How did the internal stalemate bring Macron back to earth?

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The writer is managing editor and columnist for Le Monde

President Emmanuel Macron has two lives, one lived abroad and the other at home. After interrupting the official motorcade in Copenhagen last week, he walked across the city to Christiansborg Palace, where fellow European leaders were waiting for him to attend the summit meeting.

He shakes hands with local well-wishers as if he stepped out of a Danish TV series CastleThe French president was smiling, clearly enjoying the warmth of his Scandinavian welcome.

The contrast with the political catastrophe brewing in Paris could not be more striking. His popularity has reached an all-time low, after some of his most important allies abandoned him, and Macron has spent this week silently watching his support unravel, with France mired in its most serious political crisis since 1968.

On Monday, he tasked his third prime minister in 12 months, Sébastien Lecornu, with trying to find common ground between political parties reluctant to do so again. (Lecorno resigned 14 hours after announcing the formation of his government.)

On Wednesday evening, LeCorno informed the country that this mission had also ended in vain. “I’ve tried everything,” he added. Now it is up to the president to pick up the pieces and present his own solution. Meanwhile, Macron’s former prime minister, Edouard Philippe, now a presidential candidate, urged him to resign. Another former Macron-era prime minister, Gabriel Attal, leader of Macron’s Ennahda party, asked him to stop “desperately clinging to power.” On Friday evening, the president finally came up with a solution that lacked innovation: he asked Lecornu to form a government — again.

This unprecedented situation revived the specter of the horrific Fourth Republic (1946-1958), when rival political parties were unable to cooperate, paralyzing successive French governments until Charles de Gaulle took power and initiated a new constitutional system, establishing the Fifth Republic that still exists to this day. As the shock reverberated this week, blame immediately fell on the most powerful man in the French system: the head of state.

But who is really responsible? There is no doubt that the current chaos arose from Macron’s hasty and unilateral decision to dissolve the National Assembly and call early elections on June 9, 2024, to halt the rise of the far right. By failing to produce a parliamentary majority, those elections created lasting instability. Macron himself belatedly admitted that the decision brought “more divisions than solutions.” If there was no winner in those elections, which strengthened the power of the extreme right and the extreme left, there was a clear loser: the presidential camp.

However, Macron has assumed he can continue until the end of his second term in 2027, trying to protect his legacy despite a weak and fragmented centrist bloc. Gone is the audacity that characterized his early years. Instead, “Macronism” paralyzed the country.

The French political establishment also bears responsibility. Leaders of all political parties, from all shades of left to right, have stubbornly refused to work together or reach a compromise – oblivious to France’s dire financial situation and the turbulent international environment. As Lecorno rightly put it, they were unable to “put country before party.” The only goal they seem to share, almost obsessively, is to run for president in 2027.

The irony here is that Macron, who promised to stop the rise of the far right in France, may be forced to appoint a far-right prime minister if another early election gives a majority to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, which is now headed by her young deputy, Jordan Bardella. The unthinkable has become plausible: a new opinion poll on Friday put the National Front ahead with 36 percent of the vote in a snap election — enough to reach a parliamentary majority with some center-right allies.

This prospect may frighten the main parties enough to agree a last-minute compromise with Macron and Lecornu on pension reform and avoid a new dissolution of parliament. But the calm will only be temporary. It also sends shivers through most of Macron’s European partners, many of whom face a similar challenge from illiberal forces. The recent victory of populist Andrej Babiš in the Czech elections was bad enough; The formation of a French government with a far-right prime minister would be a much stronger blow to the European Union, which would please Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Will Macron, the visionary whose ambition breathed new life into the European project after his election in 2017, end up as the gravedigger of that dream? This is the ultimate irony for a leader whose creativity and activism on the world stage are applauded by his peers but who has failed to convince his fellow citizens of the demands of a rapidly changing world.

A book published in 1946 has recently found its way into French discussion. Written by French historian and resistance fighter Marc Bloch before he was arrested, tortured, and executed by the Gestapo in 1944, Strange defeat Includes a devastating analysis of the mistakes of the French establishment and the public complacency that led to the collapse of the country’s defenses in 1940.

Last year, Macron praised Bloch’s “biting clarity”, announcing that his remains would be transferred to the Pantheon. The new popularity of Strange defeat Over the past few days it probably wouldn’t have been a surprise to him. Now it was his turn to show “biting clarity” to spare France another defeat.

This article has been updated.