Can Macron pull off another victory?

Emmanuel Macron has already pulled off one stunning victory this year against France’s political extremes. The question now is whether he can repeat the trick. 

Disenchanted French voters are going to the polls once again on Sunday for the first of two rounds of parliamentary elections, and the signs are that the President has a real fight on his hands.

Macron has done most of the hard work already. His convincing win over Marine Le Pen on 24 April in the face of fierce antipathy from voters on the Left and Right was an impressive feat.

Yet despite sweeping presidential powers, he needs a working majority in the National Assembly of 577 MPs to get part two of his reforming agenda across the line. The parliamentary elections are known as the “third round” of the Presidential race.

Pitted against him are the forces of hard-left veteran Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who narrowly missed out on the Presidential election run-off against Macron. In a rare example of left-wing unity, France’s version of Jeremy Corbyn has assembled a radical coalition of Communists, Socialists and Greens, called the NUPES, which polls put neck-and-neck with Macron’s rebranded centrist alliance, Ensemble.

After Marine Le Pen bagged 13 million votes in the second round six weeks ago, it might seem odd that it’s the French Left having a pop at the champ, not the Right. But as Walter Ellis writes in his preview of the elections (well worth a read), the Anyone But Macron bunch are as fickle as they are disillusioned – the Left seems like their best bet.

Mélenchon is unlikely to win an outright majority in the Assembly, but he could stop Macron from doing so. Polls suggest the President could fall short by up to 39 seats. This would be a big setback, forcing him to broaden his alliance and make haggling over policy a lot more complicated.

The task ahead of Macron is difficult enough as it is. He wants to re-wire France’s bloated welfare state and reform the byzantine pension system, which would involve upping the retirement age from 62 to 64.   
If Mélenchon pulls off a surprise majority of his own, Macron would be under considerable pressure to make him his prime minister. This marriage from hell is known as “cohabitation” and would spell disaster for the President’s domestic agenda. Mélenchon wants the retirement age lowered to 60, a much more generous minimum wage, and to undo many of Macron’s other liberalising labour market reforms.

So far, Macron’s campaign has been low-key, just as it was until the final weeks of the Presidential elections before tightening polls spooked him into upping the tempo. It has allowed Mélenchon to dictate the narrative and build momentum. If Macron discovers too late that he’s taken his eye off the ball, France’s next five years will look very different to how they did in April.