France Set for Elections That Will Test Macron’s Power

Macron announced earlier this month that he was dissolving the lower house of the French Parliament, with the first round of legislative elections for the National Assembly set for Sunday, June 30, and the second round happening July 7. The decision came after France’s far-right National Rally party made a strong showing in the European Parliament elections. Recent polling shows the party, led by former Macron election foe Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, the party’s president, is far ahead of Macron’s centrist bloc and a more left-wing alliance known as the New Popular Front.

Calling new elections was a risky move by the French president – and one that’s likely to do damage to him regardless of the results, says Vivien Schmidt, a professor at Boston University and founding director of the school’s Center for the Study of Europe. Macron already had to replace a prime minister earlier this year.

“More likely than not, what you can predict is he’s going to be in much worse shape at the end of this than he was,” Schmidt says. “And lots of members of his party are going to find themselves looking for other jobs. That’s without question.”

Schmidt spoke with U.S. News this week about the elections, the stakes for Macron and the broader implications for both Europe and the France-United States relationship. Questions and answers below have been edited for length and clarity.

The short answer is Macron is taking a big gamble. His party lost lots of seats (in the European Parliament elections) and the extreme right came out on top. It’s actually quite unusual for a president to respond in this way, but Macron did.

Macron doesn’t have an absolute majority in Parliament since the legislative elections two years ago, and as a result, he’s been having to govern by decree. There’s something called Article 49.3 in which he simply can push a policy through. And so for the retirement reforms, moving the age from 62 to 64, that’s essentially what he used and he’s been doing that a lot.

The extreme right essentially had a plurality of votes in the European parliamentary elections, and it was they who said there should be new legislative elections without ever believing that would happen. But Macron did it.

He has calculated that this may be a way to save his party. To my mind, this is a major miscalculation and all the polls suggest that.

When Jean-Marie Le Pen – Marine Le Pen’s father – was in the 2002 elections against (then-President) Jacques Chirac, everyone voted for Chirac and against the extreme right. More recently, Macron has sort of presented himself as the bulwark against the extreme right, and he assumed that in the legislative elections in the second round, it would be him versus the extreme right, and that everyone, even if they were holding their noses, would vote for his party. It’s a major miscalculation because it turns out the left got together – the center-left plus the extreme left – which he never expected would happen. And the result is, as likely as not, it could be in many of these districts in the second round a contest between the extreme right and the left, and his own party will be decimated.

So his strategy now … is to demonize the left coalition, the New Popular Front, and to talk about it as if it’s all (the left-wing French populist party) La France Insoumise. They’re making arguments about (them) being antisemitic because (LFI leader and prominent coalition member) Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has in the past made comments that left it open as to whether he was antisemitic or not.

But it’s the extreme right that has a party history of antisemitism. This is something that comes out of their past. This is nationalism, sovereignism. This is, “We hate foreigners and the foreigners among us who are not truly French.”

One easy answer: They’re the new kid on the block. Why not give them a chance? And I think there is a whole range of voters who can feel that way.

But the longer answer, slightly more complicated, is that Macron has essentially pulled the air out of the center-right and the center-left. When he ran in 2017, he said he was not right nor left, he was critical-center. He was against the establishment parties of the right and the left, and he was going to do something different. As things turned out, he’s governed much more on the center-right than on the center-left. But in so doing, he’s still pulled votes from the center-right and center-left and as a result, both parties have dwindled to almost nothing. Now the extreme right has simply been gaining ground over time.

To explain the rise of the extreme right beyond this, they have engaged in a policy of normalization. Marine Le Pen takes over the party, is a lot like Jean-Marie Le Pen, but she’s decided it’s going to be – the French term is “dédiabolisation” – un-demonizing the party, and essentially to make it appear as if it’s a normal party. And that process has been going on so much so that over time, increasing numbers of the electorate see the party as normalized.

The next piece is the face of the party has changed, in these legislative elections in particular. Le Pen has taken a back seat to Jordan Bardella, a 28-year-old who has tremendous capacities – extremely communicative and appears personable. And he’s presenting his party’s line in a way that seems to appeal. Plus he has a large TikTok following, which means he knows how to use social media and he’s using it very effectively with the younger people. Thus, they’ve got not only the older generation, but they’re getting a new, younger generation that sees Bardella as cool and charismatic and doesn’t carry the baggage of Le Pen.

He’s the person who speaks and who will be prime minister if the National Rally get an absolute majority.

I think whatever the results, the impact on Europe is tied to Macron, who’s been a very positive and forceful voice for Europe to move forward. He is the voice for innovation in Europe on a whole range of fronts. To the extent that he’s been weakened electorally within France, that simply weakens his voice in Europe and also takes his attention away from Europe and back into domestic issues. He has another three years to go, but he has made himself – by calling these elections – a kind of lame-duck president, not only at the national level, but also within the EU as a leader.

It’s either the National Rally gaining an absolute majority or a kind of weak prime minister. If it’s the weak prime minister, the U.S.-French relationship will not change because the president, Macron, will still be in charge. If it’s the National Rally, then it’s unclear because they have had a pro-Russia discourse before, certainly on Ukraine. So there will be tension there. International obligations on the environment, I think those won’t be met.

But essentially, for foreign policy, the president is very much in charge nonetheless, so I think not that much will change, except for the difficulties involved with a national government that is very much French first, equivalent of “America first.” It’s going to be more complicated, I think, for Europe than for the U.S. if there is an absolute majority and there’s an extreme right prime minister. (Editor’s note: This scenario in France is known as “cohabitation.” If the National Rally wins an absolute majority, Macron would be compelled to choose a new prime minister from that group – presumably Bardella.)

It’s anyone’s guess as to what’s going to happen. There’s all sorts of polling, but it’s really very unclear, and much depends upon what comes out of this first round. Because the first round, this is not about one party against another. These are legislative elections, so it depends also on who’s running in the various electoral districts.

I think the one thing that’s probably true is we really don’t know what’s going to happen to Macron’s party, but more likely than not, what you can predict is he’s going to be in much worse shape at the end of this than he was. And lots of members of his party are going to find themselves looking for other jobs. That’s without question. Even if, in the end, the extreme right is not elected and it doesn’t doesn’t get an absolute majority. Because you may get a mix of center-left, center-right, extreme right and extreme left, but without any clear majorities at all except for the fact that Macron’s plurality will be gone. And his party will come in below other parties.