Ihere was a lot of sleight of hand during the long election campaign which ended on Sunday 19th June. We first saw a President of the Republic believing that everything was his because he had managed the feat of being re-elected with 58.55% of the votes cast on 24 April. Then arose from the ranks of the left a so-called prime minister, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who, because he had succeeded in achieving unity around his person, was to become the strong man of the new five-year term.
For all those who had taken pleasure in this double illusion, the awakening in the evening of the second round of the legislative elections was particularly brutal. France is on the right, very on the right, with only one formation that can claim the momentum: the National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen, which is progressing in votes and seats and becomes with 89 elected deputies, the first party of opposition.
Since the shock of 2002, everything had been designed in France to block the far right: the Republican front on the one hand, the hardening of the rules of electoral qualification on the other within the framework of a majority ballot with two towers unfavorable to the extremes.
It is this double barrier which has just been shattered at the end of a legislative campaign which has seen the presidential majority lose its soul in unclear instructions, without obtaining anything in return. On the ground, anti-Macronism and anti-Melenchonism proved to be much more powerful engines than anti-Lepenism.
Executive Vulnerability
For the first time, the National Assembly fairly faithfully reflects the very fragmented state of the country, as if the most mobilized voters had managed to bend the rules of the Ve Republic to impose a proportional representation of the country. The consequences on the mode of political functioning are similar to an earthquake. The government is deprived of an absolute majority, which had never happened since the establishment of the five-year term and the reversal of the electoral calendar decided in 2000 and 2001.
And, unlike 1988, it remains far from the account to find one. He lacks 43 votes to be sure of getting his texts through, which de facto obliges him to negotiate upstream either around a government contract, if he manages to find one or more allies ready to s engage, or on a case-by-case basis, in the opposite hypothesis. We are at the antipodes of the very vertical mode of operation which had characterized the first five-year term of Emmanuel Macron like that of Nicolas Sarkozy.
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