The nationalist party National Rally (RN) yesterday around 32 percent of the votes in the elections to elect French MEPs, more than double the support achieved at the polls by the ruling Renaissance party, which led President Emmanuel Macron to dissolve the National Assembly and convene the legislative elections on June 30.
Supported by some and criticized by others, even within his camp, Macron’s measure represents a high-risk step, with several possible scenarios, from a recovery of the ruling bloc to an even greater victory for the extreme right. The president expressed this Monday that he trusts in the ability of the French people to make the most just decision for themselves and for future generations.
My only ambition is to be useful to the country that I love so much, he wrote on social networks, a message that has already worked for him before: that of appealing to a republican front that stops the extreme right.
Macron easily beat the RN leader, Marine Le Pen, in the 2017 presidential election runoff, and five years later he repeated the dose, although he won less comfortably, thanks to the speech about the danger of nationalism and his anti-European vision.
Also the Secretary General of Renaissance and Chancellor of the Republic, Stéphane Séjourné, presented the dissolution of the Assembly as a gesture of confidence in the face of a panorama that he considered necessary to clarify.
The president’s call is sincere, at a time when almost 40 percent of the electorate chose a far-right list, he stated in light of the fact that the 32 percent support for RN was added to the five achieved by Reconquista, a even more radical far-right party.
Happy with yesterday’s results, the RN leader declared that they are ready to govern and asked the French to support a project “at the service of a single cause: France.”
In his convincing mission, the vice president of the organization, Sébastien Chenu, stated that they represent the hope of recovering a country mired in problems for which he blamed the government, such as “the budget catastrophe”, with a huge public debt, insecurity and loss of purchasing power.
The current executive cannot give us lessons because of the terrible record he leaves behind, he stated when appearing on the BFM TV network.
The other proposal regarding the results of the European elections comes from the left, which denounces a bleak panorama, trapped between bad official policies and the agenda of the extreme right.
Under this argument, the leader of La Francia Insumisa, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, advocated for a popular front that brings together all the leftist forces (socialists, insumisos, communists and environmentalists) to provide an alternative power that he described as a necessity ” urgent, strong and clear.”
The first secretary of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faure, also called for a popular front against the extreme right in the legislative elections of June 30, which will have the second round a week later.
“The extreme right is no longer at the doors of power, it has already set foot there,” he warned.
From the communist ranks, its national secretary, Fabien Roussel, defended the same front, which he defined as a social and ecological proposal, with unique candidates for each constituency in the upcoming elections.
The left already competed alone and with good results in the 2022 legislative elections, in which it was only surpassed in deputies by the ruling party, but the then created New Popular, Ecological and Social Union (Nupes) dissolved amid contradictions and differences between its members.
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