How Macron Broke the French Political System

(Note to Restoration readers:

It is my pleasure to introduce my readers to Philippe Lemoine. Philippe is a philosopher by training who writes about politics, science, and philosophy, foreign policy, and various other issues interesting to him. I encourage you to follow him on Twitter or here on Substack.

The French election results are a huge mess. A grasp of the basics is available anywhere, but readers who enjoy our deep-dive editions will want more. Here at Restoration, we try to provide that kind of in-depth analysis whenever possible. We are extremely grateful to Philippe for providing that to our readers. Enjoy!

—Ayaan)

Three days ago, French voters surprised most observers by giving the National Rally, Marine Le Pen’s nationalist party, only a quarter of the seats. Yet, 38% of French voters voted for them, significantly more than any other party. The left and the center only got a quarter of the vote each, but each ended up with more seats than the right. What happened was complicated; the consequences are more complicated still. In short, the alliance of left and center was enough to keep power out of the hands of the right, but it will not be enough to govern. France is now in political terra incognita and nobody knows what is going to happen next.

The Results and the Peculiarities of the French System

Post-election, the National Assembly, France’s lower house, is now divided into three roughly equal blocs. The New Popular Front, a left-wing alliance whose main components are the radical left LFI, the Greens and the center-left Socialist Party, has the largest bloc with 182 deputies. Ensemble, Macron’s centrist alliance, came in second with 168 seats. The National Rally and its allies, the nationalist bloc, came third with 143 seats. In last place came the Republicans, the traditional center-right party, who managed to salvage 46 seats, but may play a crucial role in the coming months despite this relatively small number of deputies.

via Wikimedia Commons

Key:

New Popular Front in red

Ensemble in yellow

National Rally in dark blue

This is all a huge surprise. Most pollsters forecast between 200 and 230 seats for the National Rally, far from the 289 required for a majority, but enough to put it far ahead of anyone else. The New Popular Front beat expectations by winning the largest number of seats, but crucially it’s still very far from a majority. Ensemble also did much better than anticipated, it was expected to end up with 90 to 120 deputies, but it still lost almost 80 seats and is no longer in a position to govern. Nobody else is though, and therein lies the problem, but before I discuss what could happen next I need to explain what just happened and for that I need to say a few words about the French electoral system.

French parliamentary elections happen in two rounds. In each district, the two candidates who had the most votes in the first round, as well as any candidate who received the votes of at least 12.5% of the registered voters in that district, move ahead to the second round. This means that it’s possible for three or even four candidates to face each other in the second round. The candidate who gets the most votes in the second round wins the seat for that district. What this means is that, unless smaller parties make alliances before the first round to avoid running against each other, they can’t even make it to the second round in most districts and can’t hope to win a large number of seats.

Macron’s Gambit

Macron probably thought that, by calling snap parliamentary elections after his party was soundly defeated at the European elections and giving the parties only three weeks to prepare, the left would not have time to put together an electoral alliance and force them to present multiple candidates in most districts, so that left-wing candidates would only have been able to qualify for the second round in a handful of them. It would have only left a centrist candidate from his Ensemble alliance to face a far-right candidate in the second round in most districts and, just as Macron himself did in both 2017 and 2022, enough left-wing voters would vote for the centrist candidate to defeat the National Rally.

President Macron. Credit: Jacques Paquier, via Wikimedia Commons

This strategy must have sounded all the more sound that, in the past few months, infighting had been at a record high on the left. There are deep personal enmities among the leaders of left-wing parties, combined with equally profound ideological differences, so Macron probably calculated that if they only had one week to make a deal, parties had to declare their candidates in every district two weeks before the first round at the latest, they would not succeed.

But, ironically, this strategy produced exactly the opposite result, precisely because left-wing leaders knew that they had no time. Unless they managed to make a deal they would be wiped out, so they decided to effectively tie their own hands by publicly announcing the day after Macron called elections that they had made a deal, even though at that point they had not agreed on anything. Paradoxically, if Macron had given them more time, they would have tried to work out the details first and there is a good chance they would have failed to strike a deal.

Macron’s strategy worked no better on his right flank. The surprise decision caused the implosion of the National Rally’s only rivals on the right by forcing them to face internal contradictions that, up until then, were only latent. Four out of five of the European members of parliament freshly elected from Reconquête, Éric Zemmour’s party, decided to go behind his back to make a deal with the National Rally, leaving the party in shambles. Eric Ciotti, the President of the center-right Republicans, meanwhile, also decided to make a deal with Le Pen without consulting with the other leaders of the party, who then ousted him and split in the party. Again, if Macron had not forced Reconquête and the Republicans to come up with a strategy for the elections in a hurry, they may very well have avoided that outcome.

The result was that, instead of beating the left in the first round and winning by default in the second, Macron’s alliance was going to be squeezed from both sides by a strong alliance on the left and a National Rally that just had to pick up the pieces left by Reconquête and the Republicans on the right. And indeed, after the first round of the election, when the National Rally won more than one third of the vote at the national level and came first almost everywhere, while the left-wing alliance did well in most places, that’s exactly what everyone thought was going to happen. But then it didn’t happen. Why?

Ironically, Macron or rather his party and its allies, as we shall see those are not the same, were saved by the left. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of LFI, who had spent the past seven years waging a relentless war against Macron, immediately made a statement upon the release of the first estimates on the night of the first round in which he announced that the New Popular Front would withdraw its candidates in every district where Le Pen’s party came first and they came third, leaving the candidate who came in second, typically a member of Macron’s alliance, alone to face the National Rally.

LFI Leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Credit: Pierre-Selim, via Wikimedia Commons

While he didn’t ask for anything in return, he calculated that by making that announcement right away he would induce the centrist bloc to reciprocate, which is exactly what happened. Macron himself issued a statement in which he seemed to oppose a general withdrawal, saying it should only happen on a district by district basis, presumably because he didn’t want centrist candidates to withdraw in districts where it could result in the election of a far-left LFI candidate. But he was ignored because, although Macron himself still hadn’t realized it, he was now irrelevant. His party and its allies, who were in this mess because of him and knew they no longer owed him anything, wanted to prevent the National Rally from winning a majority and save their seats in districts where it was still possible by honoring the tacit deal with the New Popular Front, so ignoring Macron’s statement, Gabriel Attal, his Prime Minister, announced that his party would also withdraw wherever doing so could help beat the National Rally.

As a result, instead of the more than 300 three-way or four-way races that should have taken place in the second round, all but guaranteeing a massive number of seats for the National Rally because it was comfortably ahead of anyone else in most districts, there were less than 100, almost exclusively in districts where the National Rally was so far behind that it had no chance of winning anyway.

It Was Ultimately the Voters Who Rejected the National Rally

But even given this tacit alliance between the left and the center, if centrist and left-wing voters had behaved as in 2022 (when there were almost only two-way races in the second round and Le Pen’s party won most of those where it was present), the National Rally would still have come very close to a majority. However, presumably because this time the prospect of a National Rally majority seemed real, left-wing and centrist voters behaved completely differently and mobilized en masse to defeat Le Pen’s party.

RN Leader Marine Le Pen. Credit: Vox España, via Wikimedia Commons

In retrospect, 2022 was anomalous in that respect and, in 2024, left-wing and centrist voters reverted to their historical behavior. This is a very important point that many commentators miss: the decision by the parties to withdraw candidates in districts where the National Rally came first in the first round played a very important role, but it was by shaping the options of voters and ultimately it’s still the voters who rejected the National Rally. Of course, had the parties not withdrawn their candidates, most left-wing and centrist voters would have probably have voted for the candidates that were ideologically closest to them and the National Rally would have won, but even after centrist and left-wing candidates withdrew, if voters had behaved as they did in 2022 it would still have won!

The National Rally’s defeat, then, had two causes. This tacit alliance between the left and the center, known as the “republican front” in France was a necessary but not sufficient condition for it. Ultimately, it was the behavior of left-wing and centrist voters in the second round, who often cast a ballot for the candidate of a party they had spent years fighting, that relegated the National Rally to third place in seats, despite receiving by far the largest number of votes.

Within the left-wing alliance, the main effect was that many Socialist Party candidates who otherwise would have had no chance of winning, because they were mostly running in rural districts where the National Rally is very strong (whereas LFI was mostly running in urban left-wing strongholds where it often could have won even if centrist candidates had not withdrawn), nevertheless ended up winning, bringing their total very close to LFI. Had Mélenchon not called for a “republican front,” the total number of left-wing deputies would have been much smaller, but his party would have continued to numerically dominate the left-wing alliance, as Socialist Party and Green deputies would have been a much smaller share of the total number of deputies in that alliance. Therefore it seems that Macron was not the only one who miscalculated.

But miscalculate he did. To be sure, the “republican front” strategy also saved his party and its allies in parliament, but they still lost almost 80 seats, nobody has a majority and, now that Macron forced his allies to unnecessarily go through this ordeal, they have essentially decided to forsake him. After the second round, Macron’s own Prime Minister, while announcing his resignation, openly criticized him by saying that he never supported the dissolution of the National Assembly. Édouard Philippe, Macron’s Prime Minister from 2017 to 2020, who now heads a center-right party and one of the main allies of Macron in parliament, implicitly suggested that a temporary coalition be formed to make a caretaker government possible until they could somehow get rid of Macron.

France Is Now Ungovernable

In short, while this notion is surprisingly popular in the Anglophone world because Macron’s alliance didn’t do as poorly as expected, the idea that his bet somehow paid off is completely disconnected from reality. The fact that his own party members and their allies in parliament now regard him as irrelevant is not even the worst problem he is facing. The main problem is that not only does no party or alliance has a majority, but none are even close, which means that France is effectively ungovernable.

To be sure, Macron’s government under Attal already had only a plurality of seats in the National Assembly, but it was close enough to a majority that it could still govern by putting together ad hoc majorities with the Republicans on a bill-by-bill basis. Nothing of the sort seems possible post-election.

This is precisely the kind of scenario that the institutions of the Fifth Republic, created by Charles de Gaulle in 1958, were designed to prevent and it has literally never happened before. What made this anomaly possible is that, because the other parties have quarantined the National Rally and it has now become very popular, one third of the electorate is effectively “neutralized” and our institutions can’t really function in those circumstances, because that makes it very difficult to put together a government. It’s the worst institutional crisis in decades and it’s very unclear how it will be solved – if at all.

It’s true that in other European countries, ideologically disparate factions often form parliamentary coalitions to govern together when they find themselves in that kind of deadlock, but the ideological distance between parties in France is much greater and the political incentives much less favorable to that kind of arrangement. Anyone who broke with his party or alliance to form a government with ideological adversaries would likely be dealt a severe punishment by his voters in the future. Since, moreover, any such arrangement would in all likelihood not last very long, potential coalition-builders would be trading a temporary benefit of dubious value for a serious and lasting disadvantage.

It’s not that French political culture, which is very inimical to compromises, can never change, but political culture is shaped by the institutions and the French institutions were not created for this kind of situation. In fact, as I already noted, they were created to prevent that kind of situation. Now we’re in a situation that our institutions are supposed to make impossible, but with the same political culture fostered by those institutions, which is totally unsuited to such a situation.

Thus, while various scenarios are being floated at the moment, none of them seem particularly realistic and nobody has any idea what is going to happen. But something will have to happen, at least before the fall, because that’s when the budget for next year has to be discussed and the Constitution doesn’t actually plan for anything in case the government can’t get a majority vote in the National Assembly.

Maybe the parties will manage to agree on temporary solutions that will be extended every month to allow the state to keep collecting taxes and paying the bills, as the Belgians did for more than one year a few years ago in a similar situation, but political divisions are arguably less stark in Belgium because members of parliament are elected proportionally, which creates incentives to compromise. In Belgium moreover, everyone was to blame, which means that no one in particular was.

In France by contrast, because the entire political system revolves around the presidency and Macron is clearly responsible for this post-election predicament, there will be someone to blame if we reach that point and it’s not clear that it can last until next summer, when Macron will be able to dissolve the National Assembly again.

One argument he could use to deflect calls for his resignation is that, since the Constitution says that snap elections can only be called once a year, in theory, even a new President could not resolve the deadlock. In practice, however, some jurists are saying that if a new President were elected and called for snap elections before the legal delay, the Constitutional Council would not object and there are good reasons based on previous decisions made by the Council to think they might be right.

There is also the possibility that, even if people don’t believe ousting Macron would solve the deadlock, they might not care and simply want him out because they’re angry at him for creating that situation in the first place. In theory, nobody can force Macron to resign, but if people go in the streets there is no saying what will happen. It’s extremely doubtful that a caretaker government would agree to repress a popular movement directed at a President it has no loyalty toward and that everybody hates.

Even if Macron manages to hold out until next summer and calls for snap elections again, his party would probably lose again and the new parliament may very well also have no majority, at which point calls for his resignation would surely become hard to resist. Thus, while most people think that such a scenario is crazy, I don’t think we can rule out that Macron could be forced to resign.

To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s going to happen or even that it’s very likely, but I think it’s underpriced at the moment because people are still reasoning as if we were in a normal political situation. But since last Sunday we no longer are and nobody knows what is going to happen.