Very exciting - confusing of course because: 'France'
Le Pen has been defeated by the left, but who will govern France? Our panel responds
At least one thing is clear: the French people do not want the extreme right in government. The National Rally (RN) had never been so close to the gates of power. After the first round of elections a week ago, Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen’s 28-year-old protege, was being talked about as Emmanuel Macron’s future prime minister. To everyone’s surprise, everything was reversed between the two rounds.
While Marine Le Pen has succeeded in “de-demonising” the party founded by her father, the rebranding is clearly not enough to make voters forget that the RN is not an ordinary political party, that it has never rejected its history or broken with a xenophobic ideology rooted in the extreme right through supporters of the Vichy regime and French Algeria.
But the relief felt by a majority of French people is a delusion. The national assembly is ungovernable, divided into three almost equal blocs that are more hostile to each other than ever before, and none of which is in a position to impose itself.
Emmanuel Macron will no doubt argue that he won his election gamble. But he has not won – he has lost his political power. The centre of gravity has shifted from the Élysée palace to the national assembly, which is now in gridlock and can no longer be reelected for a year.
There are no winners. The RN may have doubled its seats; it did not win the majority that was within its grasp. The president’s centrist alliance may not have disappeared, but it has lost the relative majority it had. The New Popular Front, made up of a motley alliance of leftwing parties, certainly came out on top, but it has no leader, no majority and no common objectives. The radicalism of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his party, France Unbowed (LFI), is a repellent for many others.
France is on borrowed time. The
barrage (wall) against the far right by a cobbled-together opposition will feed the resentment of RN voters who feel like victims of deals done between friends. If the “republican front” parties fail to build constructive coalitions, they will be proving Le Pen right. She declared on Sunday evening: “The tide continues to rise” and “Our victory is only postponed”. France avoided the worst, but the price is chaos and a time bomb.
Tactical voting kept the far right from election victory – but with gridlock in parliament the future is unclear, say Rym Momtaz and others
www.theguardian.com
- Milnet.ca staff
