Emmanuel Macron

It was the historian and thoughtful biographer of many Third, Fourth and Fifth Republic politicians, Maxime Tandonnet, who put it best: “I don’t believe the theory where Emmanuel Macron gifts the PM job to the National Rally three weeks from now, intending them to crash and burn. His massive hubris simply wouldn’t have it. I think we’re witnessing an authentic shipwreck: total disconnection caused by wilful narcissistic blindness. He is still convinced he can win.”

Ever since le Président, dressed up as a provincial undertaker, with a wide black tie he must have borrowed in a hurry, called a snap general election on Sunday night, one hour after polling stations closed and the victory of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in the European elections was confirmed, the country has been tying itself in knots, trying to understand why he ever thought this could be a good idea.

With about a third of the vote in the life-size poll that is France’s only PR election, the Rally won twice the numbers of Renaissance, Macron’s ad hoc party created in 2017 after he won the Élysée job. The French Left has split between a credible iteration of a revamped Social Democracy, under Raphaël Glucksmann, son of the late philosopher André, who polled 13.8 per cent to Renaissance’s lacklustre 14.5 per cent, and Manon Aubry’s France Unbowed list (9.9 per cent) a kind of Corbynista Left on acid, who waged almost their entire campaign on the supposed Gaza “genocide”.

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The party’s real boss is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 72, dubbed the “French Fidel Castro”, who rules without internal elections of any kind, and disdained even to run for his former MP seat in Marseille at the last general election, two years ago. Once a mild middle-of-the-road Socialist senator under François Mitterrand, this former choirboy then teacher has reinvented himself as the leader of the Party of Rage. His target voters were the discontented residents of the multicultural banlieues, riven, it claims, by systemic racism, who the minute Sunday’s results were announced crowded the Place de la République in Paris, vowing insurrection against the “Fascist Right”.

The Left can only hope to win if it reunites, but the Frankenstein party that would result is guaranteed to turn off moderate voters. The archipelago of right-of-centre small parties that are all that remains of a glorious Gaullist past can only hope to win if they ally themselves to the National Rally, which only a few of them would. Macron hopes that he can reinvent himself (again) as the great unifier of the broad anti-Fascist republican centre: his instructions to his disgruntled followers are not to run against any outgoing moderate candidate, be they old-style Socialists, centrists or traditional right-wingers. Renaissance was his very own thing, and if he wants to break it, he no doubt feels entitled to. (The hard done-by Renaissance MPs feel quite differently.)

This, of course, neglects the very real detestation of most of the country, who feel he patronises, even despises, them. It is possible, as M. Tandonnet sees it, that Emmanuel Macron doesn’t quite understand how deep it runs: like every French chief of any organisation, he reigns over a court where nobody, ever, contradicts the boss, or even jokes with him (save jokes initiated by le patron lui-même).

Still, the ultimate game plan may run as follows: on July 7, having won the general election on the evening of the second round, the 28-year-old RN list leader, Jordan Bardella, gets named PM by Macron, who constitutionally has no choice. The job is too big for the inexperienced Bardella. After a couple of years of failures, Emmanuel Macron calls another election, and wins.

This is, of course, an absurd plan. Macron has modelled it on François Mitterrand’s two years of “cohabitation”, after losing a general election to the Gaullists in 1986, running circles round a hapless Jacques Chirac, who hadn’t realised what a trap it was. In 1988, the French duly re-elected Mitterrand.

But aside from the fact that politics today hardly look like politics 40 years ago, Macron, a technocrat who’d never run for any elected office before he entered the Élysée aged 39, is no Mitterrand, a wily old bird with encyclopaedic knowledge of the French grassroots and a sense of timing and triangulation defying Euclidean geometry.

No wonder that Renaissance’s foot soldiers, who during their time in Parliament were treated like low-ranking employees by their mercurial boss, are furious and, for the first time in their political lives, have started criticising their boss, too late. Nobody in France, in fact, is happy today, except Marine Le Pen, looking like one of her dozen Bengal cats that got the cream, and waiting smilingly for her next job in a couple of years.

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