How far will Emmanuel Macron kick the can down the road? For much of the past month, the French president has shuttled between his official vacation residence in Provence and the Olympics, repeatedly heading back to the capital for cameos alongside medal-winning athletes. But the conclusion of the Paris games on August 11 also ends the political “cease-fire” declared by Macron in July.
The Olympics afforded a brief honeymoon that allowed the president to brush over the stinging defeat dealt to his political project just weeks earlier. On July 7, the snap elections called by Macron at the beginning of the summer tore the rug out from under his coalition in parliament. The president’s allies lost nearly ninety seats in the National Assembly, in which the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) emerged as the largest single bloc.
Alleging in a July 10 public letter that “nobody won” the elections, Macron’s main priority since that point has been to thwart the NFP’s claim to govern. The left-wing alliance — which includes Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, the Parti Communiste Français, Les Écologistes, and the center-left Parti Socialiste (PS) — together holds 193 seats in parliament. This is well beneath the 289 seats needed for an absolute majority, but still gives it what the French call a “relative majority” over Macron’s Ensemble (166 seats) and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and its allies (143 seats). On July 16, Macron reinstated the outgoing government, aligned to his party, as caretaker ministers.
In the weeks since, nothing has changed in the raw mathematical reality. As the largest coalition in the new National Assembly, the NFP is demanding the right to form a government and structure…
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Auteur: Harrison Stetler
