Editorial: Emmanuel Macron’s French election gamble leaves rest of Europe holding its breath
‘You know horses are smarter than people. You never heard of a horse going broke betting on people,” Will Rogers once joked.
Emmanuel Macron ought also to have known predicting what the public will do seldom pays off. Nor can France’s president console himself that this was bad luck. It was bad play.
And now, France and the European Union are likely to be left spinning as a result of this particular ill-advised turn of the roulette wheel.
Mr Macron seemed convinced that by not risking anything, he risked even more.
But to illustrate just how far the miscalculation went: in the first round of parliamentary elections in 2022, 4.2 million French people voted for the far-right National Rally (RN) party. That number was around 11 million at the weekend.
The payout is going to be big for the famously Eurosceptic Marine Le Pen, RN’s far-right matriarch.
Centrist and left-wing parties will be red-eyed working on permutations to block her path to power,
They must decide from today whether to pull candidates out of hundreds of election run-offs.
And they make for uncommon bedfellows. Their only mutual feeling is their antipathy towards Ms Le Pen’s party. But having won 33.2pc in the first round – ahead of the left-wing New Popular Front on 28pc and Mr Macron’s Ensemble alliance on 22.4pc – there is no hiding from the consequences of this political earthquake.
Ms Le Pen may have extended her appeal by rowing back on the nuclear option of a “Frexit”. But her party’s manifesto makes no secret that it is highly sceptical about the country’s relationship with Europe. She is trenchantly opposed to closer ties.
The seismic nature of the change may not only be reflected in the French republic’s constitution. As things stand, the president’s remit is in foreign policy and security. The government governs the country. But Ms Le Pen has other ideas. Control of borders and taking back lost sovereignty are central to RN’s raison d’etre.
Brussels – and many other European capitals – will be concerned that RN could forge alliances with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orban, both far-right allies. This would give them significant heft within the bloc, making them a force to be reckoned with. Ms Le Pen’s known admiration for Vladimir Putin is also a source of consternation, especially in the context of the EU’s commitments to Ukraine.
Mr Macron called the election out of a conviction that France needed a moment of political “clarification”. He has got what he asked for.
The picture could hardly be clearer, but from his perspective and from that of many others, it may yet make for an appalling vista.
The chokehold of the far right on French politics, which he hoped to break, could be stronger than ever, and may even extend to the EU. One sure bet at least is that there will be many anxious eyes trained on next Sunday’s second-round vote results.
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