France faces a vital election – one which could determine the survival of not only of the euro and the European Union, but of the Fifth Republic itself. But it’s not the race for president.
Today, voters go to the polls to narrow down the field of candidates for the Elysée palace to just two. It is the culmination of a dramatic and fascinating race between firebrand Trot Jean-Luc Mélenchon, smooth-talking neo-fascist Marine Le Pen, pretty-boy centrist Emmanuel Macron, and embattled Thatcherite François Fillon.
At the same time, however, the June election for the 577 seats in the National Assembly remains largely unreported, in both the French and foreign press.
Under the French system – a curious cross between parliamentary and presidential democracy – the president is elected by popular vote, but his prime minister must come from the majority faction in the Assembly.
In the event of what is called a cohabitation, when the president and prime minister hail from opposing parties (as happened, for example, in 2002), the president’s power is reduced to the specific domains of foreign and defence policy, while the prime minister’s role is greatly enhanced.
Afew years ago, Le Pen, speculating about the possibility that she could be elected prime minister under François Hollande, summed up the president’s role in such a cohabitation with typical acerbic firmness: “He will inaugurate and commemorate… I will implement the policies endorsed by the French people. He will submit or desist!”
The reason people focus on the presidency is the assumption that voters will grant the president’s party a parliamentary majority – which has historically almost always been the case. For this reason, pollsters do not even bother polling for the législatives until after the president is elected.
But in an election where three of the four leading candidates hail from outside the established party system (the scandal-hit Fillon, of the opposition Republican party, is the exception), this trend is unlikely to hold.
Within the current parliament, none of the three outsider candidates enjoys meaningful support. The Left Front, to which Mélenchon is allied, has 10 MPs. Le Pen’s National Front has a paltry two, and Macron’s En Marche, a one-man show which was only officially created a few months ago, has none (although dozens of MPs from both the Left and the Right back him).
French MPs are elected on a constituency basis. If the incoming president is one of these three, he or she will find it difficult to pick up more than a handful of MPs without the network and local support base of sitting MPs.
This is all the more important since all four candidates are proposing deep structural reform, which at the very least would require the ruling party to have a majority of 289 seats in parliament – and if the changes involve constitutional change, a two-thirds majority.
The question of how any of these candidates could form a majority is one that no candidate except Fillon, as the only candidate who can expect more than a few dozen MPs from his party to be elected as deputies, has adequately addressed.
Macron, when asked, breezily replies that, “a majority will be formed”, without going into any more detail. He is clearly banking on reformist-minded Socialists and Republicans, incentivised by an electoral alliance with En Marche in the wake of his ascendancy to the presidency, rallying to his cause.
His hope appears to be that he can mirror the model of the Gaullist godillot deputies of the 1960s, who unconditionally backed le général. Yet this is bullishly optimistic for a man whose pre-political career was spent in banking, rather than leading the Free French during World War II.
The electoral map is even more hostile to the two extremist candidates. At the very most, Le Pen can hope for around 60 seats. Meanwhile, Mélenchon’s is standing under the new banner of Unsubmissive France (FI), rather than the traditional Left Front grouping to which he is allied. FI is putting forward its own candidates for the legislative elections – a plan which, in true Monty Python form, is fostering tensions with Mélenchon’s Communist allies.
In short, neither Le Pen nor Mélenchon can hope to reach anything close to a parliamentary majority, even if they do win the presidency.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that they would have no power to legislate at all. Either would be able to foment parliamentary alliances around individual issues. Predictable marriages of convenience could include the Left Front joining with the frondeur dissident wing of the Socialist Party (a faction that includes the Socialist Party candidate for the presidency, Benoît Hamon) to tighten labour laws. Less obviously, Mélenchon’s Left-wing Euroscepticism has brought him to much the same conclusions as Le Pen’s: both would likely be able to count on the other’s support in any attempt to withdraw France from EU treaties, as both have pledged to do.
But winning votes on single issues is not a recipe for government. The president must appoint a prime minister, tasked with managing a coherent majority in the Assembly. It is almost impossible to envisage a scenario in which either Mélenchon or Le Pen’s government is not reliant upon more moderate factions to form a majority, who would be able to frustrate the most radical ambitions of whoever becomes the Élysée’s new tenant.
Even with a majority in the Assembly and a prime minister from his own party, President Hollande saw proposed reforms repeatedly voted down. Infamously, his government had to resort to the 49-3 clause to pass numerous liberalising laws without a vote, including the economic measures in the Loi Macron, whose namesake now seeks a mandate for more of the same.
A victory of the far-Left or far-Right would be a first in the history of the Fifth Republic. But national chaos and national decline should not be treated as their inevitable consequence by the political mainstream.
The Socialists and the Republicans, if they have any sense, would set aside their differences and agree on an electoral pact in the aftermath of such a drubbing, in order to ensure that the most destructive elements of either Mélenchon or Le Pen’s manifestos cannot be implemented.
Whether such an alliance of the moderates against the extremes – a so-called Republican Front – could hold is a different question altogether. But it does mean that today’s vote, while vitally important, will only be the start of the battle for France’s future.
