Macron called an election to avoid ‘bedlam’. It is a mad gamble which he may not win

“Mr President, how could you put us in this situation? How could you put us in this chaos?” an elderly woman asked Emmanuel Macron in Brittany on June 18th. Macron defended himself: “In all good conscience I tell you, there was no other solution.”

If he had not dissolved the French National Assembly on June 9th, Macron added, “It would have been bedlam.”

But two weeks later, it looks like France is heading for bedlam. Every political grouping except Marine Le Pen’s extreme right National Rally (RN) — whose European election victory prompted Macron’s decision — has splintered. As the two-round snap election approaches, the country is intensely worried about its future.

Media owned by the far-right, fundamentalist Catholic industrialist and press magnate Vincent Bolloré provide a constant barrage of pro-RN coverage

The fact that the dissolution was reportedly the brainchild of three Macron advisers calling themselves “the musketeers”, one a former journalist, the other two from public relations firms, has added to disquiet.

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Media owned by the far-right, fundamentalist Catholic industrialist and press magnate Vincent Bolloré provide a constant barrage of pro-RN coverage. Bolloré engineered the defection of Eric Ciotti, leader of the neo-Gaullist conservative party Les Républicains (LR), to Le Pen’s camp.

Accusations of treachery are rife: against Ciotti; against Le Pen’s niece Marion Maréchal, who abandoned her mentor Eric Zemmour to return to the family fold, after representing Zemmour’s small extreme right party Reconquest in the European election.

“We can’t turn France over to the Le Pen family!” the Socialist MEP Raphael Glucksmann said plaintively on France Inter radio.

But the solution proposed by the left, a coalition called the New Popular Front (NFP), is not working. NFP is dominated by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the vituperative 72-year-old leader of the extreme left France Unbowed (LFI) party, whose defence of the Palestinians of Gaza has led to widespread accusations of anti-Semitism. Mélenchon purged five LFI deputies from the outgoing Assembly because they criticised him.

Because Macron’s centre-right liberal coalition lost its absolute majority in the 2022 legislative elections, former prime minister Elisabeth Borne had to pass legislation by decree, as allowed by the constitution, 23 times

The NFP will not say who will be prime minister if it wins — akin to asking voters to embark on a journey without knowing their destination. Nupes, a similar left-wing coalition created for the 2022 legislative election, disintegrated. Few doubt this one will too.

Because Macron’s centre-right liberal coalition lost its absolute majority in the 2022 legislative elections, former prime minister Elisabeth Borne had to pass legislation by decree, as allowed by the constitution, 23 times.

It was, Macron’s opponents screamed, undemocratic. They hoped to bring down the government with a no-confidence vote in the autumn, a humiliation which Macron was determined to avoid.

The day after the dissolution, Macron reportedly told a confidant, “I’ve been preparing this for weeks and I’m delighted. I pulled the pin and tossed my grenade at their legs. Now we’ll see how they get out of it.”

It is not clear to whom Macron was referring. He vowed in 2017 to blow up France’s two-party left-right political system. He wanted to stand alone in a heroic battle against the extreme right.

Macron got his wish, but the extreme right appears to be winning. An Ifop opinion poll this week showed Macron’s Renaissance trailing in third place with 18 per cent of voter intentions. The RN leads with 33 per cent — nearly 40 per cent when Reconquest and defectors from LR are included.

The NFP, which Le Pen labels “an Islamo-leftist bloc” and “an abomination” is in second place at 28 per cent.

LFI politicians repeat that Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie co-founded the Front National in 1972 with former members of the Nazi Waffen SS and the anti-Gaullist OAS terrorist movement. It was in part to make France forget that legacy that Marine Le Pen changed the name of the FN in 2018. She dropped her father’s anti-Semitism but kept his xenophobia and Islamophobia.

Macron alienated many in his camp when he tossed the proverbial grenade

Le Pen and her 28-year-old protege Jordan Bardella, who could become prime minister of France two weeks from now, send coded messages to party faithful, for example when Bardella repeated three times in a television debate that “77 per cent of rapes in Paris are committed by foreigners”. Bardella says it’s not safe for French women to go out at night.

Macron alienated many in his camp when he tossed the proverbial grenade. Candidates from his Renaissance party do not want his name or photograph on their posters. Prime minister Gabriel Attal resented having been kept in the dark about the dissolution. He called Macron’s decision “brutal”. Yaël Braun-Pivet, the Macronist speaker of the outgoing National Assembly, publicly reproached Macron for not choosing “another way … a coalition or a government pact”.

If the RN or NPF win an absolute majority, Macron will endure an excruciating “cohabitation” with a prime minister he considers to be an extremist. But if no one wins an absolute majority and Macron loses his plurality of seats in the assembly, France will become virtually ungovernable. Gen Charles de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic in 1958 to prevent just such instability.

A leading European power could be paralysed at a time of wars in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine, and in the run-up to a US election which Donald Trump may win. Europe too has reason to fear the results of Macron’s mad gamble.