Protesters gather during an anti-far-right demonstration after French President Emmanuel Macron called for legislative elections following significant gains by far-right parties in the European Parliament elections in Paris on June 15, 2024.
Lou Benoist | AFP | Getty Images
French President Emmanuel Macron faces a reckoning after the country’s far right made historic gains in the first round of a snap parliamentary election.
The National Rally party, led by activist Marine Le Pen, and its allies won more than 33% of the vote on Sunday, in a firm rejection of Macron’s centrist and globalist policies. If they win an absolute majority in Sunday’s second round of elections, Macron’s power will be severely weakened.
The French president, who came to power more than seven years ago, has bet heavily on the election, characterising the contest as a choice between nationalism and demagoguery on the one hand and liberal values and a strong and united European Union on the other, but many think his gamble has backfired.
Thomas Piketty, a successful French economist and economics professor, pointed out what he described as one of Macron’s biggest mistakes: neglecting and demonizing France’s left.
“What worries me a little bit is that the current government has tried to demonize the left in the last few weeks, days and months, even though Macron would never have been elected without the left,” Piketty, author of the book “Capital in the 21st Century,” told CNBC’s “Street Signs Europe” on Monday.
“Without the left’s vote for Macron against Le Pen in 2022 and 2017, he would not be president and he never really tried to do anything together with the people who made him president.”
Piketty described France as a country with three main electoral blocs: the far right, the centrist business bloc and the left. He described Macron’s centrist party, Renaissance, as getting votes in “the poshest places in the country” where there are concentrations of the business elite, and said they “thought they could stay in power just by pandering” to that bloc.
Supporters of Macron and the left are scrambling this week to join forces to try to prevent the far right from dominating the French legislature, as it did in the 2022 and 2017 presidential elections. But many of Macron’s policies, such as cutting welfare, raising the national retirement age and cracking down on protests, have served to alienate left-wing voters.
“You can’t run the country like this, with such a narrow electoral base, for a long time,” Piketty said.
“I think this is a great lesson for these elections, which is also valid for other countries: the idea of putting together the centre-right and the centre-left, and the winners of globalisation together, governing the country against the left, against the right, is not something that can work for long.”
Macron called early parliamentary elections on June 9 after a heavy defeat in the European Parliament elections, in which right-wing parties made significant gains in several countries, including France, Germany and Austria.
Ahead of the second round of elections for France’s 577-seat National Assembly, more than 200 candidates have said they will drop out of the race, Reuters reported citing local media, to avoid splitting the anti-far-right vote.
To this end, Macron has called for unity between the centre-left and the centre-right, calling for a “broad mobilisation behind the Republican and Democratic candidates”.
