The presidential election leaves a political landscape particularly divided between left, extreme right and center right. How will the President of the Republic succeed in governing in this context conducive to division? Political guests of Sonia Mabrouk, Jérôme Jaffré, political scientist and associate researcher at CEVIPOF and Michel Wieviorka, sociologist, author of the book So Macron, Happy?hope for a five-year term that will transform divisions into political and institutional debates.
The legislative challenge
According to Jérôme Jaffré, the central bloc, which is made up of government parties such as the socialists, the ecologists, the centrists, the republicans, represents “less than 40% of the votes cast in the first round. For reference, it was 80 % in 2007. That is to say half less in 15 years.”
“It’s something striking because indeed there is a radical and powerful right-wing bloc, with a third of the voters in the first round and up to almost 42% in the second, and a radical left-wing bloc, with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who represents less than a quarter of the electorate, but who hopes to progress by capturing the rest of the left.You have a situation for the legislative elections, and we have already seen this in the second round of the presidential election , where the radical left and the radical rights cannot ally themselves, cannot get along”, notes the political scientist.
According to the specialist, President Emmanuel Macron takes advantage of this antagonism to constitute his own domination over the political landscape. If he succeeded in 2017 and 2022, it may be complicated to perform the same feat for the upcoming legislative elections. “You still have to build a majority of deputies behind him in the legislative elections, whereas with a re-elected president, there is not the momentum and the automaticity of this majority. Why? Because when a president is elected for the first time, the main argument of the French is ‘let’s give him a chance and a majority so that he can do what he says.’ But when a president is re-elected, the notion of giving him a chance no longer has the same flavor,” he continues.
Political opportunities or a social crisis?
For Michel Wieviorka, France is now compartmentalized into “blocks which do not seem to be able to communicate. The solution which would consist in swallowing a small piece of it, integrating it into a government is a solution which does not solve any problem and which leaves the fractures still We must transform the fractures into debate, into conflict, into institutional life and into something other than chaos or violence”
“Basically, we are in a situation where either we will have social crises to manage, or we will find a political outlet. I would say the risk is that Emmanuel Macron considers that the crisis is not necessarily a bad thing for him. All these crises during the five-year term did not prevent him from being re-elected”, abounds for his part Jérôme Jaffré.
The latter also believes that it is necessary to offer “political solutions to the tensions and divisions that fracture society”. He also develops the idea that the two issues that now face Emmanuel Macron are: a political solution or a social crisis.
“At that point you have two ways. I would say either in matters of government another method, and the president said he will develop another method without ever telling us what that method would be and how it would work. This could be to modify the method of voting for the election of deputies quickly enough so that in the event of a major crisis such as the yellow vest, there is the political outlet of a dissolution and legislative elections with proportional representation, partial or total which obliges the political forces to recompose themselves and to get along”, he concludes.