It may not work, but there's logic behind Macron's gambit

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think this is a dangerous gambit, but it is just that, a gambit, not a gamble. It is underpinned by a strategic, political logic that makes a great deal of sense. President Macron is not playing dice. That his critics may yet be proven correct does not make his gambit the wrong decision, as anyone who has played poker will tell you. You play the hand you are dealt.

President Macron’s hand is hardly a strong one. The far right have been ascendant in France for years, thanks to the crisis of legitimacy that has plagued most western liberal democracies in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, underpinned by worsening living standards, spiralling cost of living, decaying public realms; the list goes on.

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Ironically, this same crisis produced President Macron himself. He was Minister of Economics and Industry under President François Hollande, whose presidency ended in 2017 with him the least popular President of the French Fifth Republic. President Hollande did not run again, and Macron chose to stand himself, not for President Hollande’s Parti socialiste but as an insurgent backed by his own movement, En Marche.

Macron finished first in the first round of the 2017 Presidential elections, in which the Socialist candidate finished fifth, and the main centre-right candidate finished third, just behind Marine Le Pen, whom Macron defeated handily in the runoff. It was the first time in the French Fifth Republic that the runoff election did not involve a candidate from the traditional centre-left or centre-right parties.

In the parliamentary elections a month later, President Macron’s party won 308 of the Assemblée nationale’s 577 seats. The Socialists lost 250 seats, and Les Républicains lost 82. The traditional parties won less than a quarter of the seats between them. President Macron had swept aside the old order and ushered in a period defined by the contest between his liberal centrist coalition and the French far-right of Marine Le Pen.

Positioned against President Macron and his party, now known as Renaissance, Marine Le Pen and Rassemblement Nationale have grown in strength as a party of protest, and in the European Parliament elections held last weekend, won 31.4% of the vote to the 14.6% of L’Europe Ensemble’s (President Macron’s coalition).

So, what is the logic here? Firstly, President Macron is betting on what is known as the cordon sanitaire, the broad policy of non-cooperation with the far right by other political parties, and the tendency of the French public to rally against far right candidates when they do manage to reach the second round of Presidential or legislative elections.

The cordon sanitaire has weakened over the past decade. The French public are less likely to rally against far-right candidates than in the past: in 2022, Marine Le Pen won the highest proportion of the vote any far-right candidate has won in a presidential election in the Fifth French Republic. The policy of non-cooperation has also weakened: earlier this week, the president of Les Républicans, Éric Ciotti, announced that his party would collaborate with Rassemblement Nationale in the upcoming elections. However, this has been followed by a mass revolt against him among his party’s legislators.

But President Macron hopes that in a higher turnout election, in which control of the French Parliament is at stake and the two-round system of elections will set up head-to-head contests between far-right and anti-far-right candidates, French voters will back the moderate centre and anti-far-right forces – that the cordon sanitaire will hold.

It may not, of course. The risk of asking the French people whether they want the far right is that they answer, “Oui”. If they do, President Macron’s fall-back position is to turn government against Rassemblement Nationale.

At the top of a system that invests substantial power in the executive, President Macron can minimise the damage the far right can do in government while challenging them to solve the issues they carp about from the sidelines. In this scenario, the intention is to allow Rassemblement Nationale to expose themselves as incompetents without real solutions to France’s challenges.

Marine Le Pen (Image: PA)

Of course, Rassemblement Nationale’s leadership may be more effective in government than President Macron believes they will be, as Italy’s Prime Minister Meloni has proven. And as we have seen from populists across the West, in power they can be very effective at finding scapegoats for their failures.

At the very least, though, Marine Le Pen would be deprived of one of her most potent electoral assets in the 2027 presidential election, in which President Macron would not be eligible to run. She will no longer be able to present herself as the outsider.

At its heart, this is not a strategy for winning back control of the French Parliament. It may not lead to victory in the elections later this month, and it does not have to – the aim is to lay the ground for victory in the 2027 presidential elections.

Sound too clever by half? Perhaps it is. President Macron once notoriously said his thoughts are “too complex” for journalists. He is supremely confident in his intellect and abilities, which can breed complacency and hubris. But we cannot say that he has no strategy or that it makes no sense. Nor can we say that President Macron has no track record of pulling off spectacular gambits: who among us can say we swept aside an established political order and reshaped it in our image?

He may prove to be less a Jupiter and more an Icarus, flying too close to the sun and crashing into the sea – dragging France in with him. But I’ll leave history to judge that. For now, we must hope that he prevails.