A campaign that started lukewarm and ends under tension. At least for the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, this is how the dynamics of the dispute, in recent weeks, for the legislature can be described.
The result of the second round of the election that will define the composition of the National Assembly, this Sunday (19), will determine the progress of the five years of his new term. And a real possibility is that the newly re-elected will fail to obtain an absolute majority, something that has been the norm since 2002.
In the first round, Juntos, a center-right coalition around Macron, was practically tied with the alliance of left-wing parties, the New Ecological and Social Popular Union (NUPES). Each group got around 5.8 million votes, with an advantage of just 21,285 for the president’s bloc.
Macronists, however, are ahead in the projection of deputies for the Assembly, composed of 577 seats. The system is not proportional, and two-round voting tends to favor large coalitions at the center of the political spectrum. According to an Ipsos poll released this Friday (17), the president’s group could get between 265 and 305 seats, followed by the left-wing bloc, which would have 140 to 180 seats.
It is the uncertainty about the size of this difference that has heated up the campaign, as the direction of Macron’s second term and his reform plans, such as pensions, depend on it.
Two are the likely scenarios – a majority of the left bloc is seen as unlikely. If he wins at least 289 seats, the president will have an absolute majority and will be able to approve his projects without having to negotiate with other political forces. If he does not reach that number, the relative majority will lead him to seek compositions with deputies from other parties, forcing the need for agreements.
After being re-elected at the end of April by defeating the far-right Marine Le Pen, Macron postponed his involvement in the legislative campaign, in a strategy that ended up leaving Nupes, led by the ultra-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon, speaking almost alone, and, as a consequence, , emptied the debate of proposals.
The scenario continued like this until the eve of the first round, when Macron began to attack Mélenchon, aware of the risks of not repeating the 2017 result, when his coalition elected 350 deputies.
The president then launched into an alarmist speech, according to which without a solid majority in his coalition, France could plunge into a period of turmoil. “In these troubled times, your choice is more crucial than ever. Nothing would be worse than adding chaos in France to global chaos,” he said on Tuesday, calling voters to the polls to try to reverse record abstention. of the first round, by 52.5%. Mélenchon’s answer came on the same day and in the same currency. “The chaos is he, who doesn’t know what else to do in the face of the global crisis that is advancing,” he told Le Parisien newspaper.
According to constitutional law professor Marie-Anne Cohendet, from the Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University, it is an exaggeration to speak of chaos. The two times a president held a relative majority, between 1958-1962 and 1988-1993, “it wasn’t the end of the world.” “Of course the president prefers to have a strong majority. But he shouldn’t lead Parliament, Parliament should lead the government.”
Faced with a possible relative majority, Macron may seek reinforcements, to win parliamentary votes, from the center-right Republican bench, which can win between 60 and 80 seats.
“But both because of the strong internal divisions and the decisive role they would find themselves in, they would present, in exchange for support, requests for positions and influence in the government that could be seen as excessive”, says Marco Tarchi, professor of political science at the University from Florence.
Whether the majority is absolute or relative, it is certain that a great novelty will be the left-wing bloc as the main opposition force, going from 73 seats obtained five years ago to something between 140-180.
The coalition leadership by Mélenchon’s party, the France Insubmissa, with methods considered strident, must intensify the use of the Assembly as a sounding board, in order, according to Etienne Ollion, professor of sociology at the Polytechnic School in Paris, “to create scandals and politicize each subject”.
If the relative majority is unwanted by the French leader’s coalition, on the other hand it could rekindle the clash between left and right in the country, erased by the centrism of Macron’s early term, and lead the legislature to occupy a more relevant place in politics, forcing Macron to negotiate more. “That would be good for democracy, with more debates and less authority from the president,” says Cohendet.
