Know your French rights

I’m back…

We don’t yet know the dates for next year’s French presidential election, but because of the expiry date on Macron II, it has to happen, on two Sundays a fortnight apart, sometime between 11 April and 2 May. My money, for the little it’s worth, would be on 11 and 25 April. Easter is early next year (28 March) so that doesn’t need to be taken into account. It seems unlikely anyone would want to trouble the French for the weekend of 1 May, although they don’t get a day in lieu on a Monday as the British do when a bank holiday falls at the weekend, so perhaps that doesn’t matter…

It is generally accepted that the election will (once again) be about who can beat the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) in the run-off. We do not yet know who their candidate will be. Last April, when Marine Le Pen was found guilty of misusing European parliamentary funds, part of her sentence was to lose her right to stand in elections for five years and with immediate effect (exécution provisoire), even with an appeal pending. Her appeal was heard in February this year and the verdict will be delivered in early July. It seems unlikely that the ban will be lifted. This might not matter, given that her protégé and RN president Jordan Bardella is currently scoring better than her in the polls. The ballpark figure for Bardella is around 36% to 33% for Le Pen. An article in Le Monde last weekend helpfully reminds us all of the perils and inaccuracies of polls at such a distance (Présidentielle: un an avant...) but this is what the other candidates are working to. (It’s worth looking at the figures if you can, because they underline a historical tendency for Le Pen to be over-scored, while the likes of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and even Emmanuel Macron are under-scored, but that’s a matter for another time.)

It’s a fragmented field on all sides of the political spectrum. I’ll start by looking at the French right and centre-right - aka the stupidest right in the world - and also invoking all the usual caveats at such a distance.

Last weekend (18-19 April 2026) the main right-wing Les Républicains (LR) party voted on how to designate its candidate. The party’s 76,000 members (down from 120,000 less than a year ago) were offered three options:

1. Endorse party president Bruno Retailleau as their candidate

2. Opt for an internal primary

3. Opt for a wider primary involving other centre-right and right wing candidates

By an overwhelming majority (74% on a 60% turnout), the membership endorsed Retailleau, the man who became leader in May 2025 after the tragi-comic end of his predecessor Eric Ciotti (of whom more later).

If the name sounds familiar, Retailleau, a senator from the Vendée and former protégé of Philippe ‘Puy du Fou’ de Villiers, was interior minister under Michel Barnier and then François Bayrou (September 2024 to October 2025), but threw his toys out of the pram last autumn when the new PM Sébastien Lecornu refused to appoint the LR’s François-Xavier Bellamy as education minister. (Bellamy would have been far too Catholic for France’s teaching unions and Retailleau knew it.) Retailleau returned to the Senate and just after the New Year formally announced what everyone already knew - that he would be running for President of the Republic. (Retailleau toyed with running in the LR primary in 2022, but stood down when confronted with the four-way contest between party heavyweights Ciotti, Barnier, Valérie Pécresse, and Xavier Bertrand. Ultimately Pécresse beat Ciotti in that contest, but went on to score a disastrous 4.8% in the election.) Politically, Retailleau is on the Catholic right of the party and will use his time as interior minister to frame his campaign as a ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ and hardline on immigration candidate. He has chosen as his slogan ‘la radicalité raisonnable’ - reasonable radicalism - as a sort of ‘common sense’ opposition to the endless fudging of Macronism. Paradoxically, the party vote does not preclude Retailleau from participating in a right-wing primary later in the year if such a thing were to be organised, but it ostensibly blocks the way for a rival emerging with the formal backing of the party, which, despite its fall from grace over the last decade, can still count on a large number of local councillors, as the recent municipal elections showed..

Not everyone in the party was happy with Retailleau’s manoeuvre. Laurent Wauquiez, whom Retailleau defeated in the contest to become party chief, and leader of LR’s 47 deputies in the National Assembly, has and continues to argue forcefully for a primary stretching from Macronists such as Gabriel Attal and Gérald Darmanin, via Macron’s former PM Edouard Philippe (who has his own Horizons party), through LR and even reaching out to the far-right Reconquête! (yes, there really is an exclamation mark) party of Eric Zemmour/Sarah Knafo. There are reservations within LR at including Zemmour, but a wider primary is the preferred option for the likes of Pécresse and Senate speaker Gérard Larcher. It is also the position of Michel Barnier, who is busy inviting anyone who will listen to participate in what he calls a ‘conclave’ (see for example L’Express 9-15 April 2026). Barnier’s view is that the centre-right/right ‘socle commun’ (common base) that has been governing France since the dissolution fiasco of June 2024 should devise a programme first, then find a candidate (perhaps M Barnier, que sais-je?)

And then there is the case of David Lisnard, the mayor of Cannes. Lisnard quit LR after a disagreement with Retailleau over the plan to select a single candidate for the party and also because of Retailleau’s failure to separate the party from Macronism. First elected to Cannes city hall in 2014, Lisnard was subsequently re-elected in 2020 and again in March this year, when he took 81% of the vote in the first round. Lisnard is, in some ways, the classic French local notable and in 2021 became president of the influential Association des Maires de France in succession to former right-wing poster-boy François Baroin. I first really came across Lisnard during the 2017 campaign, where he was one of the main spokesmen for François Fillon and then a year later when I was asked to review a book he co-authored with Jean-Michel Arnaud called Refaire communauté. Pour en finir avec l’incivisme, one of his trademark policies. Lisnard has his own (micro-) party, Nouvelle Energie, which sits on the neo-liberal wing of French conservatism and claims around 10,000 members, along with a handful of deputies and senators. In many ways, Lisnard’s policies echo those of Fillon, whose promises to cut 500,000 public sector jobs earned him the nickname of the French Thatcher. Lisnard’s point of reference is more contemporary: Argentine president (and lest we forget economist) Javier Milei (though perhaps without the chainsaw). Linard recently provided the preface to Michael Miguères’ hagiographic La Révolution Milei. Lisnard is not against the idea of a primary and believes that he has the charisma and the policies to emulate the unexpected emergence of Fillon in the 2016 right-wing primary.

The problem with primaries, as experience has shown, is that they can throw up the wrong candidate and invariably expose the very deep personal and political divisions within parties. They are what the French might call a ‘fausse bonne idée’.

A man who knows just how badly wrong primaries can go is Edouard Philippe, who was one of the organizers of Alain Juppé’s ill-fated campaign for the LR primary in November 2016. A year before the primary, Juppé was way ahead in the polls and seen as the man most likely, in an anticipated run-off with Marine Le Pen, to win the support of left-wing voters. The problem was that though he might appeal to the left in a presidential second round, he wasn’t appealing to the peuple de droite in their own primary. While we expected Juppé to have to slug it out with comeback king Nicolas Sarkozy, the party membership opted overwhelmingly for the third man, Fillon. With disastrous consequences. Philippe has made it clear that he intends to stand. The last piece of the puzzle fell into place for him with his comfortable re-election as mayor of Le Havre. The polls have him as the next best placed candidate after one or other of the RN candidates, on about 20%, but this is precisely where the Juppé experience, laid bare in Gilles Boyer’s Rase campagne matters.* Philippe needs to be seen as a bona fide right/centre-right candidate first before appealing to the left in a run-off. He has no intention of being drawn into a primary.

As one of Macron’s growing legion of former PMs, Philippe might yet be endorsed by Macron’s party, Renaissance (ex-La République en Marche), now led by another former PM, Gabriel Attal. He himself has ambitions, but might judge 2027 as too soon. So does the current justice minister Gérald Darmanin, but the same applies to him. It is also not certain that being the candidate to extend the Macron legacy will be much of a vote-winner. Centre-right politics in France - Renaissance, whatever is left of the Radical Party, but also the Union des Démocrates et des Indépendants (UDI) - is struggling to find space and a voice against a noisy backdrop.

So what does that give us? Going from centre to right, as a I see it: Attal, Darmanin, Philippe, Barnier, Lisnard, Retailleau. There is also Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, the neo-Gaullist souverainiste who Marine Le Pen famously announced would be her PM if she won the 2017 run-off. Despite losing his seat in the National Assembly to La France Insoumise in 2024, he was recently re-elected mayor for the small town of Yerres, to the south-east of Paris, and plans to run again. It’s not clear if Zemmour will run or if he will step back in favour of his partner, Sarah Knafo. Her performance in the municipal elections in Paris in March was a disappointment (for her anyway), but she is still being included in the conversation by most of the opinion pollsters. Xavier Bertrand, the social Gaullist president of the Hauts-de-France region might fancy his chances. And there is even talk of a comeback by yet another former PM, the 72 year-old Dominique de Villepin, whose Parti Humaniste, created in 2025, is seen as a platform for a run at the post he was touted for in 2007… And they wonder why Bardella has such appeal among les tchjeunes.

The French left is also fragmented, but in different ways…

*Boyer and Philippe are close friends and have co-authored a number of books about French politics and also political fiction in the Baron Noir/House of Cards genre.

Les municipales are go!

2014’s French municipal elections showing the results for larger communes

So, despite announcing to a TV, radio and online audience of nearly 25 million on Thursday evening a raft of measures to combat the coronavirus COVID-19, Emmanuel Macron has decided that the municipal elections in the 34,968 communes of mainland and overseas France will go ahead on 15 and 22 March. Before his address, there had been speculation that they might be put back, but according to various sources, leaders of the moderate right, including the speaker of the Senate (Gérard Larcher) and the chair of Association des Maires de France (François Beau-Gosse Baroin) made forceful objections. (A suggestion that Laurent Fabius, chair of the Constitutional Council also had a hand in changing Macron’s mind was denied via the Council’s Twitter account on 13 March.) Quite what the turnout will be is an altogether different issue with so much other background noise over the last few weeks making it difficult for voters to hear the campaign going on.

Municipal elections matter to the French. My rule of thumb when talking about them to my students is that, while in Britain the overall turnout is about 30%, in France that is the general abstention rate. Well, okay, in the big cities turnout is around 55-60%. In rural communes, the turnout (taux de participation) can be considerably higher. In La Chapelle-aux-Saints, an agreeable and rather dispersed village on the edge of the Corrèze and the Lot where Fifth and a Half happens to have a modest abode, the turnout among the 211 électeurs in 2014 was 86%. The term commune, by the way, has nothing to do with tree-hugging hippy **** nor with radical left-wing politics or any of that sort of malarkey. It is simply the smallest unit of local government in France, although some communes are much bigger than others. Basically, when the French Revolutionaries were redrawing the administrative map of France, they used the old parishes as the lowest level of jurisdiction, shifted a few boundaries here and there and relabelled them as communes. The adjective that is used to describe their election, however, is municipales and not communales. So now you know.

In this blog I’ll explain how the elections work. I’ll look at the political stakes in a later post.

Each commune has a local council whose size is determined by its population, on a sliding scale outlined below.

Altogether, the process will involve the election of more than half a million councillors, but there are two methods of election. In communes of up to 1,000 inhabitants, election is by majority system where candidates can stand on a list or indidividually. The lists are not, however, blocked, and voters can express their preference for candidates from different lists or for individuals. If the requisite number of councillors obtain more than 50% of the vote in the first round, there is no run-off, but if any seats remain to be elected - by no means an unsual situation - voters are summoned to fill the remaining seats a week later.

In communes of 1,000 inhabitants or more, a system that looks like PR is used, but don’t let that fool you. In reality, it is a majority list system with a dose of proportional representation: the list that wins, whether they get an absolute majority in the first round or a relative one in the second, is awarded half the seats on the council. Only then are the remaining seats shared out among all the lists, using the D’Hondt method of the highest remaining average and on condition that they receive 5% of the votes cast. If no list wins an absolute majority in the first round (and that’s the norm given the fragmented nature of French politics), then any list that gained 10% in the first round can stay in the race, while candidates on lists that gained at least 5% of the vote can merge with others. (In these communes, the rules on parity apply, so the lists must alternate between female and male candidates or vice versa, depending on who is the tête de liste. This is not the case in the smaller communes.)

By way of a very rapid illustration, the table below shows how the system played out in Nice in 2014, where eight lists from the first round were reduced to four in the second, competing for 69 seats on the municipal council. Christian Estrosi’s right-wing Union de la Droite list (aka Ensemble pour Nice) had taken 45% of the vote in the first round and increased its share to a shade under 49% in the second. But as the table shows, the consequence of the system was that the ruling group took 52 seats on the city council and 49 on the conseil communautaire serving the ‘greater Nice’ area.

These are the general rules that apply to all 34,968 - or at rather 34,862 - there are 106 were there are no candidates standing, which means the departmental prefect’s office has to step in and administer the commune. There are three exceptions. Lyon, Marseille, and Paris are subdivided into arrondissements or secteurs and councillors are elected at the same time for these district councils as well as the overarching city councils. In Paris, for the first time, the central 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th arrondissements will operate as a single electoral district and elect a single council, the other 16 will continue as before.

Meanwhile, down in Lyon, something new will be happeneing. Voters in the ancient ‘Capital of the Three Gauls’ will vote for their arrondissement councillors, and a portion of these will sit on the city council, the number depending on the population of their district. But voters in Lyon and 58 other surrounding communes will be casting a second vote for the new metropolitan council of ‘le Grand Lyon’ - greater Lyon.

Oh, and on account of Brexit, nearly 600 British nationals who sat on various outgoing municipal councils will not be able to stand again…

A suivre…

Les européennes - prelude to Macron Acte Deux

I’ll be honest. I was not all that optimistic about the turnout ahead of Sunday’s European elections in France. This year, 26 May marked the Fête des Mères and I had visions of carloads of French voters heading off to chez jolie-maman, via the boulangerie to pick up dessert rather than the polling station. Ahead of the election, opinion polls were predicting a better-than-normal turnout – something of the order of 45%. On Friday evening, pretty much the last sondage was suggesting 47%. Imagine everyone’s delight, then, when at lunchtime, French radio stations and news channels were suggesting a turnout that pointed towards above 50%. Whatever one might think about French disaffection with mainstream politics (as opposed to the gilets jaunes), clearly half the pays légal thought it worth their while to drop into the mairie to pop their envelope in the perspex box.

In the end, the taux de participation was just a shade over 50%. How does this compare with previous European elections? Pretty well. My ‘go-to’ for election statistics is the france-politique website maintained by Laurent de Boissieu, journalist with La Croix and a commentator whose Twitter feed is also worth following. The figures can be found here. The first European elections in 1979 saw a 61% turnout. This dropped to 57% in 1984, 49% in 1989, rose to 53% in 1994 before dropping down to 47% in 1999, 43% in 2004, 41% in 2009, before a small rise to 42% in 2014. An hour before the first estimates of the results arrived, we were told to look out for 52% turnout. In the end, it was 50.12% nationally. How might we explain this?

There are a number of factors. The gilets jaunes movement is certainly one of them. While the yellow vest lists did poorly - most voters who identified themselves as supporters and who said they would vote, indicated that they would vote for more ‘conventional’ list – the social crisis has had an impact.

Climate change politics also has clearly had an effect – the late surge by Les Verts, which I’ll come back to in a moment, lifted the turnout.

There is also something to be said for the form and the timing of the election. By the hazards of the electoral calendar, this is the first electoral test for Emmanuel Macron. European elections always fall two years after the presidential elections, but his two immediate predecessors - Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012) and François Hollande (2012-2017) - both had to negotiate nationwide municipal elections before the European ones. Sarkozy had not been in office a year before the French told him what they thought of the Président Bling-Bling in les municipales in March 2008. And while le Président Normal had a little longer to prepare, the same happened in March 2014, a couple of months before the European elections. Both were used by the electorate as votes sanctions against the President. (And if you think municipal elections do not matter in France, you really have a great deal to learn.) So, as a first test, the Macron list and his ‘pop-up’ party did reasonably well.

The final factor is the return to a national vote. In 2004, 2009 and 2014, the French used a system of super-regions, not unlike the British system, but unique to European elections. The system was introduced in 2003 by the then PM Jean-Pierre Raffarin and interior minister Sarkozy as a means of damage limitation for Jacques Chirac’s presidential Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, although it failed in that regard. And, on the whole, ruling majorities do not do well in European elections. By my reckoning, the ruling parliamentary party or coalition (NOT the presidential party) has only ‘won’ the European elections on four occasions (1979, 1994, 1999 and 2009). And even then, the results have to be unpacked a little… another time.

The rate of participation/abstention was not the same everywhere, however, and there were some very wide differences in metropolitan France, ranging from a low of 40.8% of abstention to nearly 62% in Corsica and nearly 60.5% in the Paris suburban department of Seine-Saint-Denis. (The official results by department can be found on the Interior Ministry site here.) (In overseas France, the rates of abstention were considerably higher.)

Figure 1 - Le Monde, 28 May 2019

So much for the turnout, Paul. What about the results? Well, here’s a graphic from Le Parisien:

Figure 2 - There were 34 lists - these are the ones that secured more than 1% of the vote. Lists over 3% are eligible for reimbursement of their election costs, but only those over 5% get seats.

The campaign had hardly set the electorate on fire. In the context of the yellow vests movement, the Grand Débat National and Macron’s proposals in response to that, the elections had really taken a back seat until the last couple of weeks, when it became clear that both Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron were going to reduce/elevate the process to a duel between them and their two parties. In that respect, the election turned out as we expected, with Le Pen’s rebranded Rassemblement National-led list winning the largest share of the vote, at 23.3%. Unlike 2014, when she had no national seat in parliament and therefore headed the campaign, Le Pen was not up for election, but installed as tête de liste her new protégé, the 23 year-old Jordan Bardella.

The choice of Bardella was very much hers, and so, in terms of the internal dynamics of the RN as well as national politics, it was important for the list to finish in first place. Mission accomplished then. Finishing second to the Macron list would have been a serious blow to Le Pen, given the wider context of social discontent and doubts within her movement of her ability to win an election in the wake of 2017. Bardella’s youth also points to a young figure being groomed for the succession and challenge to the lurking presence of Marion Maréchal in the background. Domestically, then, the result has shored up Le Pen’s position within the party as well as establishing her and the RN as THE opposition to Macron.

And therein lies the rub. Since the results were announced, various commentators have taken the line, in France and across Europe in general that ‘the far-right populists didn’t do was well as expected’. Perhaps not. But they are now a feature of mainstream politics, not the periphery. Thus, while we can point out that Le Pen’s FN/RN did better in the 2014 European elections (first with 25% of the national vote) and in the 2015 regional elections (first again nationally with 28% of the vote), this result shows that the French far-right have consolidated their position geographically. This is not just a party getting huge votes in certain areas - see Figure 3 below. It is, moreover, a party that mobilises its troops. Something like 80% of those who voted for Le Pen in 2017 turned out to vote, compared to only 54% of macronistes and barely one-third of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s voters from 2017. (In figure 3 below, communes that voted RN are in pink, LREM in orange. This is a little confusing, because traditionally pink is the colour of the left-wing PS, but that’s Le Figaro for you. Le Monde uses brown…)

Figure 3 - the results by commune from Le Figaro - don’t you just love GIS electoral mapping software?

It’s unusual for a President to get quite as involved in a secondary election as Macron did, but the situation is unusual, and it should not be forgotten that La République en Marche (LREM) remains a work in progress. The wider political context forced his hand and it became inevitable when he launched the Grand Débat and became heavily (perhaps too heavily) implicated in that. His choice of Nathalie Loiseau, the European affairs minister, as tête de liste may or may not have been a good one. She didn’t perform terribly well in the pre-elections debates, but she was by no means the worst. The opinion polls had the LREM and their allies more or less neck and neck with the RN until the last ten days or so, when the RN crept ahead. It’s always risky turning an election into a plebiscite, but Macron had very little choice. In the event, the result was better than it might have been. However, as PM Edouard Philippe said on Sunday evening, ‘if you come second, you haven’t won’. (Wise words, Ed.)

It was the results behind LREM that were the shocks and, in a sense, a pleasant surprise for Macron (and to some extent Le Pen). Paris Match’s survey of opinion polls had third place going to the maintsream right-wing party, Les Républicains (LR), credited with 14% of voting intentions. That had been the ball-park figure throughout the campaign and at party headquarters on the Rue Vaugirard there was a general feeling that, as with the Fillon campaign in 2017, a late tailwind might even push the list, headed by François-Xavier Bellamy, through the 15% barrier. There was general consternation, when the first exit polls released at 8.00 pm put them in fourth with less than 9% and that is where they stayed. So much, then, for the party that, in late 2016, was a shoo-in for the Elysée.

Just as these elections were always going to be a stern test for the new LREM, just so they would be for the president of LR, Laurent Wauquiez. Elected at the end of 2017 (see my blog entry for 14 December 2017), the president of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region has been heavily criticised from within his party for taking the LR down the path of identity politics, stigmatised by the wonderfully sardonic Edouard Philippe as the droite Trocadéro. Wauquiez chose Bellamy as tête de liste as a copy of himself (on Bellamy see Arthur Goldhammer’s excellent comment here) rather than a leader who would reach out across the famille de la droite et du centre, but in truth the family needs to take a long hard look at itself. Although LR has 100 deputies in the National Assembly and controls the Senate, the party has still not come to terms with its response to Macron and on Sunday that showed, as disaffected centre-right voters supported the LREM list and not Bellamy.

Wauquiez’s critics within LR, particularly Valérie Pécresse, president of the Ile-de-France region and Gérard Larcher, speaker of the Senate, wre not slow to voice their views. In the opinion of the former, Wauquiez had no option but to resign. If Larcher, by virtue of his office the deuxième personnage de la République was marginally more circumspect in public, in private he has echoed Pécresse and, using his position as speaker has begun to try to rally the right and centre-right ahead of next year’s now critical municipal elections. Apart from its homelands in the Massif Central the LR electorate was virtually invisible and many of its voters simply stayed at home, especially in eastern and south-eastern France. Don’t let Figure 4 below fool you. The scores in departments like the Alpes-Maritimes (Nice) were appalling.

Figure 4 - Le Monde, 28 May 2019

Les Républicains switched places with Les Verts (EELV), the Greens, led by Yannick Jadot. Credited with perhaps 8-9% of the vote by almost every opinion poll, they were boosted by a last minute vote (according to reports 25% of EELV voters decided to vote Green at the very last minute). But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. While ecology is undoubtedly part of the zeitgeist, we have been here before. I can remember the 1989 election, when the Greens made their ‘breakthrough’ with 11%, only to then slip away in 1994. In 2009, they took 16.28% of the vote, just behind their future allies the PS. It was on the basis of those results that François Hollande promised them seats in the National Assembly, brought them into his electoral coalition in 2012 and they responded by running a very poor candidate, Eva Joly (fine person, poor candidate). In 2014 and out of government they slipped back below 9%. And in 2017, Jadot (very foolishly) stood down in favour of the doomed PS presidential candidate Benoît Hamon. Jadot’s success is in part thanks to the failings of the moderate left, but also to disaffection among ecologist voters with Macron, disappointed by the limitations of his policy, embodied by the resignation of environment minister Nicolas ‘sort of the French David Attenborough’ Hulot late last summer.

Figure 5 - Allez les Verts… until next time. Le Monde 28 May 2019

It’s worth noting the strength of the Green in Brittany the Alps and the southern Massif Central, as well as, for the first time ever, Corsica, where Jadot’s list polled 22%, behind the RN on 27.7%, but well ahead of LREM on 15%, a reflection of what Corsicans see as Macron’s high-handed attitude to their ‘sensibilities’.

In France, the Greens are generally considered to be on the left, and their success is in some way accounted for not just by dissaffection on the left of the LREM (some 17% of EELV voters on Sunday voted Macron in the first round in 2017) but also frustration with Hamon, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (from 19% to 6.3% for heaven’s sake), and to a lesser degree with the Parti Socialiste. Of these, at least the latter, led by Raphaël Glucksmann (PS-PP), held on to the same proportion of the vote as its candidate (Hamon) did in 2017, while Hamon managed a shade over 3% and at least gets his election expenses reimbursed. As Figure 6 below shows, the PS can still count on its Breton and south-western heartlands. (Raphaël Glucksmann is a philosopher who set up Place Publique as a pro-European centre-left party outside the PS but also to counter the influence of Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise.)

Figure 6 - La gauche cassoulet is alive - Le Monde, 28 May 2019.

Over-optimistic French left-wingers picking over the results were excited to point out that if one added Jadot, Glucksmann and Hamon’s voters together, they would be neck and neck with Loiseau. And if one could persuade La France Insoumise (LFI - led in the election by Manon Aubry) plus the Communist Ian Brossat to join, then that took them past the 30% marker. But that sort of wishful thinking has no basis in political reality.

Where did it go wrong for Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the insoumis? Surely the natural party of the gilet jaunes, instead it seems that, if the yellow vests voted for any party in particular, it was the Rassemblement National. From 19% in the first round of the presidential election in 2017 to less than one-third of that score in 2019. Within the party, patience has begun to run out, not least on the part of deputy Clementine Autain, exasperated with Mélenchon’s ‘anti-everything’ approach, which seems to boil down to shouting at everyone (my view, not Autain’s).

Figure 7 - LFI - Big in the Ariège, Seine-Saint-Denis and overseas… anorexic everywhere else Le Monde, 28 May 2019

One of Autain’s criticisms of Mélenchon has been the failure, justement, to create an alliance populaire of left-wing parties to challenge both Macron and also Le Pen. And it is true that it is the RN that has strengthened its support among working class voters. But continued weakness of the left offers some hope to Macron.

Macron the candidate, it will be remembered, emerged from the left. Macron the president, on the other hand, has governed, for the most part, from the centre and right. Without going into a discussion of policy we can see this simply by looking at the key ministries occupied by Philippe, Bruno Le Maire (finance) and Jean-Michel Blanquer (education). Sunday’s results to the left of LREM, however, offer Macron an opportunity not so much to shift to the left as to open up the possibilities of a group or even a party of centre-left macroncompatibles to mirror the Agir group in the National Assembly on the right of LREM and Modem and acting as a passerelle for disaffected members of LR. It won’t be easy, but it could well be a feature of Acte II of Macron’s presidency, particularly if he is capable of ‘greening’ his politics.

But one thing is certain in the wake of Sunday’s elections. The old left-right division of French politics is done. The division is now between progressistes et nationalistes if you are Macron and mondialistes et patriotes if you are Le Pen. On 12 June Edouard Philippe will outline the next phase of his government’s work to the National Assembly, ahead of a vote of confidence, thus formally launching the second phase of Macron’s presidency. Meanwhile the parties and politicians will look ahead to and begin to prepare the ground (if they haven’t already) for next year’s municipal elections, which one commentator has described as the ‘most depoliticised’ (apologies for the appalling Gallicism) of the Fifth Republic.That’s not quite true, in fact. Bipolarisation only really hit French local elections in the 1970s. Still… the transformation of the political landscape and other less obvious factors, such as the end of the cumul des mandats, have made local politics a fractured field. A gilet jaune mayor anyone?