The French government’s puzzle begins with a charade. If the anti-Le Pen front won the elections, now a majority must be found. It won’t be easy. “Galliae divisa est in partes tres”, Julius Caesar predicted the day following his first mission across the Alps. The picture sees it politically split into three blocks: gauche, center and far right, with the majority on the left but none of the three groups close to the threshold of 289 seats for an absolute majority. While Paris is preparing to host the Olympics and launch celebrations for July 14, a national holiday, the country is entering a swamp of unknowns. The specter of stalemate looms in the face of the numbers that politicians and political scientists are feverishly poring over. The outgoing prime minister, Gabriel Attal, saw his resignation rejected by President Emmanuel Macron. A ball kicked into the stands. A stall for time. “For the moment,” Macron said, “the stability of the country must be guaranteed.” On the other hand, there is no precise date for the appointment of the prime minister and the French president, who will remain in office until 2027 and has always ruled out resigning, is expected in the next few days in Washington for the NATO summit. And a military strategy would really be useful, at the Elysée, to understand how to extricate itself in this post-electoral phase.
Macronism, given up for dead, has circumvented the encirclement. Ensemble, with the incumbent president’s Renaissance, François Bayrou’s MoDem – “Francesco Rutelli’s French twin”, as those who know both call them – and Edouard Philippe’s Horizons have risen from their ashes. Now they have to deal with that very strange political animal that is Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his France Insoumise, an anti-system, red-brown force, in reality incompatible and irreconcilable with all the other parties. He, Mélenchon, used to talking big every day, now feels like Che Guevara. The New Popular Front – an acronym that only a month ago did not even exist in the imagination of the French – has allowed a colorful and picaresque faction to dress up as Matignon. The government building. The umbrella acronym of the left-wing federation has obtained 182 deputies, yes, but only 71 of Mélenchon’s. The others are scattered among five different acronyms, including 61 of the Socialist Party – in a reformist version – of Glucksman. It doesn’t matter. Mélenchon doesn’t change his tune, rides the streets and asks that he be entrusted with the government. “To implement, in its entirety, our program”. A scenario that is not a given, given that there is no fixed rule that provides for a prime minister coming from the first political force in Parliament. Excluding the Ressamblement National of Le Pen (and the young Jordan Bardella), it would be precisely Macron’s party.
The air is heavy from the RN headquarters. Le Pen says that “The candidates were wrong”. Bardella, the Italian-French who, the son of migrants, tried to embody the battle for the primacy of the pure-blooded French, feels called into question and speaking in front of the party headquarters, spoke of “defeat” and acknowledged “mistakes”, taking on his “share of responsibility”. But no surrender. The Rassemblement accuses Mélenchon and Macron of having signed an “obscene agreement”. Certainly unnatural, given the frontal opposition between the two. And now? Will Macron try to explore a left-left prime minister, even if only to burn him and move on, or will he say what is in his heart? In the second hypothesis, going back to calculating this and that, a transversal majority – Italian style – would be found: Greens and Socialists, the three liberal centrist parties and those Républicains who are the French version of Forza Italia: liberal conservative members of the EPP. Practically an Ursula majority. In French sauce. Edouard Philippe, former prime minister of Macron (who would indicate him as future president, in 2027) said it loud and clear, inviting the political forces to “favor the creation of an agreement” without the lepenists and Mélenchon. A bridge government might be led by a well-known economist, imitating the Draghi model, for a year. Until the elections that everyone is already preparing for 2025. Christine Lagarde, for years at the helm of the ECB in Frankfurt, has reportedly already been called by Paris.
#confirms #Attal #plans #government #Tempo
2024-07-11 21:20:50
