The worrying, although expected, growth of the extreme right in last Sunday’s elections will reinforce its influence in the European Parliament, on which crucial decisions for the EU depend, and acquires even greater relevance by concentrating on the great powers of the Union, … with France as the main focus. To the overwhelming victory of Marine Le Pen’s National Reunification (RN), Emmanuel Macron has responded with a high-risk bet as surprising as it is bold and reckless: the advancement of the legislative elections to June 30 and July 7 in a kind of plebiscite with which a charred president aspires to stop the ultras when they do not stop gaining support at the polls, but which in reality can lead them to the Government for the first time since the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958.
This leap into the void has caused a political earthquake with incalculable consequences. A substantial change in the voting orientation does not seem foreseeable in just three weeks. RN achieved 31.4% in the European elections, compared to the humiliating 14.6% of Renacimiento, Macron’s party, which was second. Without an absolute majority in the National Assembly, the liberal president suffers acute wear and tear that does not put him in the best conditions to come back in record time against a rising extreme right that has masked its fiercest features and has been normalized by broad social layers. . Perhaps he is counting on the citizen’s vertigo at a possible access to Le Pen’s power and that the double-round system works against her, although it is less and less scary.
The left aims to create a “popular front” to serve as a dam for the ultras, but the personalisms and frontal differences between the more temperate groups and the radical euroskeptics of Jean-Luc Mélenchon threaten their union. The very weakened traditional right is on the verge of fracture when its leader, Éric Ciotti, proposes an unusual alliance with RN that would break the ‘cordon sanitaire’ around that force and has caused overwhelming rejection in the Gaullist ranks, of which He was expelled yesterday. Upon being re-elected for a final term, Macron made it his priority to thwart the far-right’s access to the Elysée in 2027. Now he may be forced to cohabitate for three years with a Le Pen prime minister in a France in which the extremisms of both kinds, without it being very clear if the electoral advance will contain them or give them wings.
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