Don’t hand le Pen the keys to power, urges Emmanuel Macron

Macron urges France’s moderate parties to join a ‘new democratic force’ to defeat the hard-right bloc as the Republican party leader is sacked for allying with le Pen.

France's President Emmanuel Macron speaks to reporters. Picture: AFP.

President Macron has urged the moderate parties of France to join him in a “new democratic force” to defeat the hard-right bloc that could be swept to power in the snap election he called after the National Rally’s victory in Sunday’s European polls.

In combative form, Macron railed against the “defeatism” sweeping the Paris elite and rejected accusations that he was gambling with the future of France by calling a parliamentary election for the end of the month.

He had no choice, he told a press conference, given that a total of 50 per cent of voters in Sunday’s elections had “voted for the extremes”. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally took 31 per cent and the hard-left Unbowed France party of Jean-Luc Melenchon won 10 per cent, taking fourth place. Other hard-left and hard-right parties scored about 9 per cent.

“You can’t tell the French, ‘We’re continuing as if nothing had happened.’ That’s not respecting them, that’s not listening to them,” Macron said. The country faces a historic moment of “clarification” now, he added, rather than in three years’ time, when the next presidential and parliamentary elections are due. “I do not want to give the keys to power to the far right in 2027. I fully take responsibility for starting this process of clarification,” he said.

As Macron was speaking, a leadership drama verging on farce played out at the conservative Republicans party. Eric Ciotti, its chief, was sacked in an anonymous vote by his senior colleagues for announcing that he had made an election pact with the Rally. Ciotti, 58, an MP for the Cote d’Azur region, locked himself into the party headquarters and said he remained its leader because only the votes of all party members could oust him.

Macron admitted that his administration, which has been in power for seven years, had made mistakes. It had failed to move quickly enough to remedy a feeling of dispossession driven by economic hardship, crime and immigration, he said. Anger and resentment were felt by people struggling to “get by even when they’re working”.

He added: “We’re not perfect, we haven’t done everything right, but we have results … and above all, we know how to act.”

Voters had voiced genuine anger when they flocked to Le Pen’s party, led by her 28-year-old protege, Jordan Bardella, he said, but National Rally had no remedies and its promises would lead to national bankruptcy. He urged the centre-left Socialist party, Greens and the conservative Republicans to join his centrist Renaissance camp in a “radical new” coalition of democrats.

“I hope that when the time comes, men and women of goodwill who will have been able to say no to the extremes will come together, will put themselves in a position to build a shared, sincere project that is useful to the country,” Macron said.

Socialist and moderate conservative leaders are unlikely to grasp Macron’s offer of a broad alliance. He talked of opening his government to new ideas from both sides but an alliance has been rejected in the past. The two former ruling parties were reduced to rumps, with a fraction of their previous MPs, after Macron’s presidential victory in 2017.

Macron was scathing about the upheaval his decision to call an election has caused the Republicans. Ciotti’s alliance with Le Pen horrified his colleagues because it breached decades of refusal of any link to the anti-immigrant party founded by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen.

“The masks are coming off” in the party of the late Charles de Gaulle, Macron said. He added that Ciotti had “signed a pact with the devil and … in a few hours turned its back on the legacy of de Gaulle”.

He rebuffed suggestions from senior figures in his own camp that he should keep his distance from the campaign because of his unpopularity with voters.

Macron also ruled out the possibility that he could resign in the event of defeat in the second round of the parliamentary elections, on July 7. “I want to nip that idea in the bud,” he said.

As the parties scrambled to field candidates in 577 constituencies, an opinion poll for Le Figaro showed National Rally far ahead of Renaissance, with 35 per cent of the vote compared with 16 per cent for Macron’s party.

The Times