Authoritarian social and institutional reorientation doesn’t necessarily need the far right in power

An electoral decision

At around 8.30 p.m. on 9 June 2024, shortly after the official announcement confirming the victory of the extreme right, led by Jordan Bardella, just 28 years old (for the first time someone without the surname Le Pen), in the elections for the European parliament that took place that same day, President Emmanuel Macron decided to steal the show and announce a surprising dissolution of the national assembly in which he nevertheless had a fragile majority.

A frisson gripped the vast majority of the population, including his closest allies and sympathisers. No-one understood why he had made such a rash decision, no-one had imagined it possible. Everyone, however, suspected that deep down the president didn’t know exactly what he was doing. The Paris stock market crashed. Some felt the dissolution with an astonishment akin to that of the 2020 lockdown announcement during Covid-19.

At the time there was talk of war, and since then (or perhaps before) society has been governed as if it were a war. Others immediately remembered the dissolution proposed by George Pompidou to Charles De Gaulle in the heat of the May 68 barricades, but soon realised that there was no parallel to the insurrectionary situation of the 1960s. The only similarity, even if the range of characters involved is quite asymmetrical, would be the desire of the respective leaders to maintain the appearance of being at the centre and in control of the whole situation.

Although the possibility of dissolving the National Assembly had been rumoured in the press, there was no indication that the president would take this decision. On the contrary, the realisation of the victory of the Rassemblement National (RN) in the European Parliament elections indicated that the most rational course of action would be exactly the opposite. The possibility of the far right gaining an absolute majority in the national assembly had never been greater. Prudence and moderation, traditional traits for those who position themselves as politicians of the centre, were called for. It was necessary to buy a little more time.

But Emmanuel Macron, erratic and impulsive, doesn’t fit this profile; he best embodies what has been called the “extreme centre”.1 In other words, a new kind of authoritarianism, one of the faces of global capitalism’s restructuring of government. The manner and timing of the announcement of the dissolution and the new electoral process brought with it a result that was taken for granted: the victory of RN. Never before had the possible outcome of an election been so predetermined. This was the manhole cover that Emmanuel Macron suddenly opened with his radical decision to dissolve parliament.

Whether this is true or not, it is always worth remembering that the European Parliament is basically perceived by the majority of society as a body that fulfils a formal role within one of the least democratic institutions of global capitalism, namely the European Union (EU)2 – something that the majority of the population understands well because, although it is growing, the turnout for this election was only 43%. As you may remember, when a referendum was organised in 2005 to consult the French population on whether or not they wanted to join the European constitution (the Treaty of Rome II), they democratically answered no.

Almost 55% of the French said no to the constitution, but as this was the wrong democratic choice, the constitution was rendered unviable, as the Dutch also rejected it. The European establishment decided to change course and drew up another treaty, the Treaty of Lisbon, which was democratically imposed on the member countries, only this time obviously without any popular consultation, because obviously they couldn’t risk another wrong choice. Although he is very enthusiastic about the European Union, to the point of wanting to revive the old project of a European army, Emmanuel Macron is well aware that the far right is already very present within the international institution and that, although it keeps trying, it has so far been unable to threaten its administrative structures and political orientation in a more emphatic way.

 So there was no pressure on him to take such a decision. The argument that he had been defeated and that a crisis of legitimacy was opening up was not entirely false, but all it took was one or two adjustments, one or two declarations and the government’s ship would be back on course (although few could identify what that was) without any major mishaps. With the arrival of the summer holidays and the Olympic Games approaching, the population would soon forget the shock of the far right’s electoral victory in the European elections.

Everything would return to normal, at least until 2027, when there will be a new presidential election. A wait ensued. If, in a mixture of adherence and repulsion, society organised itself in anticipation of the Olympic Games, it was fear and optimism, depending on the political camp, that came to prevail and, for a few weeks, took over the country. Never before had the future been so favourable to supporters of the extreme right.

A poll soon showed that the majority of Bardella voters approved of Macron’s decision. The dissolution appeared to be the decision of a single man; it spread disquiet, incomprehension and indignation throughout society. The crisis that the president had unleashed had opened up an unknown hole, suspending time for a short three weeks – because as if it wasn’t enough to trigger such confusion, the president had decided to give as little time as possible for the organisation of an election of such importance: the first round would be on 30 June, and a week later, 7 July, the second round.

A catastrophic outcome was shaping up with the prospect of entering a dark new world, hitherto unknown, in which the far right would once again rule France. Again, because that hasn’t happened since the Vichy government (1940-1944) under Marshal Pétain in partnership with Hitler – not forgetting that Macron in an obscure gesture officially rehabilitated Pétain as recently as 2018. 3

Minutes before the president’s televised announcement, none of these expectations appeared on the immediate horizon of the French population. The possibility of an extreme right-wing government is real, but for three years from now. The president turned the clock forward.

We’ll never know whether we’ll have a completely different government, an institutional civil war, a new partnership between the president and his young prime minister, or even a continuation more or less of Gabriel Attal’s brief government. Not a few people had the impression that Macron wanted to govern with the RN. Perhaps he thought he could control or wear down the extreme right in power.

However, the fatalistic certainty that embodied French society’s expectations that the time had finally come for the RN to take power was not fulfilled. After three weeks of living like a sursis in a countdown waiting for a catastrophic outcome determined in advance, to everyone’s surprise, on 7 July, at the close of the second round, against all the predictions and electoral polls, the left-wing coalition that had been formed at that time under the name of Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front – NFP), although far from achieving any majority that would allow it to impose a prime minister, secured first place and the largest bench of deputies.4

O Front Républicain, which had been formed through a shambolic alliance between the NFP and the Macronist forces of the Ensemble, has once again managed to halt the rise of the RN. Macron, however, undemocratic and a sore loser, pretended there hadn’t been an election and, in an undeclared alliance with the RN, decided to appoint Michel Barnier of the weak Republican Party as prime minister. At the end of the election, the country seems to be experiencing an institutional and territorial split that, to some extent, updates France’s fractures.

The extended French gift

You can’t think about contemporary France without keeping in mind the second round of the 2002 presidential election, in which another Front Républicain formed around Jacques Chirac to give him 83 per cent of the vote – “a banana dictatorship result,”5 recalled the newspaper Ouest France on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of this event – against the 17 per cent obtained by Jean-Marie Le Pen, of the Front National, who, in the first round, had left behind Lionel Jospin, the prime minister at the time, and favourite to win the presidential election for the Socialist Party (PS).

Since then, French institutional politics has turned to the right and is, in a way, dictated by the agendas and programmes of the far right. In a way, even though it hasn’t yet come to power, it is the far right that has been guiding the paths taken by French civil society since the beginning of the millennium. On the other hand, this is only possible because society is objectively orientated towards the right. As we shall see, Macronism’s turn to the right was not only due to belief in the discourse of the far right, it is also a position taken by virtue of the right-wingisation of society. One trying to reach the other, and vice versa.

The attacks on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper and the Bataclan in 2015 accentuated and sealed the trend of this turn.6 There are many examples, but we can highlight the new immigration law passed in January 2024, known as the Loi Darmanin, named after the interior minister, himself a former member of the far-right Manif pour Tous movement.

A movement that became an association in 2023, Manif pour Tous was formed at the end of November 2012 around the fight against the Gay Marriage Act. Its main action was an annual national demonstration, from which its name originates. In addition to Minister Gérard Darmanin, France’s first policeman as he is known, we can highlight the momentary sympathy for the movement of normally unquestionable figures such as Simone Veil7, the former health minister under whose name the law giving the right to abortion (loi Veil), immortalised by Macron in the Pantheon, is known.

In their book L’extrême droite, nouvelle génération : enquête au coeur de la jeunesse identitaire8 [The far right, the new generation: a survey of young people with an identity], Marylou Magal and Nicolas Massol highlight, among many other things, how Manif pour tous was decisive in providing a space for the different tendencies of the French right to meet. The demonstrations were a laboratory where alliances, intellectual and emotional exchanges were created and became an organic meeting point for the organisation of the new French far right, especially its youth.

According to the authors, young people are less shy about building links that were previously forbidden to their political fathers, i.e. they more readily assume the affinities between all the right-wing parties, which consequently leads to a growing right-wingisation of the French right from their youth. That’s where the RN candidate Jordan Bardella came from, for example.

The president who in 2017 promised to neutralise the far right once and for all is now being held responsible for the growth of the monster that has been forming immanently in society and for accelerating the RN’s march to power. In an interview with Le Monde on 18 June, consultant Raphaël Lorca called the dissolution of the assembly a “psychic coup d’état”. That is, a political act of such destabilising force that it is capable of provoking mental neutralisation, a feeling that what is experienced is not real. It makes everyone wonder if it was a dream or a delusion.

On the other hand, he says, this kind of performative act has a hyper-reality effect, because in a perennial conjuncture, every decision of this kind “is placed in the register of urgency”. Any future transgression or political decision is now measured by this decision. Since from now on, most decisions will inevitably be perceived as less radical than these, the gaps left by it are immense.

The idea of a new type of coup d’état had already been noted by Alain Badiou. According to the philosopher, the 2017 election had already been the result of a plebiscite vote with a “systemic bombing campaign saying: if it’s not him, you’ll have the far right”. What really happened in this election, he says, was a “democratic coup d’état”9 – an update of Bonapartism as identified by Marx – which brought to power a new alliance of a broad political, media and business spectrum that Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini called the “bourgeois bloc”10.

In other words, Macron would represent a recomposition of the political and business spectrum that was organised with the aim of governing and rapidly restructuring France, making it, so to speak, fit and prepared to participate in the rapid transformations of globalised capitalism and, above all, to contain the growing dissatisfaction of the population and the riots that would multiply against the acceleration of such reformatory processes – which did in fact happen.

This bloc, led politically by the president and the group of parties gathered in the Ensemble, maintains much of its legitimacy and perpetuation in power due to the fear they loudly propagate that they are the last available civilised bastion against the rise of the extreme right. It remains to be seen whether this electoral barrage will have an effect forever, or whether in 2027, on the occasion of the next presidential election, the prophecy that has been postponed for more than twenty years will finally be fulfilled.

Centre, left, far right

It was an intense three weeks of campaigning punctuated by almost daily events. The day after the dissolution of the assembly, Macron met with the heads of the three parties that make up his Ensemble group: Stéphanie Séjourné (Reinaissance), Edouard Philippe (Horizons) and François Bayrou (MoDem). The latter even suggested that the campaign should detach itself from the president, hiding his image, at the risk of sinking completely into his low approval ratings; an idea evidently rejected by the boss, as the president continued to be omnipresent in the media, saying that he would give three televised speeches a week.

At the start of the campaign, still in shock from the decision taken by its leader, the Macronist camp found itself desperately looking for allies. It found very few willing to engage in dialogue. The president’s decision coincided with the moment when his political camp was at its most fragile. The result of the European elections had been one of the worst ever for a presidential majority in a legislative election. Many imagined themselves jumping ship.

His former ally, the remnant of May 68, Daniel Cohn-Bendit didn’t mince his words to La Tribune: “Macron has put folly at the centre of France! He thinks he’s Jesus, imagining that his good word will solve everything.” “It’s the Titanic,” said others from inside the government, unsure whether to resign, break with the presidential camp, get involved in the campaign, found a new party-movement or just wait. It’s no coincidence that a possible ally, former president François Hollande 11, who surprisingly stood as a candidate for the PS, went so far as to say that the presidential coalition was dead. At one point during the second round, the newspaper Le Figaro stated that “in the name of the ‘front républicain’, macronia risks being erased”.

There was an atmosphere of the end of the kingdom. There were many who tried to leave the bloc as soon as the polls opened and the votes were counted. Restlessness reigned above all among those who would have no certain fate after the election. At the end of the election, however, the Ensemble survived with a good result of 165 deputies (although this is 73 fewer than in the previous parliamentary configuration). Although it lost its relative majority and became the second force in congress, for a few weeks the group feared the worst. Everything indicated, and the results of the first round reinforced this, that the president’s base would literally be wiped off the French political map.

It was thanks to the left and the Front Républicain that not only did this not happen, but the defeat suffered was numerically minimised. The demoralisation, on the other hand, was great, but it remains to be seen whether this still matters. In any case, the fact remains that if the total disintegration of the presidential camp didn’t happen, the real possibility of it was experienced intensely by everyone, as if it were imminent.

Macron’s big bet to try to win or minimise a possible electoral defeat was the apparent impossibility of a union of the left. However, as early as 13 June, this impossibility was already a foregone conclusion and an agreement had been reached. In fact, the president had reason to bet on a new fragmentation of the left, in view of the tough campaign for the European parliament, filled with accusations and mutual attacks between La France Insoumise (LFI) and the PS – headed this time by a rising figure of what used to be called gauche caviar, renamed by Thomas Piketty as gauche brahmane: Raphaël Glucksmann.12

Shortly after announcing the dissolution of the assembly, the latter declared that it was impossible to build any alliance with Jean-Luc Mélénchon, leader of the LFI, and that the most natural move for the PS would be to break ranks with the government. He was swiftly de-authorised by the rest of the party, which sewed up a deal and sealed an alliance with the PCF, LFI and EEVL (Europe Ecology Greens) which, with clear nods to the glorious past of the French working class, was given the name Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP).

Despite its name, the alliance had everything, although it wasn’t that popular, because it lacked people; we’ll come back to that below. For now, the most important thing to know is that despite everything, there was a hegemonic dispute between the so-called “left of rupture” embodied by the LFI and the more institutional left led by the PS (curiously or not, it is closer to this pole that the French Communist Party currently finds itself).

Similar to the problems that the president brought to his group, it was Mélénchon who was the figure to be contained in the NPF. “Every time he says he’s going to be prime minister, he makes me lose a few votes,” said François Ruffin, candidate for the Somme, a devastated industrial area and a leading figure in the LFI, who at the end of the election will definitively break with the party. It was thought that this alliance was a way of building a force capable of minimally curbing the RN government, in other words, it was the way to contain the institutional damage that everyone took for granted. However, against all expectations, the NPF obtained 178 deputies, coming first in the election. Within the group, although second in number, the PS was the big winner.

The party, which almost disappeared in the 2022 election when it obtained just 27 MPs, now has 65 representatives, six fewer than the LFI. Under normal conditions, the new prime minister would come from the NPF. It is worth insisting that the regression and right-wingisation in Western democratic societies is such that what a few decades ago would have appeared as a traditional social democratic programme is now considered radical left-wing – some, coming from the left and apparently with their feet off the ground, even talk about it being a left de rupture (gauche de rupture).13 It is true that among the proposals put forward for the 2017 election, the LFI advocated the radical refoundation of the French Republic, i.e. the founding of the 6th Republic, but this has completely fallen by the wayside.

On the far right’s side, the process was experienced as a transition from euphoria at the real prospects of power to relative disappointment. Although it obtained an unprecedented and significant 148 deputies in the assembly, the real possibility, which did not materialise, of a massive victory in which the dawn of 8 July would mark the arrival of a young man from its ranks as prime minister of the fourth nuclear power on the planet was experienced as a cold shower.

Until he appeared at the head of RN’s ticket for the European elections, Jordan Bardella was unknown to the general public. Although he has long been a regular user of Tik Tok, a social network he favours over X (twitter), especially for communicating with young people. It’s important to note that around 30 per cent of young people aged between 18 and 34 voted in RN (the Macronista group has less than 10 per cent of voters in this age group). Bardella represents a new generation of voters and party cadres, whose point of radicalisation, as we have suggested, must be located in the experience of the 2015 attacks and the Manif pour Tous.

The most radical are clamouring for a truly French identity and don’t hesitate to say that they suffer from “anti-white racism”. In addition to the influences of the nouvelle droite, whose main representative is Alain de Benoist, it is the theory of the “grand remplacement” that brings together the young militants of the French far right. Vulgarised by Renaud Camus in a best-selling political intervention book released in 2015, the “grand-remplacement” is a complotist theory that preaches that due to low birth rates the French will soon be replaced by Arabs and blacks, and will become a minority in their own country and territory.

The fight against this phantom is what has guided the far right and contributed to the resonance of these ideas among young people and the disadvantaged classes. After her young party colleague won around 33% of the valid votes in the first round, Marine Le Pen said without blinking that her voters had voted against the project of contempt for the people that had been going on for seven years. In the end, the RN is now the largest party in the French assembly, but it won’t govern. At least not directly.

The most caricatured event of this election was the split in the Les Républicains (LR) party. There were those, led by party president Éric Ciotti, who wanted to build an alliance with the RN and those who preferred to maintain their relative independence. Mediated by the tycoon Vincent Bolloré14, with whom he has a close relationship, Ciotti secretly negotiated an alliance between his party and the RN. As soon as this intrigue was discovered, the party council deemed it unacceptable and voted to remove the president from office.

Not accepting this outcome, he rebelled against the party, invading and literally locking himself in its headquarters and occupying it illegally. Ciotti even made statements to the press through the window of his office while refusing to leave it, which came to be known as a bunker15. Valérie Pecresse, president of the Île-de-France region in which Paris is located, went to the rescue and, together with a colleague who had a copy of the keys to the party’s headquarters, had to intervene firmly to negotiate a way to evict him without having to break into the party’s headquarters and, above all, come up with a way to manage the picaresque split in what was the last mutation of the former party of ex-presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy.

It is crucial to note that this would be the first time that a major party, if its legal authorities validated this project headed by its president, would be involved in a national coalition with the RN, breaking the traditional cordon sanitaire against the extreme right. Ciotti and his dissident allies crossed this Rubicon together, although without managing to take the whole of his party with them.

For a moment he was very reminiscent of the PSDB leadership, which in 2018 was divided between those who were ambiguous about their choice in the second round between Fernando Haddad and Jair Bolsonaro, and those who were unabashedly in favour of the Captain. Ciotti did not disappoint and remained faithful to his radical positions during the weeks of negotiation, mystery and confusion over the choice of the new prime minister, having called more than once for an alliance of the right around RN. It was from within the ranks of this party, which had been diminished and almost imploded in the electoral process, that, with the more or less implicit backing of the RN, the name of the new prime minister came out: Michel Barnier.

Today, at least in France, observes Gilles Richard16, the traditional divide between left and right seems to have receded into the background. Since 2002, with society turning to the right, the main divide seems to be something else. It’s as if there were an internal division on the right, orientating society towards a “globalist” side and a “nationalist” side. Although France is in fact one of the last countries to have a representative institutional left, they, being outside this fundamental division, basically respond and react to its agendas (and thus become right-wing in the process), without being able to propose a new configuration in which they can actually have some voice and political strength.

The disintegration of the LR, the former traditional right, says Gilles Richard, would respond to this logic. On the one hand, we would have an orientation towards US Atlanticism and Macron’s Eurocentrism, and on the other, the nationalism of the RN. Although it’s true that we can find clear elements of Eurocentrism in the latter (although little Atlanticism) and nationalist traits in the Ensemble. A rapprochement that has led to a not insignificant proportion of Macronist and traditional right-wing voters, with their meltdown, choosing between the NFP and RN, often without hesitation, with the latter. After all, as the Brazilian example clearly shows, not a few felt that it would be better to try a completely new experiment with the extreme right in power than to repeat the old reformist and “spendthrift” formula of the institutional left.

Election (1)

“‘The extreme right’ on the brink of power. The challenge of the republican front,” headlined Le Monde on Tuesday 2 July. The second round would take place in a few days and the main urgency until then was to set up a Nouveau Front Républicain capable of bringing together, even temporarily, the left and the Macronist centre, after the RN’s show of strength in the first round two days earlier and the prospect of a landslide victory that was looming. The NFP quickly declared that it would withdraw its third-placed candidates from the contests in favour of a government candidate in the constituencies led by RN.

This gesture did not receive a symmetrical response from the presidential camp, which remained largely ambiguous. Macron, although he continues to insist that he is a fighter against the far right, counting on the left’s automatic support for anything that stands against the NR, has been slow to engage explicitly in this truly decisive battle, feeling entitled not to speak out clearly against the far-right barrage. It was even suggested that he was showing ingratitude to those who twice activated this socio-political device that allowed him to be elected president in 2017 and 2022.

Not everyone in his camp was in favour of forming a Front with the left. It seemed that part of the presidential camp would not hesitate to collaborate in one way or another with a possible RN government. Some, like Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, said that no vote should be given to RN, others, like Bayrou, said that no vote should go to RN or the NFP. This ambiguity, so to speak, was justified by these actors in response to the hegemony that the LFI and especially Mélénchon held in the left-wing alliances.

At the same time, it was difficult for Macron and co. to backtrack on all the accusations made against the NFP during the European elections and in the first round: anti-parliamentarianism, violence, separatism, economic terrorism. Taking advantage of the vacuum of the genocidal massacre that Israel is committing in Gaza, and the fractures that the conflict is causing to emerge in French society after the 7 October attacks in Israel, accusing Mélénchon and the entire left of being anti-Semitic has become commonplace. While it’s hard to deny that there are indeed traces of anti-Semitism on part of the French left, these are nonetheless residual. Antisemitic, by definition, is the extreme right, no matter what its label, but the media and the Ensemble say little or nothing about this necessary determination.

If it hadn’t been for the left, there would have been no Front Républicain. However, while in 2002 the Front Républicain bloc was relatively solid, the 2024 bloc didn’t hide its provisional nature. The 15 June demonstration was attended by 250,000 people across the country, while in 2002 there were 1.3 million for the historic 1 May. There was little enthusiasm in either the NFP or the Macronist camp. Fatalism reigned, as if there was no reason for existential engagement in the face of the enemy’s certain victory. Many lived days of nightmares and absolute paralysis.

More than anything, a new Front was a necessity for survival. At the end of the first round, with the RN’s victory certain, it was a question of reducing the damage. Above all, to prevent them from obtaining an absolute majority in parliament. It was a political task as well as a moral one. In any case, in its editorial of the same day, Le Monde called for “the urgency of a republican front”. The situation that was unfolding was “fuelled by political distrust, the rejection of immigration, and growing security concerns. The wave is not specific to France, but in a country that believed itself to be better protected than other democracies by its republican tradition, by its institutions, the shock is immense.”

The following Sunday, 7 July, everyone (or almost) breathed a sigh of relief after an unsuccessful march to power. The alarm had sounded with unprecedented volume. The week before, at the end of the first round, however, the urgency was to set up a new Front to stop the extreme right. At this point, faced with the seriousness of the situation and the real risk of an institutional turnaround, Le Monde, a newspaper that endeavours to maintain a republican appearance, stated in its editorial that any ambiguity would be “unforgivable”.

Election (2)

An article in Le Monde on 18 June entitled “Dissolution: récit de ces heures où Macron a ouvert la boîte de Pandore” [Dissolution: account of these hours in which Macron opened Pandora’s box] highlighted the president’s isolation and authoritarian stance. Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, like other members of the government, reportedly advised postponing the dissolution until the beginning of September, when he returned from his holidays. At that time, June, the risk was high, especially given the low popularity and growing mistrust that the population has with the president.

The announcement had barely been made and the ministers were already entering the world that lay ahead, so sure were they of RN’s victory. Reports say that some were moved to tears during an emergency meeting shortly after the dissolution. Others said it was “Belgian roulette”, a variant with six bullets and not just one in the cartridge. The state apparatus went partially on stand-by. The ministers, who are also members of parliament, disowned their jobs and cancelled their schedules in order to engage in their own private campaigns. The risk of a worsening economic crisis increased, as the market generally seems to favour stability.

Macron declared loud and clear that the RN and NPF programmes were unrealistic, but investors were wary of the future because everything pointed to him losing and having to compromise with one or the other. Officials feared that they would soon have to hand over sensitive information about the tax and treasury administration to the far right.

Anticipating the RN’s victory, the president was quick to appoint allies to some key posts with the aim of equipping the state to better resist a possible far-right government. This was the case with the French commissioner to the European Union, criticised by Le Pen, but who helped renew Ursula von der Leyner’s mandate. Macron also appointed her chief of staff. As well as the new commander of the air force, and police chiefs.

Post-election

On 9 September, exactly 51 days after the second round of the elections and even after the sacred holiday break, Macron decided to appoint, against all initial expectations, Michel Barnier from the old guard of the LR as prime minister. A former member of parliament and former foreign minister under Jacques Chirac, he recently headed the European Commission group responsible for organising relations with the UK in the immediate post-Brexit period. His long political CV also shows that he was one of the MPs who in 1981 voted against decriminalising homosexuality in France and proposed building a wall on Europe’s eastern borders.

Two months after the NPF’s first place in the elections, the prime minister chosen is linked to Sarkozy and is on the right of the Republican Party. In other words, although he is not linked to Ciotti, he is not far removed from the RN’s positions. Allying the centre with the right, with the backing of the far right (since it is known that during this long wait to find a name, Marine Le Pen was personally consulted by Macron several times) was the only way the president could continue to govern an increasingly ungovernable country.

Some talk of a masterstroke, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The automatism of the process means that those who already have some power in their hands manage to steer it or readjust it to the detriment of others, albeit always provisionally, as if postponing the outcome. Everyone was once again surprised by this choice, including his allies and the bosses. In a clear reversal of terms, the party that came fourth in the election was given a prime minister as a gift. In contemporary democracies, the loser often wins. In any case, such a gesture further discredits the electoral process and democratic institutions and in the short term should further accentuate the crisis in the country.

Seeing the turn of events on the horizon, the LFI even proposed an impeachment process for the president to the assembly. Although impossible, something that at first seemed only a symbolic and desperate gesture, Macron’s impeachment would, at least that’s what polls released shortly after Barnier’s appointment say, be supported by half the population. In addition, three quarters of the French say they are opposed to the appointment of the new prime minister, preferring Lucie Castets (PS) or Bardella in his place. “The election has been stolen from the French people, the message has been denied,” Mélénchon immediately said. Just as in 2005, the election result turned into its opposite.

The left (Nouveau Front Populaire) came first, but it was a very fragile alliance and, above all, it was necessary to build an even more fragile alliance for the second round, the Front Républicain, this time with purely electoral objectives, in order to defeat the far right. If, on the one hand, French democracy had established the practice that the party or group that came first is the one that nominates the next prime minister, on the other hand, this is the practice, but not the norm.

From the outset it was clear that for Macron, everything but the NFP. Or rather, everything but the LFI? Even on 23 July, trying to turn its discreet majority into victory, the NFP proposed Lucie Castets as its candidate for prime minister. A civil servant educated at the best French and international administrative schools, now a tax counsellor at Paris City Hall, she belongs to the moderate wing of the PS. In other words, she is close to Macron’s political position before he was elected in 2017.

In a very skilful and impressive way, because many imagined that she would remain in the shadow of Mélénchon and other NPF leaders, Castets was able to impose herself and spent days travelling around the country and, above all, in the media. Day after day she gave interviews and proved to be a very credible candidate, even for the centre-right media. Feeling under pressure, Macron signalled, however, that he would not accept appointing a government that included LFI ministers. In response, and against all expectations, Mélénchon announced that his party was prepared not to be part of a possible government led by Castets and that Macron would just have to go through the usual routine and everything would be fine.

This was not the case, as Macron soon confessed that, deep down, he didn’t want to govern with someone from the NFP, regardless of whether or not they were from the so-called radical left. Castets didn’t give up and continued until the end to present herself as a credible option. Several names circulated as options before Barnier’s appointment, as the government, in a classic strategy, began circulating dozens of possible names every day in order to confuse the debate and, above all, wear down the population, which could no longer stand so much muddling through. Deep down, the president wasn’t sure who to choose, but he already knew who he didn’t want at all.

As has been noted, like other Western democracies such as Germany, Belgium and Spain, France has finally joined the ranks of countries that now need to form odd alliances in their parliaments in order to continue functioning at all. While this was going on, the country remained in automatic mode for over a month, but not that long. The difference with other countries, however, is that the new government’s guarantor is the far right. Without it, it won’t stand.

In a way, the curious thing about this point of arrival is how a traditional social-democratic party and programme like the LFI (admittedly led by a figure totally incompatible with the way contemporary institutional politics has moved) would actually be absolutely compatible with the original Macronism of 2017, the one that presented itself as a rejuvenated renewal of liberal progressivism, but which nonetheless strikes much more fear into the neoliberal establishment than the RN.

After the election, the then prime minister, Gabriel Attal, acted as required and immediately handed in his resignation. The president, however, asked him to stay in office for a while longer in order to ensure a smooth transition and to make sure that things continued to run smoothly, so to speak, during the Olympic games and while he looked for a new occupant for the post.

The press baptised this new eccentric figure embodied by Gabriel Attal as the resigning prime minister [“premier ministre démissionnaire“]. Unheard of to this extent in France, but already relatively common in other countries, the Prime Minister, like his entire ministry, although no longer officially a minister, acted as one. Paradoxically, he held and did not hold office for fifty-one days. As the pen never stopped moving, it became clear that a provisional prime minister is not so different from a permanent one. Acting like the owner of the ball, and moreover like someone who believes he owns the playing field, everything pointed to the president’s personal choice for prime minister. It was necessary to find someone who had a semblance of conciliation, but who would continue the accelerated march of the reforms demanded by French employers and obliged by the European Union. Everything suggests that Barnier will simply invert the equation embodied by Attal and will in reality be a “permanent-provisional” prime minister (many are even talking about the possibility of a new election in a year’s time if the crisis of ungovernability worsens). Given the fragility of the minister and the president, there is a real risk of paralysis in the assembly, which would obstruct any possibility of reforms or adjustments – and even the vote on the 2025 budget – through the normal channels of the democratic game.

However, this may not be a big problem for the president, because although he had a narrow majority in the previous configuration of the assembly, he couldn’t easily approve anything. As a way out, he has long been governing through urgent measures that legally bypass parliamentary bodies. In Brazil, these legal measures are provisional. In France, what would seem at first glance to be analogous to Brazilian provisional measures, the famous article 49-3, is not, because there it is permanent.

The law is passed after a simple deliberation by the Council of Ministers and the text is considered adopted if no motion of censure against the government is voted down, which would require an absolute majority of the opposition in parliament. Without an absolute majority, but without the possibility of the opposition blocking the measures, the government is governed by permanent measures. Elisabeth Borne, prime minister between May 2020 and January 2024, used this legal device more than twenty times, including to approve the controversial pension reform.

There seems to be a strong tendency to concentrate power in the executive to the detriment of the other two powers. Many people are concerned about the authoritarian drift in France. As elsewhere, this social and institutional reorientation doesn’t necessarily require the extreme right to be in power.

Originally published in Portugues at The Earth is Round.

NOTAS DE RODAPÉ

• 1. As David Adler noted in an article for the New York Times, it is not the extremists but the so-called centrists who are the most hostile to democracy. Anything goes in an attempt to stop what is now seen as extreme, including authoritarian and impulsive measures. A lot has changed since 2018, but what seems certain is that the centre of the political spectrum is keeping pace with society and is shifting rapidly to the right. Cf: Adler, David, “Centrists Are the Most Hostile to Democracy, Not Extremists“, 23 May 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/23/opinion/international-world/centrists-democracy.html
• 2. [For this see chapters 4 to 7 of How will capitalism end? (London/New York, Verso, 2016) by Wolfgang Streeck in which various facets of the institutional structure of the European Union are discussed in detail].
• 3. Cf: https://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/le-scan/2018/11/07/25001-20181107ARTFIG00121-macron-petain-a-ete-un-grand-soldat-pendant-la-premiere-guerre-mondiale.php
• 4. Roy, Iva, “Un répit salutaire mais sans majorité pour le Front Populaire, Basta!”, 8 July 2024. Available at: https://basta.media/Un-repit-salutaire-mais-sans-majorite-pour-le-Front-populaire
• 5. Cf: https://www.ouest-france.fr/elections/presidentielle/histoires-d-elections-a-la-presidentielle-de-2002-le-seisme-le-pen-suivi-du-raz-de-maree-chirac-278297b6-ab50-11ec-a913-f0dff1800d5e .
• 6. One of the first to forcefully diagnose this particular turn in the French spectrum was Alain Badiou in a lecture given on 23 November 2015, a few days after the attack, and later published in book form. (Cf: Notre mal vient de plus loin. Penser les tueries du 13 novembre, Paris, Fayard, 2016).
• 7. Cf: https://www.huffingtonpost.fr/actualites/article/manif-pour-tous-simone-veil-a-salue-les-manifestants-contre-le-mariage-gay_13943.html
• 8. Cf: Marylou Magal, Marylou and Massol, Nicolas, L’extrême droite, nouvelle génération : enquête au coeur de la jeunesse identitaire, Paris, Denoel, 2024.
• 9. Badiou, Alain, Éloge de la Politique, Paris, Flammarion, 2017, p. 115-123.
• 10. Amable, Bruno & Palombarini, Stefano, L’illusion du bloc bourgeois: Alliances sociales et avenir du modèle français, Paris, Liber/Raisons d’Agir, 2018. In a 2022 article published in Sidecar, Serge Halimi already identified a deepening and an even more right-wing turn in this bourgeois bloc on the occasion of Macron’s re-election. (Cf: Halimi, Serge, “The Bourgeois Bloc,Sidecar, 30 June 2022. Available at: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-bourgeois-bloc ).
• 11. Many suspect that Hollande’s surprise candidacy disguised his ambition to return to the centre of the political arena as prime minister, and it may well be true, but so far this intention has not produced any effective results.
• 12. Raphaël Glucksmann, son of the renegade Maoist André Glucksmann, is a rising figure in the PS. He was his party’s frontrunner in the European elections. A virtual presidential candidate in 2027, the man dubbed the “man of the plural left” is close to Lionel Jospin, Hollande and Macron, representing the party’s right wing and standing against the growing hegemony of Mélénchon and the LFI within the French left. In 2008, at the same time as the Russian invasion, Glucksmann was working in Georgia as an official adviser to the then neo-liberal president, close to the United States, Mikheil Saakachvili. This led to accusations from Bardella that he was unfit to hold state office because he worked for different foreign state interests and often, according to him, in competition with the French. The MEP is married to one of France’s most important journalists and television presenters: Léa Salamé. The author of Femmes Puissantes (Powerful Women), a best-seller for “liberal feminism” (Nancy Fraser), has already had to change channels to avoid interfering with her husband’s rising career. There is a feeling in the country of equality that, despite everything, she may have to give up her brilliant and more than promising career at the risk of jeopardising her husband Glucksmann’s political ambitions.
• 13. Durand, Cédric; Keucheyan, Razmig and Palombarini, Stefano, “Construire la gauche de rupture”, Contretemps, 22 July 2024. Available at: https://www.contretemps.eu/construire-gauche-rupture-nouveau-front-populaire/
• 14. The tycoon Vincent Bolloré is an important figure in the French political and media world, assuming there is a separation between them. A leading businessman with major interests in what is known as France-Afrique, he plays a role similar to that of the American Roger Ailes (Fox News boss) as the owner of various media outlets and especially the American-like television channel Cnews, which serves as a platform for the mass and daily dissemination of far-right discourse and ideas. For some years now, it has been the country’s main channel, not so much because of its audience, but because it manages to set the tone and content of the agenda and debate in other media outlets and in national politics.
• 15. Cf: https://www.ouest-france.fr/politique/eric-ciotti/un-forcene-dans-son-bunker-la-video-deric-ciotti-seul-dans-son-bureau-decryptee-par-un-expert-a2095efe-2982-11ef-96d1-fdb7d737b711
• 16. Richard, Gilles, “Les Républicains sont voués à devenir un partit croupion”, Le Monde, 18 juin 2024.