When President Macron led the Bastille Day celebrations at the Arc de Triomphe on July 14, 2017, with his wife, Brigitte, to his left, and Donald Trump to his right, he was riding as high as the military jets decorating the skies above him with trails of blue, white and red smoke.
Aged just 39, the self-styled “disruptor” from the radical centre had just beaten Marine Le Pen, his right-wing nemesis, to the presidency and helped his supporters to win a thumping majority in parliament.
Seven years on, Macron will cut a much-diminished figure at Sunday’s event. Even members of his own entourage are deserting him over his reckless handling of a political crisis largely of his own creation that threatens to turn the disrupter into a demolition man.
“I won’t be on the ministerial platform on July 14,” one unnamed member of the government told BFM, a rolling news channel. “It’s ridiculous, what message would that send to the French? That everything is continuing as before?”
When Macron called a snap parliamentary vote that concluded last Sunday, his avowed intention was to provide “clarity” for the country after Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally won last month’s elections to the European parliament. But although the French people have now spoken, no one can agree what they said.
Advertisement
A week later, there is still no new government, Gabriel Attal, the outgoing prime minister, has been asked to stay on as a caretaker, and there are fears trouble could spill on to the streets before the Paris Olympics, now less than a fortnight away.
Macron himself — once dubbed “Jupiter” for his imperious style — risks being reduced to a lame duck in his remaining three years in the Élysée Palace and may eventually have little choice but give up and step down early.
• Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s clean-cut chameleon who could be PM
“Jupiter is dead,” was the withering verdict of Dominique de Villepin, a former prime minister. “Jupiter has been defeated at the ballot box.”
Since the foundation of France’s current Fifth Republic in 1958, its elections have produced clear majorities, in most cases from the same camp as the president himself. Although Macron’s supporters narrowly failed to do so in the last poll in 2022, they were still by far the strongest force.
Advertisement
This time, by contrast, the parliament contains three large, mutually antagonistic groups. The New Popular Front, a hastily cobbled together coalition of Socialists, Communists, Greens and the hard-left France Unbowed, came first, but with only 178 seats, which left it far short of the 289 needed for an absolute majority.
Macron’s Together alliance trailed with 150 seats, while the National Rally had far fewer than expected at 125. Although it won the first round and was widely expected to win the second one too, its ambitions were thwarted by supporters of the other two blocs, who followed calls by their leaders to vote tactically to keep it from power. The centre-right Republicans form a much smaller fourth force.
Under the French constitution, Macron is free to appoint whomever he likes to take Attal’s place, though convention suggests he should choose the head of the most successful bloc.
The New Popular Front insists this means it should be one of their number, who would then implement their radical left-wing programme, which includes a sharp rise in the minimum wage, some price control and a cut in the retirement age. But they were not immediately able to say who that should be after going into the election without having agreed on a single leader.
Initial attempts by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 72, the divisive leader of the hard-left France Unbowed, to claim the job for himself or one of his lieutenants were rebuffed by the four other more moderate parties in the group worried that would scare off more mainstream voters.
Advertisement
Days of often acrimonious discussion followed behind closed doors. But by Friday evening, support appeared to be coalescing around the unlikely figure of Huguette Bello, the president of the regional council of Réunion, which, although an island in the Indian Ocean 5,800 miles from Paris, is a French department
Bello, 73, a former Communist and MP for more than two decades, who is little known to the public, has indicated that she would be up for the job, though the Socialists were still insisting that it should go to Olivier Faure, 55, their own leader. A poll, meanwhile, showed voters preferred his colleague, Raphaël Glucksmann, 44, who led the Socialists’ campaign for the European parliament.
There is no guarantee, however, that Bello, Faure, Glucksmann or indeed anyone that the left can come up with would have enough support in parliament to survive a confidence vote.
Macron, too, has made clear he has a very different plan for who should be his prime minister. Before escaping the political melodrama to spend a couple of days at the Nato summit in Washington on Wednesday, he sent a letter to regional newspapers in which he insisted that no one, the left included, had won the election and suggested instead the formation of a broader-based government.
Centred on his own Together bloc, this would include the moderate left and Republicans on the right, but exclude the National Rally and France Unbowed, both of whose ideas are anathema to him.
Advertisement
It remains to be seen whether Macron will get what he wants. Mélenchon and his allies have accused him of a “power grab” while trade unions have threatened protests and stoppages during the Games.
Many of Macron’s own MPs, meanwhile, are still angry with him for calling an election that cost the party more than a third of its seats. Some leading figures are also falling out among themselves amid signs they are jockeying for position as the president’s eventual successor in 2027 — or earlier if he chooses to step down before.
“They’re fighting over a cake that’s past its sell-by date, it’s depressing,” one anonymous senior party figure told Le Figaro.
Addressing his camp after his return from Washington, Macron reportedly accused them of putting on a “disastrous spectacle” and urged them to “put the nation first before premature ambition”.
The president did not name names, but relations are said to be especially acrimonious between two of the leading pretenders: Attal, 35, elected on Saturday as head of Macron’s Renaissance party and Gérald Darmanin, 41, the outgoing interior minister.
Advertisement
Some clarity, at least over the choice of a new government, should come this week before the first meeting of the new parliament on Thursday. Macron’s own future — and legacy — looks more uncertain.
The mood among the president’s supporters — past and present — was summed up by Gilles Le Gendre, a disenchanted former MP who was president of his party’s parliamentary group for two years from 2018.
“Macronism is finished,” he said. “The only coalition that exists today is the one against the president.”
