The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Election reshapes France’s political landscape
Macron looking for working majority in National Assembly.
PARIS — In the aftermath of a historic presidential election, France’s politics are in upheaval. A generation of political leaders has been swept aside. New ones are emerging. Parties are collapsing or struggling to remake themselves as politicians scramble to form alliances to maintain their power.
The most obvious and pressing challenge confronts the victor, Emmanuel Macron, who will officially become president today. With national legislative elections less than five weeks away, he must find a way to forge a working majority in the National Assembly, France’s lower house of Parliament.
For Macron, the legislative elections are in many ways the third round of the presidential race — they are even called that by some in the French news media — because they will determine his real strength to push through his controversial agenda to make the French economy less rigid.
Macron has no party in the current Parliament. So his top aides have urgently set about selecting candidates to run in almost every parliamentary district in the country.
“A generation is in the midst of disappearing,” said Pascal Perrineau, a political scientist who teaches at Sciences Po, one of France’s most esteemed universities. “And you have a new generation that is in the midst of being born and that is questioning yesterday’s political fault lines.”
The task for Macron’s movement, now being renamed La République en Marche!, is to quickly define itself for voters before the first round of legislative elections on June 11. Runoffs will be a week later.
If Macron does not win a majority, he will be forced to work with shifting majorities from bill to bill, or to form coalitions with other parties, and coalitions “are not really in the French tradition,” said Fabienne Keller, a senator from the mainstream party on the right, the Republicans.
“But to elect a president of the Republic who is neither from the Socialists nor from the large movement of the right and center is also unusual,” she added.
The need to build from the ground up is not Macron’s problem alone, however.
Both establishment parties — the Republicans and, on the left, the Socialists — face a painful identify crisis after an unprecedented election that shunted them aside. The populist or more hard-line parties that have risen at either end of the political spectrum are also having growing pains.
Issues like globalization, which dominated much of the presidential campaign, have cut across old political dividing lines and are helping to scramble alliances.
Macron’s victory on May 7 is threatening both mainstream parties as some of their politicians look to defect to the winning team. Yet he has characterized his movement as neither of the left nor of the right, thereby giving himself room to pivot in almost any direction.
The trap he is trying to avoid is having too many faces from existing parties and having En Marche look simply like a fig leaf for the same old players from a discredited political establishment.
That has left Macron with a difficult needle to thread, trying at once to attract new faces as well as enough old hands for his legislative group to work effectively.
Similarly, he’s aiming for a balance of members from right and left, to avoid being seen as too close to either the Socialists or the Republicans.
So far, Macon’s movement has announced it has candidates in 428 of the 577 legislative districts, and it hopes to have more by the filing deadline on Friday. His team said 52 percent of the initial list had never held elected office, and exactly half were women.
The team’s presentation was not exactly smooth — the list first distributed to journalists had several mistakes — and almost immediately Macron’s leading centrist ally, Francois Bayrou, said he was unhappy with the number of places accorded to members of his party.
Still, some have lined up to join Macron. They include Manuel Valls, the former prime minister, who declared his Socialist party “dead” after its disastrous showing in the presidential race. About 20 incumbents from the Socialist party or its allies have already been nominated by Macron’s party to bear its colors.
En Marche initially rebuffed Valls, but then reached a compromise saying it would not run anyone against him — implicitly suggesting it could work with him in a coalition.
Macron’s party also has the Republican party in its sights. In the presidential election, its candidate, Francois Fillon, failed to make it to the second round after being tarnished by embezzlement charges.
But the party itself has survived, and until Fillon encountered the scandal, it was seen as the logical successor to the unpopular Socialist government led by President Francois Hollande.
But France’s political shake-up is wider even than the mainstream establishment.
On the far right, the party of Macron’s vanquished opponent, the National Front of Marine Le Pen, is weighing a name change and yet another revamping, with numerous calls within the party to do away with its anti-euro platform.
By increasing its presence in Parliament and forging new alliances, the National Front hopes to set itself up as the nation’s main opposition to Macron during his five-year term. Most political analysts expect that Le Pen could gain at least 30 seats in the National Assembly after the June election.