Macron Embarrasses Himself to Defeat Le Pen

LEFT: Prime Minister Theresa May welcomes France President Emmanuel Macron to the UK-France Summit, at Sandhurst. January 18, 2018. Photo courtesy of Number 10. RIGHT: Reception from Santiago Abascal to Marine Le Pen at the Madrid Summit 01.28.2022 Photo Vox Espana.

Emmanuel Macron embarrassed himself by embracing an alliance with the radical left parties of France in an effort to elect anyone but Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party to parliament. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board notes:

So much for the right-wing takeover of the French Republic. French voters on Sunday appear to have handed a narrow plurality to the political left while producing a divided National Assembly. None of this will make life easier for French President Emmanuel Macron, who was the main architect of this political muddle.

The leftist coalition Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) was on track to win between 177 and 192 seats in the 577-member National Assembly, according to early estimates by the Ipsos polling institute. President Macron’s centrist coalition was poised to secure 152 to 158 seats, while Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally (RN) and its allies were projected to win between 138 and 145.

Everyone but the left is a loser here. Mr. Macron impulsively called this snap election after the RN’s strong showing in European Parliament elections in June in an attempt to weaken his political rivals on the right. Whereas those European elections usually are protest votes, Mr. Macron hoped voters would abandon the RN if control of the national government was at stake.

That gamble worked in the sense that the RN has fared worse than expected in Sunday’s second round when voters in most districts faced a binary choice between Ms. Le Pen’s party and someone—anyone—else. That may humble Ms. Le Pen for a while. But the RN still has increased its seat count in the newly elected National Assembly from 87 in the last one, and everyone will remember that RN and its allies led last weekend’s first round with 33% of the vote.

Mr. Macron certainly isn’t a winner. His anyone-but-Le Pen strategy for Sunday’s second round led him to forge an embarrassing alliance with a motley assortment of parties of the left (ranging from the moderate to the offensive) that will make him a lame duck for the rest of his Presidency.

Mr. Macron’s party’s likely drop to second place in the new assembly shows that for many voters this became an anyone-but-Macron strategy. French voters are as worried as ever about immigration, assimilation, crime and an aloof political class of which Mr. Macron is the best representative at least since Charles de Gaulle (and possibly since Marie Antoinette). He was able to blunt Ms. Le Pen’s challenge from the right only by working to elect parties that will happily harass him from the left.

The most immediate consequence is that Mr. Macron’s economic-revival agenda is dead. The left-wing parties are fervently opposed to his signature pension and labor-market reforms, more so than Ms. Le Pen is. The investors who freaked out at the prospect that Ms. Le Pen’s party would blow up the public finances are about to discover things can be much worse.

Paris’s attitudes on some issues such as support for Ukraine are unlikely to change much. But on other issues that matter to allies, including the urgent need to increase defense spending, don’t be so sure. And note that to freeze out a party of the right sometimes accused of antisemitism, Mr. Macron made common cause with a leftist coalition that included La France Insoumise, a far-left party that has a genuine antisemitism problem surrounding its views on Israel and Gaza.

Mr. Macron bet that voters remain uncertain enough about Ms. Le Pen that they’d think twice before electing her party. But his informal partners may prove as off-putting to voters the more the French see them in action. Mr. Macron and his unlikely allies have three years until the next presidential election to prove they’re better than Ms. Le Pen would be at solving the problems that matter to voters.

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