Macron’s camp plots unlikely comeback amid French election chaos

PARIS  —  The dust has hardly settled after Sunday’s surprise French election result delivered a hung parliament — and already President Emmanuel Macron’s allies are hoping to turn the turmoil to their advantage.

Bucking recent predictions, the left-wing New Popular Front alliance won the most seats in the final round of the parliamentary election on Sunday, overtaking Macron’s centrists and trouncing Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally.

But the result left the French parliament in limbo, without an obvious candidate for prime minister and with no single party in a position to form a government.

Allies of the president are now looking for opportunities to exploit the uncertainty to assert their centrist agenda. Some think they’ve found a possible way through: by breaking up the already fractious and fragmented leftist alliance.

The New Popular Front is a motley group of disparate left-wing parties with a hastily-agreed policy platform and no clear leader. It includes the far-left France Unbowed, led by veteran firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon; the Communists; the Socialists and the Greens.

The alliance was hastily cobbled together after Macron triggered the snap election a month ago, and it remains fragile and fraught with tensions. Until quite recently, the Socialist Party and the France Unbowed were at daggers drawn over Israel’s war against Hamas, with the Socialists accusing the far left of failing clearly to condemn Hamas’s October 7 attacks.

The New Popular Front is a motley group of disparate left-wing parties with a hastily-agreed policy platform and no clear leader. | Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images

On Monday morning, the left was still firmly in its honeymoon phase and pledging to back a single person to become prime minister by the end of the week. Macron’s liberals however hope it is simply a matter of time before the left implodes and the center emerges as the largest group in parliament.

One of Macron’s top allies François Bayrou argued Monday on French radio that “the election had not yet handed down its verdict in terms of numbers.”

Challenged over what he meant, Bayrou said the issue wasn’t about “counting votes” but about identifying which group “can unite.”

The French president meanwhile has been strangely quiet and appears to be biding his time. On Monday French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal offered to resign but Macron asked him to stay on “for the stability of the country”, according to a statement from the Elysée Palace.

Parliament chess game

For the Greens leader Marine Tondelier, who was in the radio studio with Bayrou, his comments were “a denial” of Sunday’s results. “You need to accept the victory of your opponents,” she snapped back.

But clearly it’s no coincidence Bayrou was dragging his feet to recognise the left’s success, as insiders from Macron’s party have been seeking to chart a way back to the top.

“Without France Unbowed, [the left] has fewer seats than we have, and we are ahead of the National Rally,” said one official from Macron’s Renaissance party.

Another outgoing minister mused that Macron’s liberals only need a handful more members of parliament to overtake the left. “Between the non-affiliated right, the overseas MPs and the UDI [centrists], anything is possible,” the former minister said.

The left needs allies if it wants a shot at governing France, which is another source of tension inside the coalition.

In recent weeks several centrist heavyweights have floated the idea of working with the left in a “wide coalition,” though that would need to exclude Mélenchon’s far-left France Unbowed.

The division of power has also shifted on the left, which was once firmly dominated by the France Unbowed. The Greens and the Socialists are emerging as more powerful parties since the election.

Who’s talking

But the turmoil in parliament also provides opportunities to others. Even if Macron gets what he hopes for and the leftist alliance implodes, he’ll still have a bigger problem: The center is falling apart.

The French president’s decision to gamble his movement’s political future on a snap election has alienated many of his allies, including former PM Edouard Philippe and Macron’s own prime minister, Gabriel Attal, who admitted on television the president had not consulted him in advance.

During the campaign, Philippe accused Macron of having “killed the coalition” and called for “a new [parliamentary] majority” to be created. On Sunday, Macron’s allies narrowly avoided a bloodbath, still losing more than 70 seats, but that did not stop Philippe, who has presidential ambitions for himself, from slamming a snap election that delivered “a great indetermination.”

With Macron unable to stand again in 2027, all eyes are now on the race for next presidential election and few potential candidates will be willing to sacrifice their future for Macron’s present.

Even those who supported the French president’s decision to hold fresh parliamentary elections appear to be preparing their exit strategy. Outgoing Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, another presidential hopeful, was about to launch “his own set-up,” according to the same former minister quoted above.

Darmanin’s team declined to comment for this story.

Even if the liberals do manage to secure the largest group in the National Assembly and Macron was able to appoint a fellow centrist as a PM, there’s no end to the pain in sight. Opposition parties will be able to topple the government at every turn, and passing legislation will involve much blood-letting: Chaos will still prevail in parliament.