What Was Macron Thinking?

Two seismic events rocked France last Sunday. Politicians are only now pulling themselves from the rubble and scrambling to make sense of their upended world.

The initial quake arrived shortly after the French polls closed for the European Parliament election. Almost immediately, Marine Le Pen’s electoral list for the far-right National Rally (RN) was projected as the winner. This was not a surprise, of course. For weeks, pollsters had reported that the RN list, led by Jordan Bardella, was hovering over 30 percent, more than doubling the government’s Renaissance list, led by Valérie Hayer.

As the numbers rolled in, the shock deepened. The RN had already beaten majority parties in past European elections, but this time, the margin was nearly 17 percentage points. Moreover, the party carried every region, including republican ramparts such as Brittany and Île-de-France—though not the latter’s largest city, Paris—and made inroads with swaths of the population once beyond its reach, including voters over 65 as well as those with university and professional degrees.

Then came the aftershock. Less than an hour after the results were announced, President Emmanuel Macron declared the dissolution of the National Assembly and scheduling of new legislative elections. The announcement caught not only all his opponents on the back foot but also many of the leading figures of his own party.

“Given the strength of the RN,” one cabinet minister observed a few weeks earlier, “I honestly cannot foresee the president dissolving the assembly.” Even Macron, it seems, could not foresee his decision, insisting as late as last month that the EU election had political consequences only for Europe, not France.

Political actors and commentators have repeatedly described Macron’s decision—one he discussed prior to his announcement with a small group of close advisors, a few of whom, including Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, reportedly tried to dissuade him—as a crapshoot. Less flatteringly, others have dismissed it as an act of a pyromaniac firefighter, or someone who sets fires to put them out. But more important than finding a label for the decision is finding a reason for it. There are several potential explanations.

First, like the revolutionary figure Georges Danton, who declared, “Audacity, more audacity, forever audacity, and the nation will be saved,” Macron prides himself on making bold moves. And, at least initially, the intent of his announcement—to catch other parties off guard—worked, except, ironically, with the RN, which had called for the dissolution of parliament and was already making plans.

No less crucially, he did so at a time when there is not just one party on the left but several. The New Ecological and Social People’s Union, the leftist coalition that coalesced before the 2022 legislative elections, proved as unwieldly as its name. The politics and personality of the man who hatched the coalition, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI), soon alienated the other parties, including the Socialists and Greens, leading to the coalition’s implosion.

But Macron’s audacity has now nudged the parties on the left to be audacious. By Monday evening, they’d succeeded in bridging rather than deepening their differences. (This was, in part, fueled by the Socialist Party, bolstered by a strong showing in the EU election thanks to the role played by the charismatic head of the list, Raphaël Glucksmann.)

Invoking the name of the 1936 coalition of left-wing parties formed after an attempted coup by extremist-right forces, the leaders of LFI, the Socialists, the Communists, and the Greens (now called the Ecologists) announced the creation of “a new Popular Front representing the nation’s humanist, trade union, and civil movements.” They agreed to run a single and mutually agreed-on candidate in each constituency against the candidates representing the right and extreme right. The goal, they declared in a joint communiqué, is “to construct an alternative to Emmanuel Macron and combat the racist project of the extreme right.”

On the right, though, Macron’s move might have paid off. On Tuesday morning, Éric Ciotti, the leader of the conservative Les Républicains (LR), announced the party should accept the RN’s invitation to join them. His statement immediately sparked a firestorm of outrage and perplexity among other members of the traditionally center-right party.

Not only did it run counter to the party’s position that the RN’s agenda was antithetical to its own republican values, but it even contradicted Ciotti’s own claim, made in January, that “profound ideological differences” meant that there could never be an alliance between the two parties. Leading voices in LR voted to oust Ciotti on Wednesday (he insisted he remained leader while locking himself in the party headquarters to avoid removal). Meanwhile, voices from both Le Pen’s and Macron’s parties are calling for disillusioned LR members to “emigrate” to their respective sides.

Second, Macron’s move reflects the electoral strategy he first adopted in 2017: c’est moi ou le chaos. As he has relentlessly reminded the French, the chaos is in part embodied by Le Pen and her party. Yet this focus has had the perverse effect of helping Le Pen remake the RN.

Ever since 2011, when Le Pen in effect inherited the National Front from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, she has single-mindedly pursued a strategy of “de-demonization.” She purged the party of the neo-Nazis and Vichy apologists who initially filled its ranks; purged it of its name, rebaptizing it as the kinder and gentler National Rally; and rid it of her father, who could not stop insisting the Holocaust was nothing more than a “detail of history.”

Le Pen has succeeded in normalizing a party that remains deeply xenophobic, Islamophobic, authoritarian, and illiberal but has also transformed French political discourse so that these very qualities are themselves perceived as normal.

Yet Macron’s strategy risks being the disease for which it pretends to be the cure. Since 2017, he has consistently framed France’s future as a Manichaean battle between the forces of good, or Macronism, and evil, or Lepenism. But in his effort to draw conservative voters to his side, Macron has repeatedly poached in the toxic waters of Lepenism, most recently in the forced passage of an immigration bill that denies certain welfare benefits to non-nationals as well as automatic citizenship to their children born on French soil. Crucially, both of these clauses tacitly enacted one of Le Pen’s long-standing nativist demands—so-called national preference.

At the same time, he has alienated many on the left by lumping Mélenchon—whose periodically disruptive actions have violated parliamentary norms but not republican principles—in the same authoritarian and anti-republican camp as the RN.

Third, in the wake of the 2022 legislative elections, Macron’s Renaissance was denied an absolute majority in the National Assembly, and successive governments, first under Élisabeth Borne and then Attal, have struggled to pass legislation such as the pension and immigration bills. As a result, they have repeatedly invoked Article 49.3—a clause that allows the government to enact legislation without a parliamentary vote—which, although constitutional, must be used on an exceptional basis. Otherwise, as with the worldview of the RN, the deviant becomes the norm.

It is perhaps because he was tired of parliamentary paralysis that Macron decided on dissolution. As the political scientist Bruno Cautrès observed, the decision to dissolve a parliamentary assembly “is anything but an anodyne act in a democracy.” This explains why it has been used in France just five times since 1958 and the founding of the Fifth Republic. The most memorable instance was the work of Charles de Gaulle himself.

In May 1968, his presidency, perhaps even the Republic, was threatened by rebelling students and striking workers who had brought France to a standstill. In a remarkable address to the nation, de Gaulle announced the dissolution of the National Assembly, proclaiming that “the Republic shall not abdicate!” (It was the prime minister, Georges Pompidou—also skilled at craps—who gave an ultimatum to a dubious de Gaulle: either call a dissolution or lose a prime minister.)

De Gaulle rolled an eleven: French voters gave his party a solid majority. But other presidents who have tried their hand have been less fortunate. In 1997, when Jacques Chirac was two years into his presidency, he too surprised the nation by dissolving parliament and announcing new elections. His goal, he said, was to “give the people back their voices”—i.e., strengthen his position both on the right and center. Yet the people threw their voices behind the left-wing opposition, forcing a chagrined Chirac to share power with a Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, for the remainder of his term.

Just as the Democratic Party thinks, perhaps magically, that American voters, though mostly holding their noses, will cast their ballots for reelecting President Joe Biden, when the French enter the polling station for two rounds of voting on June 30 and July 7, so too does Macron’s camp cling to this same conviction. This explains his stern warning that the vote will oblige the French “to assume their responsibilities.” Or, as Renaissance deputy Cécile Rilhac insisted, Macron is forcing voters to answer one question: “Are you really sure that you want to see our country governed by the National Rally?”

Rilhac may have a point. Historically, the European elections in France (as well as other EU member states) have been occasions to voice general discontent rather than actual electoral intent. As the political scientist Nonna Mayer argues, the function of European elections, especially in France, is to offer a “sanction vote,” one that places politicians on notice. Moreover, these elections draw fewer citizens to the polls than do national elections. Since nearly half of the French population did not bother to vote last weekend, there is not a broad statistical or behavioral basis to offer an accurate forecast for the legislative elections.

If the answer to Rilhac’s question is yes, other pressing questions will be raised—namely, whether exercising power will harm rather than help the RN.

Macron might be keen on the prospect of an RN victory, hoping to repeat what President François Mitterrand of the Socialist Party accomplished during his first term of office in the 1980s, when the Gaullist opposition won the legislative elections—the first though not last instance of cohabitation (when the executive branch is held by one party, while the legislative branch by another).

Back then, Mitterrand portrayed himself as a republican counterbalance to the conservative agenda that his then-prime minister, Chirac, was attempting to impose. This included harsh laws aimed at undocumented immigrants, including the revocation of automatic French nationality for the children of these immigrants born on French soil, as well as plans to make public universities more selective and expensive. When hundreds of thousands of students filled the boulevards of Paris and other cities in protest, Mitterrand declared his support.

Chirac’s government, forced to withdraw the legislation, found itself increasingly unpopular, so much so that in the 1988 presidential election, the 71-year-old Mitterrand soundly defeated his former prime minister.

But that was Mitterrand and then, not Macron and now. Macron’s policies and person have alienated many voters, especially those on the center left who once supported him. In fact, his unpopularity runs so deep and so wide that nearly 70 percent of those who intended to vote in the European election were motivated by their opposition to Macron, according to a May poll; only the most disastrous tenure in power by the RN could reverse the trend.

Given Macron’s tendency to style his rule as Jupiterian, none of this is surprising, nor would be an RN victory in the legislative elections, an event that—if it occurs—Macron will have helped to bring about.

It is apt that the elections will play out as France prepares to host the Summer Olympics. There is a chance that the world’s athletes will be welcomed by not just the French president, the supposed embodiment of the universal and humanist values of French republicanism, but also by an ethno-nationalist prime minister he was instrumental in bringing to power.

Let the games begin.