French revolution

Hung Parliament points to turmoil ahead

French President Emmanuel Macron’s gamble to call snap elections following the far-right National Rally Alliance’s strong showing in the European parliamentary elections last month has thrown France into turmoil. In a record turnout for a runoff election, French voters unexpectedly relegated Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally Alliance, or RN, to third place, instead of the majority it had anticipated after the first round of voting. The RN’s predicament was courtesy a pre-electoral arrangement of convenience between Mr Macron’s centrist Ensemble coalition and the left alliance, the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP). To stop the RN in its tracks, the centrists and leftists withdrew some 200 candidates in seats where both were competing to give their rivals a better chance of beating the RN candidate. But the upshot is a hung Parliament with no bloc passing the 289-seat mark in the 577-seat Assemblee Nationale, although the RN has emerged as the biggest single party in its own right. With all the key coalitions falling short of the majority by about 200 seats, the final tally points to political turmoil in the European Union’s second-largest economy.

The New Popular Front (NFP), a coalition of the radical France Unbowed, Greens, Socialists, Communists, and Trotskyists won the highest number of seats at 182, followed by the Ensemble alliance at 168, and RN at 143. The NFP is led by Jean-Luc Melenchon, 71, a fiery tax-and-spend leader of France Unbowed who has spooked investors in the past with his anti-market rhetoric, penchant for Latin American dictators, and anti-Semitism. A three-time presidential candidate, his alliance has promised an expansion of public spending, higher minimum wages, and a cut in the retirement age, measures antithetical to Mr Macron’s agenda so far. Problems in this disparate grouping of centrists and leftists are already evident. Mr Melenchon has declared that President Macron had to call on the NFP to govern, though France Unbowed has said it would not work with the President’s liberals in “any arrangement of convenience”; Mr Macron’s Prime Minister and the leader of his party have both declined to work with Mr Melenchon.

The constitution of the Fifth Republic says the President gets to pick the Prime Minister. But whoever he chooses as Prime Minister needs to win parliamentary approval, a tough proposition given the widely varying agendas of the non-right parties in the Assemblee. Meanwhile, Mr Macron has asked incumbent Gabriel Attal, who resigned on Sunday evening, to remain in office temporarily to ensure stability, with the Paris Olympics scheduled later this month. Although there is no constitutional deadline for forming a government, all legislative and regulatory initiatives will be stuck in an institutional deadlock until the major players agree to a governing mechanism. It is possible for a government to function without the explicit support of an absolute majority in Parliament, but this requires passing legislation on a case-by-case basis, which has happened in the past two years. The other option is to trigger an article in the Constitution that allows the government to force passage of a law without a vote. The latter procedure, however, allows members of Parliament to table a motion of no-confidence within 24 hours, a bet that Mr Macron will certainly hesitate to take now.