Macron’s gravest risk yet may not be the far-right, but the left

5 months ago 12

Emmanuel Macron’s call for snap elections was thought to give the cordon sanitaire against the far right a brand new boost, with him at its helm – but the quick forming of a solid left-wing coalition may become a bigger headache for the embattled president.

Macron’s decision on 9 June to dissolve the National Assembly and call snap legislative elections, amid a crushing defeat of the president’s camp by the Rassemblement national (RN) in the European elections, had one goal in mind: Rally behind the French president against the far right.

“Far-right parties who have in recent years opposed so many of the advances made possible by Europe […] are gaining strength everywhere on the continent. In France, their representatives have reached 40% of the vote share,” Macron said in a solemn address that Sunday evening, minutes after elections results came through.

But the hope that the president would impose himself as the natural leader of a cordon sanitaire to fend off the far right is proving more complicated than ever – because of the resurgent leftist camp.

After a European election campaign marred by divisions, left wing movements – from the anti-capitalists all the way to centre-leaning social-democrats – have rallied around a new ‘Front populaire” coalition in express time, to everyone’s surprise.

The rise and fall of France's far-right union

A union of far-right movements in France, including renegades from the conservatives Les Républicains, was tentatively being put together in the hope to beat Emmanuel Macron, in a scenario many would have dreamt of at the EU level – before it backfired.

It has thrown Macron’s campaign strategy in disarray – as polls show the Front populaire trailing the far right as a close second, leaving Macron’s camp a distant third.

“We had banked on a binary pro- or anti-Macron split,” a ministerial source told Euractiv on condition of anonymity. “But we failed to see it would shape into three blocks, with all left movements behaving as one”.

Macron has historically positioned himself as the rampart to a growing far right sentiment – betting as early as 2016, when he first ran for office, that traditional left-wing and right-wing parties would crumble.

2024 is no exception – and Macron has called on voters to rally behind a “centre bloc” to combat what he sees as the closest the far right ever got to entering higher office.

But with the Front populaire in full swing, Macron’s Renaissance has shifted gears to paint this coalition and the far-right one as two sides of the same coin. Both, Macron said, have shown “indignity” and proven to be “anti-Republic”.

On the campaign trail, Macron camp’s most raging attacks are no longer aimed at the far-right but rather at the “unnatural” alliance of the left and its alleged “extreme left” nature, far-left La France insoumise (LFI) making for the largest block in the coalition.

The Front populaire would carry out “a politics of Anti-semitism,” Macron told a press conference last week – an unfounded claim that surfs on LFI’s apparent lack of a clear condemnation of the terrorist attack Hamas launched on Israel on 7 October. LFI has since made very clear it deemed Hamas a terrorist group.

Aurore Bergé, a close Macron ally and former minister, hinted the Front populaire would favour the growth of radical Islam.

Their manifesto would amount to ‘immigrationisme‘, Macron further said on Wednesday (18 June) – a new word used extensively by the far right to mean uncontrolled immigration – and “other mad ideas such as changing one’s sex administratively”.

Mathieu Gallard, a pollster, told Euractiv, it was surprising that “Renaissance is so much more vocal against the Left, which, according to polls, isn’t its principal threat”.

He said ostracising the left could backfire under the current two-round legislative voting system because, should Renaissance and RN candidates face off in the second round, “Renaissance will need the left-wing electorate” to swing it against the far right.

Evidence from European elections patterns, which have been emerging recently, also show voter abstention was the highest among Renaissance (42%) and the left (36%) supporters, while it stood at 28% for RN.

Higher turnout rates for the snap elections, as pollsters predict, may serve the left coalition well – and ultimately give Renaissance a brand-new problem to worry about, with 11 days to go before the first round of votes.

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]