French President Emmanuel Macron fought his last presidential campaign against the far right’s Marine Le Pen, and then the ensuing parliamentary polls against a newly united left. Just two years on, his weakened coalition must now take on both opponents at once, in a snap election that Macron has framed as a final showdown between his moderate camp and “extremists” on both right and left.
In a sombre but combative address on Wednesday, Macron’s first since his startling decision to dissolve the National Assembly, the French president cut straight to the chase.
“The masks have come off and the battle of values is out in the open,” Macron told a press conference in Paris, reflecting on the frantic political reshuffle set in motion by his decision to trigger a snap election.
He described the forthcoming legislative polls, which will take place in two rounds on June 30 and July 7, as a tussle between his moderate camp and two “unnatural alliances” that have emerged on the “far left” and the “far right”.
“Things are simple today: we have unnatural alliances at both extremes, who agree on nothing except the jobs to be shared,” he said, urging moderate voters to band together in support of his ruling coalition.
Macron aimed his first zinger at Eric Ciotti, the conservative leader who caused outrage on Tuesday by backing Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally. He blasted a “pact with the devil”, accusing the likes of Ciotti of “turning their backs on the legacy of General de Gaulle, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy”.
He was equally scathing of leftwing parties that have banded together under a new “Popular Front”, accusing Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard-left La France insoumise (LFI) of abetting anti-Semitism in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war.
The alliance “is not just baroque, it’s indecent”, he snapped, suggesting that Léon Blum – an icon of the left who headed the anti-fascist Popular Front in the 1930s – “must be turning in his grave”.
He systematically used the terms extrême gauche (far left) to refer to the fledgling coalition of Green and leftwing parties, none of which are classified as such by the Conseil d’État, France’s top administrative jurisdiction, which recently rejected the National Rally’s bid to no longer be classified as extrême droite (far right).
Macron or chaos
Macron’s surprise move to dissolve the lower house of parliament came on the heels of European parliamentary polls that saw Le Pen’s National Rally triumph with over 30% of the vote – more than double the support for Macron’s party.
With the French far right at a historic high, and all other parties in disarray, polls say the National Rally stands to win the largest number of seats in the National Assembly, and perhaps even an outright majority, possibly resulting in France’s first far-right government since World War II.
Read moreFrance’s Macron calls snap election in huge gamble after EU polls debacle
At the press conference on Wednesday, Macron rebuffed accusations that his move to call snap elections would help the far right take power in France. He called on “men and women of goodwill who are able to say ‘no’ to extremes on the left and the right to join together to be able to build a joint project” for the country.
It’s a strategy that has worked for the president before, with voters twice rallying behind him – many reluctantly – to defeat Le Pen in presidential runoffs, in 2017 and 2022.
“The aim is to engineer a repeat of the presidential runoffs in each of France’s 577 constituencies,” said Pierre-Nicolas Baudot, a political analyst at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in central France.
“The presidential camp will frame these elections as a choice between Macron and chaos,” he said. “But it’s a very risky strategy, because the far right has been ‘normalised’ in the eyes of many voters,” he added, noting that Macron’s government had helped normalise Le Pen’s anti-immigrant party by passing a controversial immigration law with support from the National Rally.
A tripolar system
Erwan Lecoeur, a political analyst at the GRESEC research centre and the Université Grenoble Alpes, described Macron’s pitch to voters as a repeat of “the face-off he theorised back in 2017 between his ‘progressive’ camp and rival ‘populist’ forces”.
The trouble for Macron, he added, is that France’s political landscape is increasingly divided into three blocs, with the president’s centre-right coalition now squeezed in between a leftwing bloc and a surging far right that is poaching voters – and politicians – from the traditional right.
“While presidential runoffs put Macron at an advantage, legislative elections often lead to three-way races in the second round,” Lecoeur explained. “In many of those races, Macron’s party will be the weakest of the three – and the National Rally the strongest.”
Hence the need for the ruling party to fight this election on two fronts, hoping to lure moderates from both the left and the right.
“Macron has no choice but to reach out to centre-left and centre-right voters, as he successfully did in 2017,” Lecoeur added. “His call to shun the extremes will lure some of those voters, but probably not enough to stave off defeat.”
Others on the left will most certainly be angered by his decision to designate all left-wing parties as “far left” and some of them as “opposed to Republican values”. On Wednesday, the president notably sidestepped a question from a journalist who asked him: “If you put far right and far left on the same level, how do you expect left-wing voters to continue blocking the far right?”
Crying wolf
During the press conference, Macron was adamant that French voters would refuse to choose the extremes on both sides of the political spectrum. He assured that he was not falling into defeatism and said he would serve out his second presidential term regardless of the outcome of the legislative vote.
“I think the French are intelligent, they see what’s being done, what’s coherent and what’s not, and they know what to do,” Macron said, describing himself as “an indefatigable optimist”.
His government has urged business leaders to get involved in the campaign, with Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire calling on bosses to “stick their necks out” against Le Pen and her “Marxist” economic programme.
The head of the Medef, France’s largest business group, duly obliged on Tuesday, warning against a “far-left fascism as well as that of the far right”. The next day, the U2P lobby representing small businesses said it viewed the National Rally and the Popular Front as “equally dangerous” for the French economy.
But U2P’s head Michel Picon also had a message for the minister, telling RMC radio: “Statements like the ones Bruno Le Maire is asking us to make don’t work, they’re counterproductive. (...) It’s not by crying wolf, or by lighting a candle for the Republic, that you’ll get your message across.”
Left still kicking
While crying wolf will do little to change the minds of hardened Le Pen voters, the sudden prospect of a far-right government has succeeded in uniting France’s bitterly fractured left – with a speed that may well have caught the Elysée Palace off guard.
The fledgling Popular Front comes just months after the demise of a previous, fragile alliance that collapsed amid bitter divisions over the war in Gaza. Those and other divisions were on full display during an acrimonious campaign for European elections during which LFI and the Socialist-backed candidate Raphaël Glucksmann were frequently at loggerheads.
“Macron probably guessed that it was better to go now, with the left in disarray, than to wait any longer,” said Lecoeur, suggesting the president had underestimated the left’s ability to band together when faced with the Le Pen brand.
The urgency of the situation, with the shortest election campaign in modern French history, may also have facilitated an accord that weeks of fraught negotiations could otherwise have impeded.
“The idea that the far right is close to power is a very powerful incentive for the left to unite and set aside other considerations,” said Samuel Hayat, a political scientist at the Centre for Political Research of Sciences Po (CEVIPOF) in Paris.
“Seeing the likes of Ciotti joining forces with the far right makes it even more difficult for leftwing people to refuse the Popular Front,” he added.
A demoralised camp
The French president may also have underestimated the extent to which his own political capital has been degraded after seven years in power and a multitude of crises.
“Macron doesn’t understand that the country has radicalised since 2017 – and that he’s antagonised people across the board,” said Lecoeur. “There is too much resentment of the president, particularly among leftwing voters, for them to bail him out once more.”
He cited a bitter battle over pension reform, which saw Macron use special powers to bypass parliament amid fierce opposition across the country, as the final straw for many voters who had reluctantly backed him to keep the far right out of power.
If the president hasn’t noticed, his own lawmakers certainly have. Several have asked not to have the president’s photo on their campaign posters, preferring to be pictured alongside his more popular prime minister, Gabriel Attal.
“I will defend my own views and seek to avoid anti-Macron reactions,” Béatrice Piron, a lawmaker from the Paris region, told AFP. Bruno Millienne of the centrist MoDem party said he was “still allied to the president” but could “no longer use his image during the campaign” because it has become “hateful” in the eyes of many voters.
“Many outgoing Renaissance lawmakers are furious at parliament’s dissolution and well aware that their chances of winning back their seats are slim,” said Lecoeur. “The ruling party is now a demolarised camp that has lost faith in its leader.”
