Challenges may await Macron after election
French president faces disparity between support, majority seats
NANTES, France — The parliamentary candidates running under the banner of the newly elected president, Emmanuel Macron, appear poised to win a crushing electoral majority Sunday that extends from France’s Alpine heights to the Brittany coast and from the Mediterranean to Paris.
Yet his party’s likely sweep of the legislative elections may disguise real challenges for Macron as well as for France, as the country tentatively journeys up a path of change it has long avoided.
Given the high abstention rate in the first round of voting last Sunday, just over 15 percent of all voters actually backed Macron’s parliamentary candidates. Yet his party could ultimately win as many as 80 percent of the seats in the 577-member National Assembly. Wariness, romanticism
That disparity — between his potential to push through an agenda for deep change because of his majority and the narrowness of his true popular support — could eventually spell trouble for a young and relatively untested president. Given that, Macron may have but a fleeting window to persuade the French to stick with him. The expectations are high.
In some two dozen interviews in and around Nantes, a flourishing city near the Atlantic coast, voters expressed a mixture of wariness and romanticism about their new president, who is just 39 and had never before held elective office.
In Thouaré-Sur-Loire, a small suburb, Bernard Brevet, 68, a retired cleaning man, was typical of voters who seemed prepared to give Macron a chance, but on the condition that he quickly prove effective.
“He’s young, he has the future ahead of him, we have to give him at least a year,” Brevet said as he ordered meat at a butcher’s stand in an outdoor market. “He must bring reforms.” Hands-off stance
Yet while Macron may not generate broad enthusiasm, neither are people voting against him. It is in effect a hands-off stance by an electorate that seems prepared to let Macron advance by default. Changing that support from passive to active will be one of his biggest challenges.
For the time being, Macron is benefiting from a kind of honeymoon period. Many French are basking in the new sense of optimism he has ushered in, and a latent desire for their country to get unstuck, after years of relative economic and political malaise. Enough people are sufficiently discouraged by the status quo that they are willing to try something new.
“There is a sort of change in the culture,” said Marc Abélès, a professor of political anthropology at the academic institution École Des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
“There was an atmosphere that was a bit deadening, the impression that one couldn’t get out, that one was cornered,” he said. “And I think against that backdrop something was pushed. We were completely looking at things negatively, and now people have a tendency to see things more positively.”
But others say that once the impact of Macron’s changes are understood, at least some segments of the population may actively resist him.
That presents a lurking danger for him, too, said Jean Garrigues, a historian at the University of Orleans. Because those opposed to him lack much representation in the parliament, they may take to the streets, he said. Breath of fresh air
Nonetheless, there is a sense that Macron brings a breath of fresh air.
“He’s completely upended the landscape, and the thing one admires in him is his guts,” said Maurice Billet, a retired executive, as he purchased the first of the summer peaches at the Thouaré-Sur-Loire market. “The people are tired of half-solutions.”
A recent study of candidates for the Macron coalition found a plethora of people who “represent the upper-middle class, largely those with degrees, and the problem in France is that the popular classes, the workers, the blue-collar workers, they are not represented there,” said Luc Rouban, a researcher at the Center for the Study of French Political Life at Sciences Po in Paris.
“Yet the working class represent 40 percent of the French population,” he said.