifts to the left, risks policy paralysis
By Richard lough and Tassilo Hummel (Reuters)
France faced a hung parliament and difficult negotiations starting Monday to form a government, after a surprise left-wing surge blocked Marine Le Pen's quest to bring the far right to power. The leftist New Popular Front (NFP) emerged as the dominant force in the National Assembly after Sunday's election, but with no single group securing a working majority the possibilities include the NFP forming a minority government or the building of a broad, unwieldy coalition.
The result delivered a blow to President Emmanuel Macron and leaves the euro zone's second largest economy in limbo, heralding a period of political instability just weeks before Paris hosts the Olympic Games.
Macron ended up with a fragmented parliament, in what is set to weaken France's role in the European Union and further afield, and make it hard for anyone to push through a domestic agenda.
The left won 182 seats, Macron's centrist alliance 168 and Le Pen's National Rally (RN) and allies 143, Interior Ministry data cited by Le Monde newspaper showed.
"According to the logic of our institutions, Emmanuel Macron should today officially invite the New Popular Front to nominate a prime minister," said Green leader Marine Tondelier, one of a number of NFP figures seen as potential candidates for the post.
"Will he or won't he? As this president is always full of surprises, we'll see," she said on RTL radio.
Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said he would tender his resignation on Monday, but it was not clear whether the president would accept it immediately, given the daunting task ahead to form a government. Attal said he would be willing to stay on in a caretaker role.
Dissonant voices on the left
Leaders from the NFP met overnight for first talks on how to proceed, but in media interviews on Monday they gave little sense of direction.
Tondelier said on France Inter radio the prime minister could be someone from the hard-left France Unbowed party, the Greens or the Socialists, the three largest parties in the alliance.
Olivier Faure, the Socialist leader, said on France Info radio that he expected the parties to agree on a plan this week, but sidestepped a question on whether the NFP would be prepared to negotiate a deal with Macron's centrist camp.
Raphael Glucksmann, a prominent moderate who led the leftist ticket in last month's European elections, said on Sunday that a hung parliament required openness for dialogue.
But France Unbowed's firebrand leader Jean-Luc Melenchon, one of the most divisive figures in French politics, explicitly ruled out any deal with centrists on Sunday, and on Monday his ally Eric Bompard was sounding uncompromising.
"The president must appoint as prime minister someone from the New Popular Front to implement the NFP's programme, the whole programme and nothing but the programme," he said on France 2 television.
Challenged on how that would be possible without an absolute majority, Bompard refused to engage with the question, insisting that as the NFP had come first, it should govern and shrugging off the idea of negotiating with anyone else.
However, there is little chance that any of the left-wing bloc's key proposals, which include raising the minimum wage, reversing Macron's pension reform and capping the prices of key goods, would pass a parliamentary vote without some kind of agreement with lawmakers from outside the bloc.
Centrists open to negotiation
Some prominent centrist figures, including Edouard Philippe, a former prime minister under Macron, said they were ready to work on a pact to ensure a stable government, but were not prepared to work with France Unbowed, a force seen by many French centrists as just as extremist as the RN.
Yael Braun-Pivet, a lawmaker from Macron's party who was the National Assembly leader before the election, said French political culture would have to evolve, becoming less antagonistic and more cooperative across party lines.
"The message I'm hearing from voters is 'no one has an absolute majority, so you have to work together to find solutions to our problems'," she said on France 2 television.
The euro slipped on Monday by as much as 0.4% as investors grappled with the uncertainty in Paris.
"There's really going to be a vacuum when it comes to France's legislative ability," said Simon Harvey, head of FX analysis at Monex Europe in London.
For Le Pen's RN, the result was a far cry from weeks during which opinion polls consistently projected it would win comfortably.
The left and centrist alliances cooperated after the first round of voting last week by pulling scores of candidates from three-way races to build a unified anti-RN vote.
In his first reaction, RN leader Jordan Bardella, Le Pen's protege, called the cooperation between anti-RN forces a "disgraceful alliance" that he said would paralyse France.
Le Pen, who will likely be the party's candidate for the 2027 presidential election, said however that Sunday's ballot, in which the RN made major gains, had sown the seeds for the future. "Our victory has been merely delayed," she said.
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Macron’s camp plots unlikely comeback amid French election chaos
By Barbara Moens and Jacopo Barigazzi (POLITICO)
The dust has hardly settled after Sunday’s surprise French election result delivered a hung parliament — and already President Emmanuel Macron’s allies are hoping to turn the turmoil to their advantage. Bucking recent predictions, the left-wing New Popular Front alliance won the most seats in the final round of the parliamentary election on Sunday, overtaking Macron’s centrists and trouncing Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally.
But the result left the French parliament in limbo, without an obvious candidate for prime minister and with no single party in a position to form a government.
Allies of the president are now looking for opportunities to exploit the uncertainty to assert their centrist agenda. Some think they’ve found a possible way through: by breaking up the already fractious and fragmented leftist alliance.
The New Popular Front is a motley group of disparate left-wing parties with a hastily-agreed policy platform and no clear leader. It includes the far-left France Unbowed, led by veteran firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon; the Communists; the Socialists and the Greens.
The alliance was hastily cobbled together after Macron triggered the snap election a month ago, and it remains fragile and fraught with tensions. Until quite recently, the Socialist Party and the France Unbowed were at daggers drawn over Israel’s war against Hamas, with the Socialists accusing the far left of failing clearly to condemn Hamas’s October 7 attacks.
On Monday morning, the left was still firmly in its honeymoon phase and pledging to back a single person to become prime minister by the end of the week. Macron’s liberals however hope it is simply a matter of time before the left implodes and the center emerges as the largest group in parliament.
One of Macron’s top allies François Bayrou argued Monday on French radio that “the election had not yet handed down its verdict in terms of numbers.”
Challenged over what he meant, Bayrou said the issue wasn’t about “counting votes” but about identifying which group “can unite.”
The French president meanwhile has been strangely quiet and appears to be biding his time.
On Monday French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal offered to resign but Macron asked him to stay on “for the stability of the country”, according to a statement from the Elysée Palace.
Parliament chess game
For the Greens leader Marine Tondelier, who was in the radio studio with Bayrou, his comments were “a denial” of Sunday’s results. “You need to accept the victory of your opponents,” she snapped back.
But clearly it’s no coincidence Bayrou was dragging his feet to recognise the left’s success, as insiders from Macron’s party have been seeking to chart a way back to the top.
“Without France Unbowed, [the left] has fewer seats than we have, and we are ahead of the National Rally,” said one official from Macron’s Renaissance party.
Another outgoing minister mused that Macron’s liberals only need a handful more members of parliament to overtake the left. “Between the non-affiliated right, the overseas MPs and the UDI [centrists], anything is possible,” the former minister said.
The left needs allies if it wants a shot at governing France, which is another source of tension inside the coalition.
In recent weeks several centrist heavyweights have floated the idea of working with the left in a “wide coalition,” though that would need to exclude Mélenchon’s far-left France Unbowed.
The division of power has also shifted on the left, which was once firmly dominated by the France Unbowed. The Greens and the Socialists are emerging as more powerful parties since the election.
Who’s talking
But the turmoil in parliament also provides opportunities to others. Even if Macron gets what he hopes for and the leftist alliance implodes, he’ll still have a bigger problem: The center is falling apart.
The French president’s decision to gamble his movement’s political future on a snap election has alienated many of his allies, including former PM Edouard Philippe and Macron’s own prime minister, Gabriel Attal, who admitted on television the president had not consulted him in advance.
During the campaign, Philippe accused Macron of having “killed the coalition” and called for “a new [parliamentary] majority” to be created.
On Sunday, Macron’s allies narrowly avoided a bloodbath, still losing more than 70 seats, but that did not stop Philippe, who has presidential ambitions for himself, from slamming a snap election that delivered “a great indetermination.”
With Macron unable to stand again in 2027, all eyes are now on the race for next presidential election and few potential candidates will be willing to sacrifice their future for Macron’s present.
Even those who supported the French president’s decision to hold fresh parliamentary elections appear to be preparing their exit strategy. Outgoing Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, another presidential hopeful, was about to launch “his own set-up,” according to the same former minister quoted above.
Darmanin’s team declined to comment for this story.
Even if the liberals do manage to secure the largest group in the National Assembly and Macron was able to appoint a fellow centrist as a PM, there’s no end to the pain in sight.
Opposition parties will be able to topple the government at every turn, and passing legislation will involve much blood-letting: Chaos will still prevail in parliament.
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French election gridlock means yet more uncertainty for Europe
By Barbara Moens and Jacopo Barigazzi (POLITICO)
For the EU, the French election result was good news — but also bad news. “The worst has been avoided,” a senior EU diplomat said, capturing the mood in Brussels on Sunday night when it became clear that the far-right National Rally would not gain a majority in parliament, as many had predicted after the first round of voting a week earlier. Instead the far right finished third, behind the left-wing alliance and Emmanuel Macron’s centrists.
Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s failure to grab the reins of the French parliament will have delighted mainstream pro-Europeans.
But that’s where the good news ends as France — alongside Germany, the other big beast in the EU, which has its own internal struggles — has now been plunged into political chaos, with no party winning enough seats for a majority. The paralysis could last months — and damage the EU.
“If soon everything stalls in both Paris and Berlin because of international political disagreements, Europe will really have a problem,” said an EU diplomat who, like others quoted in this piece, was granted anonymity to speak freely.
Macron has been a huge presence on the European front, whether by reshaping the EU’s trade agenda, pushing for a more ambitious industrial defense and competitiveness agenda, or eyeing more strategic autonomy ahead of a potential second Donald Trump presidency.
Now, the French president is weakened and distracted by his troubles at home. Whatever government eventually emerges from the fragmented French parliament, it is unlikely to be stable for long.
French politicians will also have the presidential election of 2027 on their minds while making decisions from now on. The teaming up of mainstream and leftist parties to keep the far-right out may not happen again, and the 2027 election could result in a far-right president.
“A new government is likely to focus on domestic issues rather than foreign policy. However, French politics will remain divisive and hard to manage, which will diminish France’s clout on the European and international stage,” said Célia Belin of the Paris office of the European Council of Foreign Relations, a think tank.
Manfred Weber, president of the European People’s Party, took to social media to say that “far from clarifying the political situation, Macron plunged France into confusion, strengthening the extremes.”
“Very worried about the far left & far right anti-EU rhetoric,” he said, adding “we need a strong democratic force @lesRepublicains giving a real alternative to put France back on its feet,” a reference to the center-right Les Républicains, which is a member of the EPP and won just over eight percent of the vote in the French election.
The main concern, according to a senior French official, has to do with money: “We just don’t know how we’re going to pass the finance bill in this political context, despite the risk of the EU triggering an excessive deficit procedure against France.”
German problems
France’s internal gridlock would be easier for the EU to deal with if the other half of the Franco-German engine was running well. But it isn’t.
Following weak European election results for all three parties in the German coalition, which together won just 31 percent of the vote, Chancellor Olaf Scholz managed to secure a deal on a draft budget for 2025, defusing a crisis — at least for the moment — that could have brought down his government.
Scholz may have survived but his internal coalition headaches mean there’s little time for the German chancellor to lead on the European stage — even if he’d shown any interest in doing so.
A weak Germany and France poses a question about leadership in Europe, said Mujtaba Rahman, Europe head of the Eurasia Group, a risk consultancy.
“Macron has been constantly pushing for more ambition in Europe, pushing for more coherence and for Europe to become a more important geopolitical and geostrategic player in the world,” he said. “With him fundamentally weakened at home, distracted by the need to form a government, it will be very hard to continue to play that role. He’ll be less of an ambitious player in Europe.”
Rahman stressed that both Scholz and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk face too many challenges at home to take the lead when it comes to Europe and that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is hoping to get a second term, “is only as strong as her strongest stakeholder,” meaning there is no one left to fill the void.
Policy infighting
So what does this all mean for the EU’s ambitions in the next five years?
In France, there is set to be a lot of policy infighting, which will stall economic and fiscal reforms, much to the dismay of the European Commission and the more frugal European countries.
“The big fear is that a hung parliament will lead to stagnation,” the second EU diplomat said. “This is particularly a problem in view of the French economy and public debt. All the reforms Macron and [Economy and Finance Minister Bruno] Le Maire are trying to do will then come to a standstill. No reforms, national debt rises and total political paralysis.”
European diplomats and officials are now pondering how much impact the French election will have on policy files in the Council of the EU — Europe’s engine room, where ministers from all EU countries haggle over a wide range of topics.
Read more here.