Sarkozy: election could plunge France into chaos

Emmanuel Macron has brought France to the brink of chaos with his call for a snap parliamentary election, Nicolas Sarkozy has said.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy at the Elysee Palace in Paris on June 8, 2024. Picture: AFP

President Emmanuel Macron has brought France to the brink of chaos with his call for a snap parliamentary election that could put the hard right in power, Nicolas Sarkozy has said.

The conservative elder statesman, president from 2007 to 2012, was speaking after an announcement from his successor, the socialist Francois Hollande, that he would re-enter politics and stand for a parliamentary seat.

Talk of potential chaos has been plentiful since Mr Macron called the two-round polls for June 30 and July 7 barely an hour after Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally had routed his Renaissance bloc in European elections.

A new poll at the weekend showed the Rally keeping up its momentum with 35 per cent of voting intentions, ahead of the left-wing Popular Front alliance on 26 per cent and Renaissance on 19 per cent. The conservative Republicans are at 7 per cent.

“Giving the floor to the French people to justify the dissolution of parliament is a curious argument, since this is precisely what more than 25 million French people had just done at the polls,” Mr Sarkozy told Le Journal du Dimanche newspaper.

“The risk is great that they confirm their anger rather than reverse it. The country is already split and it could be plunged into a chaos that it will have the greatest of difficulties to extract itself from.”

Mr Sarkozy, 69, supported Mr Macron, 46, in the 2022 presidential election run-off against Ms Le Pen and is influential in his Republicans party despite criminal convictions, now under appeal, for corruption and electoral finance offences. Mr Macron consults him regularly but Mr Sarkozy denied reports that he had prior knowledge of the President’s decision.

Mr Sarkozy was scathing about the left-wing Popular Front, an ill-matched alliance linking the moderate Socialists and Greens with the hard-left France Unbowed, which descended into infighting over the weekend after its leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon, purged four rivals.

Despite misgivings among the Socialists over the alliance, Mr Hollande urged all leftists to back it because the “far right” was now closer to power than at any moment since France’s liberation from Nazi occupation in 1945.

The emergency facing France was exceptional, he said in a television interview. He is to stand for a seat in his old constituency in the central Correze departement. The news was not widely welcomed in Mr Hollande’s party, which sees him as a liability after he decided not to seek re-election in 2017 because of his deep unpopularity.

Thousands of people demonstrated in Paris and around the country at the weekend against the possibility of a government led by the hard right.

Attention will focus this week on the manifestos of the two “extreme” blocs, as Mr Macron calls the left alliance and the hard right. Both are expected to contain unfunded promises of welfare spending and tax cuts, which the government estimates will cost €100bn ($162bn) each.

Bruno Le Maire, the Finance Minister, urged voters to open their eyes to wild promises “which would cause a disaster for our economy and lead directly to the impoverishment of our people”.

With no party expected to win an absolute majority of the parliament’s 577 seats on July 7, the nationalist right is counting on support from sections of the conservative Republicans.

The party went into meltdown last week when Eric Ciotti, its leader, announced a pact with the Le Pen camp, led in the campaign by Jordan Bardella. Mr Ciotti was sacked by a council of senior colleagues, then reinstated by a court that ruled the dismissal illegal.

Mr Ciotti and his supporters say that an alliance between his mainstream party and the hard right is natural and inevitable.

Pollsters have reported that half of the party’s voters agree with Mr Ciotti and say they are ready to back an alliance and vote for the Rally in the run-off election.

Mr Bardella and Ms Le Pen are softening some of their hardline rhetoric to appeal to these voters.

THE TIMES