Big blow for Macron who misses out on majority

By Andrew Hammond

Emmanuel Macron's presidential re-election "honeymoon" was shattered on Sunday when he became the first French president in around a quarter of a century not to win a parliamentary majority.

This failure of Macron's Ensemble (Together) coalition to win a majority may also prove to be significant for Europe, at large, and not just France. If Macron now needs to spend a greater than expected part of his second term focusing on his domestic agenda rather than foreign policy, his ability to play the pro-EU "continental statesman" role he enjoys, including recently with Russia over Ukraine, will be limited.

His economic reform agenda will now be more challenging to push through. This is a blow not just to the president, but also the French economy, and could undermine wider investor confidence in France.

The election result is a significant change from 2017 when the president's bloc won around 350 of 577 seats. Perhaps the big surprise of the night was the relative success of far-right National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen. This group made unexpectedly large gains, and is projected to win around 10 times the small number of seats than in 2017.

Macron's coalition will now need to either govern as a minority administration, or form informal or formal alliances with other parties. The most likely group here is probably the right-of-center Republicans.

Sunday's results show how simplistic the conventional wisdom is that French legislative elections are designed, almost by default, to hand the president a workable majority. Yet, while the incumbent has for much of the Fifth Republic enjoyed the support of a relatively secure legislative majority from his own party, this is never certain.

This is particularly true in Macron's case as, a half decade into his presidency, it is sometimes forgotten that France remains in largely uncharted political territory being governed by an alliance that was only founded by the young president only in 2016. The last two presidential elections have been the only ones in the country's modern history that neither of the parties of mainstream center-right Republicans, or center-left Socialists, managed to qualify, and it remains unclear whether one or both of these parties will stage a comeback, or whether the French political system is now realigned forever.

Even before Sunday's first round ballot, the warning signs were there for Macron. One poll released at the start of the month by the Ifop group suggested that his Ensemble centrist coalition would probably be the largest single party, but likely below the 289 needed for an absolute majority.

Going into Sunday's second round, momentum had been with the far-left coalition led by hard-left veteran Jean-Luc Melenchon, and the bloc won the second largest number of seats. Melenchon and his team engineered what many had seen as a near impossible feat: developing a broad alliance of France's deeply fractured left ― the Socialist Party, Greens and Communists ― in an unexpected show of unity. The coalition is united around a common policy platform including restoring a wealth tax scrapped by Macron, lowering the retirement age to 60, and hiking the minimum wage by 15%.

In the view of Olivier Veran, the French minister for parliamentary affairs, the failure to give Macron a majority represents a "major destabilization of politics in our country for years to come." While this language may be exaggerated, politics will become tougher for the president. A minority cabinet or coalition government is an unusual scenario for modern-day France, and the Fifth Republic was designed to avoid such unwieldy coalitions.

However, one consolation for Macron is that an even worse case scenario for him did not occur. That is, if the leftist alliance had surprised the pollsters, and won a majority. Macron would then have had to name a prime minister from the winning camp, ushering in a period of so-called cohabitation.

There is a precedent for this in the Fifth Republic from 1986-1988, 1993-1995 and 1997-2002 under the presidencies of Socialist Francois Mitterrand and Republicans Jacques Chirac respectively. In these periods, the center of gravity of domestic policy moves into the hands of the prime minister and the majority party in the legislature, with the president retaining the lead on foreign policy.

Sunday's result matters not only for the next few years in France, but could also shape the next decade too. As the low turnout shows, there remains widespread anti-establishment anger and, unless Macron is seen to succeed with his reforms, the beneficiaries in the future could be the far right Le Pen and/or far left Melenchon.

So it is not just the success of Macron's remaining presidency that will now rest significantly on Sunday's final round elections. The results will also shape the context for the next presidential ballot in 2027 when a victory by the far right or far left cannot be ruled out.

Andrew Hammond is an Associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics