France’s last parliamentary elections in 2017 gave flesh to President Emmanuel Macron’s pledge of political renewal, staffing the country’s National Assembly with newcomers plucked from the public. As their mandate comes up for renewal on June 12-19, has the promised change materialised?
It’s been five years since Macron pulled a party out of his hat and triumphed in parliamentary elections, sending an army of political unknowns to the National Assembly, France’s lower house of parliament.
Macron, himself a relative novice at the time, had promised to regenerate French politics by injecting new blood into parliament. His list of candidates featured men and women in equal numbers. More than half were newcomers to politics – people in ordinary jobs who had never held elected office.
From that list, a staggering 308 were duly elected to the 577-seat assembly. The extraordinary result confirmed both French voters’ desire for change and their habit of handing newly elected presidents a workable majority.
“In 2017 Macron was able to transform a structural weakness into a communication asset,” said Étienne Ollion, a sociologist and author of a book on France’s most recent legislature, noting that Macron’s promise of renewal and his lack of an established party chimed with the public’s anti-establishment mood.
While Macron urged his lawmakers to “be proud to be amateurs”, his “newbies” were frequently mocked in the first months of the legislature, “often unfairly so”, said Ollion, noting that gaffes and mistakes stemming from inexperience were mostly inconsequential.
“When people stammer because they’re not used to speaking in parliament, or are unsure about certain procedures, it’s no big deal,” he said. “If you want politics to be done by ordinary people, then you can’t expect everything to be perfect.”
Members of the opposition coined the phrase ‘Playmobil lawmaker’ to refer to MPs from Macron’s La République en Marche (LREM), deriding their unwavering loyalty to the president. The taunts were nothing new, said Ollion, describing the ‘Playmobil’ jab as “merely the latest sobriquet for MPs who are seen as always toeing the government line, like ‘yes-men’.”
Still, inexperience was inevitably a handicap for the party’s freshly elected lawmakers, stripped of both savoir-faire and connections. As a result, the few who did know how to navigate the National Assembly in the early days faced little competition and were rapidly able to gain prominent positions within the LREM group.
“Within LREM, those who emerged from the ranks were those who already had some experience of politics, whether as elected officials or as their collaborators,” said Ollion. “It’s no small detail considering that Macron promised in 2017 to change politics by renewing the political corps.”
Success stories and casting blunders
While most early figureheads were turncoats from the old parties of right and left, notable exceptions included Jean-Baptiste Djebbari, a lawmaker from rural Haute-Vienne in central France who rose up the ranks to become a junior minister for transport, and Yaël Braun-Pivet, the newly appointed minister for France’s overseas territories.
Things could easily have gone otherwise for Braun-Pivet, a lawyer and charity worker who was elected to represent the Yvelines department south of Paris in 2017 and rapidly found herself propelled to the head of the National Assembly's powerful law commission, a post typically given to seasoned lawmakers.
The political novice was derided early on for mixing up laws and decrees, and for likening her fellow LREM lawmakers to couch potatoes, unaware that her mic was switched on. But what Braun-Pivet lacked in experience she soon made up for in work ethic, while her position ensured she had access to a large team of assistants and advisors.
“Hers is an interesting case because it shows that with just one or two assistants in normal times, French MPs don’t have the means to do their jobs efficiently,” said Ollion. “If Braun-Pivet succeeded, it’s largely thanks to the support she enjoyed by virtue of her post.”
Inevitably, Macron’s army of newcomers also resulted in its share of casting blunders, none more spectacular than Joachim Son-Forget, the MP for French nationals residing in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, whose long list of exploits included body-shaming a parliamentary colleague, posing with assault rifles, sharing a key Macron ally’s leaked sex video, and ultimately backing extreme-right candidate Éric Zemmour in the recent presidential election.
“What a chore to be a lawmaker!” quipped the radiologist-turned-politician in a Le Monde profile two years ago, describing MPs as “petty officials who serve no purpose”. Despite his contempt for the job, Son-Forget is running for another term in office, though this time without the LREM nomination.
So is Alsatian lawmaker Martine Wonner, like Son-Forget a staunch supporter of the controversial doctor and anti-vaxxer champion Didier Raoult. During her tumultuous term in office she described mRNA vaccines against Covid-19 as “genetically-modified junk” and accused both the government and health workers of perpetrating “crimes against humanity”.
‘Just part of the decor’
While Son-Forget and Wonner are both extreme cases, talk of defections has been a recurrent theme during LREM’s five years in power, highlighting the party’s difficulty in bridging the old left-right divide and living up to its promise of renewal.
Policies pursued by Macron and his government alienated many lawmakers, particularly from the party’s left wing. Others were disillusioned with parliament and its relative weakness in a political system dominated by the figure of the president.
“While most of Macron’s novices embraced their mission with enthusiasm, many felt relegated to the background,” said Ollion, pointing to widespread disappointment regarding parliament’s ability to enact change.
Prominent defectors included Matthieu Orphelin, one of the first LREM lawmakers to make a name for themselves – and also one of the first to walk out on Macron’s party in protest at what he described as the government’s lack of ambition on environmental issues.
Orphelin, who backed Green candidate Yannick Jadot in the presidential election, is among 48 lawmakers who quit the LREM group during the legislature – a record under the Fifth Republic instituted by General Charles de Gaulle. By May 2020, the unprecedented haemorrhage had cost Macron’s party its absolute majority in the National Assembly.
Lawmaker Annie Chapelier, a nurse from the southern Gard department, quit LREM earlier that year, slamming a party “disconnected and indifferent to the people” in which the rank and file are expected to “blindly obey”. She later published a vitriolic book denouncing a powerless parliament hostage to lobbies.
“We’re merely part of the decor,” Chapelier told France Inter radio ahead of the upcoming parliamentary elections, in which she will not defend her seat.
Changing the rules of the game
As France heads to the polls on June 12 and 19 to renew the National Assembly, Macron’s ruling party has chosen not to repeat its experiment with political newcomers – discarding all talk of a renewal of French politics.
>> Explainer: How do France's legislative elections work?
Around 70 lawmakers elected in 2017 under the LREM banner have either chosen not to seek a second term or have lost their nomination. Those vacancies have been filled by Macron allies or people who are already well-acquainted with French politics.
In retrospect, LREM’s political novices helped shed light on the nature of contemporary politics and its impact on the lives of elected officials, said Ollion, pointing to threats levelled at members of the ruling party during Macron’s uniquely turbulent years in office, marked by often violent protests.
“It’s a world in which you are no longer in control of your own life, in which there’s a constant dissociation between private life and public image, and in which violence is constant – whether internal, through back-stabbings between colleagues, or external, with members of the public who insult, threaten and in some cases even assault their MPs,” he explained.
The experience of Macron’s “newbies” has also exposed the limits of attempts to breathe new life into the institutions of French democracy at a time of mounting voter disaffection, Ollion added.
“The political novices soon found themselves constrained,” he said. “It’s not enough just to change the personnel. One also needs to change the rules of the game.”
