It’s not just the temperatures that are going haywire in France, the political climate is also disrupted. The presidential election of April 10 and 24, 2022 and the legislative elections, which followed in June, created an unprecedented national political landscape, divided into three competing blocs.
A macronist bloc, organized around the head of state, which tries to maintain the legend of a “at the same time » politics, marrying center right and center left, but which continues to drift to the right and must now come to terms with a relative majority in the National Assembly. A far-right bloc, led by the National Rally (RN) reinforced by the new qualification of Marine Le Pen for the second round of the presidential election and by the election of 89 RN deputies, a record in the history of the Ve Republic. A left-wing bloc, structured within the New Popular Ecological and Social Union (Nupes), an alliance of circumstance between La France insoumise (LFI), Europe Ecologie-Les Verts (EELV), the Socialist Party (PS) and the Communist Party French (PCF), born at the time of the legislative elections, after the new presidential failure of the left, but which has since struggled to find a second wind.
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This new landscape confirms the major change that began in 2017 with the erasure of the two main parties that built the right-left divide under the Ve Republic: the Socialist Party, now relegated to the rank of simple minority ally of LFI, and Les Républicains (LR), suffocated by Macronist and Lepenist competition. The calamitous scores of their candidates in the first round of the presidential election (1.75% for Anne Hidalgo, 4.78% for Valérie Pécresse) testify to this deep double crisis experienced by the left and the right called “government”.
The fourth block
A fourth block exists, which is actually the most important but also the most difficult to define because it is invisible and multifactorial: that formed by abstention, which continues its inexorable rise over the ballots (55.25% and 58.6% in the two rounds of municipal elections in 2020, 66.7% and 65.31% in the two rounds of regional elections in 2021, 26.31% and 28.01% in the two rounds of presidential elections in April 2022, and 52.49% and 53.77% in the two rounds of the June 2022 legislative elections). From election to election, abstention sets records and imposes itself as the leading party in France, but without a political outlet.
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