Respect for Macron falls to new low among French public

Emmanuel Macron was once France’s young and charismatic president who embodied hope, triumphantly defeated the far right, and claimed to have broken the political mould by rising above traditional divides.

But now, seven years later, he’s gone from being admired to widely despised.

Emmanuel Macron’s standing among the French public is at a new low.Credit: AP

French voters’ opinions of the man regularly called “the president for the rich” have only fallen further since he called for snap elections last month, with many criticising him as narcissistic and disconnected.

Macron broke his silence for the first time since Sunday’s election results on Wednesday to call for a broad “governing pact” to end the political impasse of a badly fractured French parliament and a nation left in chaos.

He claimed in an open letter that no one won the vote since no party or alliance had come close to an outright majority. Without using the word “coalition”, he urged political parties to “engage in sincere and loyal dialogue to build a solid majority, which has to be pluralistic, for the country”.

The problem is too many have stopped listening. And Macron’s latest intervention has infuriated the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), which came in first with 180 seats, ahead of Macron’s Ensemble alliance with 150.

The NFP has accused Macron of a “democratic hold-up” for dragging his feet and not offering them the chance to form government.

Far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon, who cannot abide Macron, said his letter was a “return of the royal veto over universal suffrage”.

Macron’s letter implied he wouldn’t accept “cohabitation” when the president is from a different party than the ruling government, with the NFP, which has a heavy tax-and-spend economic program totally at odds with the president’s business-friendly brand of supply side policies.

The NFP, hastily formed after Macron’s snap election call last month, is a disparate grouping of Mélenchon’s far-left France Unbowed, a small group of communists, and the more moderate socialists and greens.

French far-right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen had a disappointing night in the second round of the country’s elections.Credit: AP

This alliance wants to repeal Macron’s unpopular pension reform that raised the retirement age to 64, increase the minimum wage, and re-establish a wealth tax that the president removed after coming to power.

And while Macron ignores the left, some in Macron’s Ensemble have been arguing instead for a pact with the conservative Les Republicains, who hold about 45 seats, a manoeuvre that has sparked divisions within the president’s camp.

Two years ago Macron, whose popularity was already on the slide, won a second term in office when many held their nose and voted for him to again keep Marine Le Pen from power.

His approval rating has only fallen since a poor showing at last month’s European elections, which triggered the latest crisis, losing between five and seven points to a total of 26–28 per cent since then depending on the poll.

There were mass protests in Paris after the far right performed best in the first round of elections.Credit: Bloomberg

Alain Duhamel, author of a recent book on the French president, says the nation’s rejection of Macron had gone beyond politics and has a “personal dimension”.

His character, he says, irritates the French; his party’s candidates no longer use his face on campaign posters. He said Macron’s move to dissolve parliament was widely seen as “a reaction of wounded pride, a lesson to the people who voted badly”.

Macron has so far used his presidential prerogative to maintain the current government, keeping Prime Minister Gabriel Attal in place despite his offer to resign, as negotiations among parties play out. The move has been contested on both left and right.

The constitution grants him the power to choose the prime minister but does not spell out how or when. Presidents customarily look to the party with the most MPs to form a government.

Macron has implied that both the far right and the far left should be excluded from a governing majority and urged other political parties to set some “main principles”, based around “clear and shared republican values”, to address voters’ priorities.

He argued that the true message of the election was that the French public resoundingly rejected the idea of a government led by Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) party.

While RN finished top in the first round on June 30, it will only be the third-largest party in the new assembly, with 143 MPs. Some point out that RN won 10 million votes, far more than the left’s 7 million or Ensemble’s 6.3 million.

Macron had three years remaining on his second term when he triggered this election, which has destroyed his party’s relative parliamentary majority and his own credibility and resulted in a barely governable country torn between the extremes of the left, the right, and the centre.

Meanwhile, Le Pen, who plans to run for president when Macron is done, can sit back and blame everyone else for what went wrong.

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