Macron ‘playing with fire’ in call for early French election

Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call a snap election has left many bewildered.

French President Emmanuel Macron Macron has been toying with the idea of dissolving parliament since the beginning of the year. Picture: AFP

French President Emmanuel Macron likes to channel Charles de Gaulle, France’s wartime saviour and peacetime giant.

Calling a snap election at the weekend to end what he called an extremist “fever” afflicting political life, he echoed the general’s appeal to voters to halt la chienlit – the mess – of the May 1968 left-wing street revolt.

He aims now to emulate de Gaulle’s crushing defeat of the left in a snap parliamentary election he held a month later.

Macron believes the French will come to their senses and rid the nation of what he calls the far-right demagoguery that holds 40 per cent of voters in dangerous thrall.

But it is hard to find anyone outside his circle who sees his gamble as anything but perilous; one that could put the hard-right National Rally in government for the first time.

“By playing with fire, the head of state could end up burning himself and dragging the entire country into the fire,” the centre-left Le Monde newspaper said.

Macron, it turns out, had been toying with the idea of dissolving parliament since the beginning of the year, after 18 months of legislative frustration following the loss of his parliamentary majority in 2022.

A clutch of confidants, said to include former conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy, persuaded him he could reboot his faltering presidency, which has three years to run, with a snap poll. The opposition, dominated by the National Rally, would be caught off guard, his advisers argued.

The President ordered secrecy and his inner circle mounted a deception campaign he is now comparing to Operation Fortitude, the Allied project in 1944 that fooled the Germans into believing the Normandy D-Day landings would be staged around Calais.

Even Prime Minister Gabriel Attal was not informed. Until Sunday, Macron was saying he would not be diverted from his course by a European election defeat.

The tactic worked.

The National Rally was stunned when Macron granted its calls for parliament’s dissolution.

Three years before the presidential election that Marine Le Pen aims to fight at the end of Macron’s term, the party, which has 88 MPs and has not held national power, admitted it is not ready to field candidates in 577 constituencies.

Macron told his team after the Sunday European parliamentary election debacle he would reassert his command of events. “I prefer writing history than submitting to it,” he said.

Francois Bayrou, a veteran centrist leader, former minister and Macron ally, said the President was right to seize the moment with a characteristically bold move “to jolt everyone into a broad coalition against the National Rally”. However, the old mainstream parties are furious with Macron and have shown no sign of uniting behind his anti-Rally banner.

The two flaws in Macron’s plan are his deep unpopularity and his reliance on the voting reflexes that have kept the Le Pen clan out of power for 50 years.

Marine Le Pen, after a decade of softening the Rally’s policies and shedding the sulfurous style of Jean-Marie, her father and party founder, has nearly erased the stigma that ensured rejection, especially in France’s second-round run-off voting system.

Her elevation of the youthful and charismatic Jordan Bardella, 28, to the party leadership has helped to seal the normalisation. The pair have successfully harnessed the dislike Macron inspires with what even his allies concede is a haughty, know-it-all manner.

The President’s efforts since 2017 to cast himself as the only rampart against a dangerous and anti-democratic party have failed to halt its advance.

He is unlikely to have helped his cause by again lecturing voters who backed the Rally on Sunday that they had made the wrong choice.

The Times