Analysts have tried to speculate on the reasons that led President Emmanuel Macron to call early elections.
The call for early elections by the French president has led many to wonder what did I expect to win with the scrutiny, since it is expected that the coalition of Emmanuel Macron lose seats in Parliament at the end of Sunday’s second round. To the surprise of many voters, Macron announced the dissolution of parliament after the defeat in the European electionsin which the extreme right led the polls.
The modification of the French electoral calendar with an early vote represents the return to a “normal parliamentary regime in which legislative elections are not at all linked to presidential elections“Delphine Dulong, professor of Political Science at the University of Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne, told ‘Euronews’.
In France, legislative elections are held immediately after the presidential elections and They usually give the majority to the president. The alignment of the electoral calendar occurred following a referendum called in 2000 by President Jacques Chirac that limited the term to five years presidential.
The changes helped avoid the “cohabitation”when the president must appoint a prime minister of an opposing sidebut they also mean that legislative elections are typically defined by candidates who belong to or oppose the president’s party.
However, Dulong stated that these elections anticipated “they will not clarify much” politically for the presidentthe analyst believes that the elections “did not give at all the results he expected.”
A “not very responsible” political maneuver
While the far-right National Group (RN), of Le Pen and Bardella, had celebrated Macron’s decision to call electionsothers have questioned it, calling the dissolution of risky bet.
“I’m not in the president’s head, if I were in the president’s head, maybe I would be able to understand why has it put us so much in danger. Because it has put us in danger with its dissolution [del Parlamento]”Grégory Doucet, mayor of Lyon for the Green party, told ‘Euronews’ before the elections.
In the first round of the elections, the Macron party re-registered a decrease in supportand the president’s coalition is now expected to lose seats in the National Assembly, with three years remaining in Macron’s term as president.
“Nothing was forcing the president to call early elections,” Dulong said, adding that the european elections They were instead a “pretext” for something you were probably considering for a long time. Dulong points out that Macron knew that he was doing it in a “risky context”, with a “polarization towards extremes” among the electorate.
Let the express scrutiny be held just before the Paris Olympics and can incite social movements in France it was “not very responsible on the part of the President of the Republic,” he added.
The expert gave two other possible reasons why the president dissolved Parliament: that “he believed in his lucky star”, after coming out of nowhere in the 2017 election, or that he thought that if he lost the election, having a prime minister from an opposition party would help the president “remake his image.”
After the second round, we will have to see if it is capable of creating a coalition pulling from the right and the left or if he will be forced to cohabitate with an opposition prime minister, such as one from the extreme right.
