The so-called third round of the French presidential elections in April will be decided next Sunday. The Parliamentary electionresponsible for establishing the parliamentary majority with which the president will be able to govern, have placed Emmanuel Macron On the defensive. At the end of the first round, he sees the large absolute majority he had in the National Assembly threatened. But if in the presidential elections in April the rival to beat was the extreme right of Marine Le Pen, now her opponent is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the New Popular Ecological and Social Union (Nupes), an alliance of circumstances of the radical left that he heads with socialists, environmentalists and communists.
However, before analyzing the correlation of forces resulting from the first round of the legislative elections on Sunday, the first data to retain is the new abstention record (52.49%), the highest in a parliamentary election in the history of the Fifth Republic. This “democratic disaster”, in the expression used in the editorial of ‘Le Monde’, reflects the systemic crisis of the French political model and also has practical consequences before the second round. Unlike the presidential ones, the first two candidates in each electoral district go to the final, as well as those who have obtained more than 12.5% of the votes of the registered voters. But with an abstention rate of over 50%, the barrier to dispute the second is above 25% of the votes counted and, consequently, in the second round on Sunday, the electoral head-to-head in each of the 577 constituencies will be the norm against the triangular calls -three candidates on stage- that traditionally took place in many districts. The result of the first round has been settled with a practical technical draw between the current presidential majority (Ensemble!) and the union of the left. The third block is Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) with 18.68% of the votes. The extreme right aspires only to achieve a parliamentary group (15 deputies), with projections that give it between 20 and 45 seats.
The presidential majority, in this context, starts with estimates that assure victory in the second round, between 255 and 295 deputies, but well below the 351 it had until now. The main challenge for President Macron is to maintain the absolute majority (289 seats) and not having to depend on The Republicans (LR) -the remnants of the post-Gaullist right- which, with 11.31% of the vote, aspire to obtain between 50 and 80 seats. It is difficult for the new leftist alliance to win the third round, as Mélenchon insists, given the few vote reserves it has. The union in the first round has allowed him to unseat the extreme right, unlike what happened in the first round of the presidential elections, but once it has been amortized, it leaves few expectations for the second.
Mélenchon’s strategists will take advantage of this campaign week to propose a kind of anti-Macron referendum, the same tactic that Marine Le Pen tried to follow without success in the presidential elections. In any case, the president has received a vote of punishment: he has not been able to capitalize on his victory in April and may be forced to govern with a relative majority in the National Assembly. In addition, he may be forced to carry out a government reshuffle: at least 2 of the 15 ministers who attend the legislative elections may be left without a seat. In short, the old policy collapsed five years ago in France, but Macron’s new policy fails to take hold either.