Saturday 20th of April 2024

not smelling like roses….

Emmanuel Macron has done something no other French president has achieved before: winning re-election while still being in charge of his own government.

The centrist president's victory over Marine Le Pen may have been convincing, but he has a problem. There are new elections around the corner to France's National Assembly and a big section of the electorate dislikes him.

"There is a lot of hate," sociologist Michel Wieviorka told the BBC. "He said last night 'I am happy' but I don't think he can be totally happy because there are plenty of clouds in his sky."

Politically, if he fares badly in the June elections, he could end up losing his majority and may not be able to form his own government. That's why his opponents are calling the next vote a "third round".

Why would that matter if he's just won 58.5% of the national vote? 

Many of his voters are not natural supporters and are unlikely to back him in June. A large number of far-left voters held their noses to keep the far right out of power, but then there are also a number of mainstream parties that threw their weight behind him too, including the Republicans, Greens and Socialists.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61214460

 

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cross-dressing…..

How does he do it?  Macron has pulled off this astonishing success because he embodies, even more than his predecessors, the centrist logic which they followed.  He famously came from the Left to capture an essentially centre-right electorate: he had been secretary-general of the French presidency and then Economics Minister under the Socialist Hollande, without himself ever being formally Socialist, while his two prime ministers have both been centre-right. 

 

Macron’s predecessors also cross-dressed politically but not to the same extent: Hollande and Chirac were centrists (Chirac put more and more ‘water into his wine’, as they say in French, as he got older), while the campaign firebrand and supposedly hardline former interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy appointed the radical globalist-leftist, Bernard Kouchner, to high office.  Mitterrand was elected on a hard-left programme in 1981 but abandoned it in 1983 in favour of the pro-European post-nationalism embodied by his special adviser from 1981 to 1991, the uber-globalist ex-Marxist Jacques Attali, who is one of Macron’s mentors. Mitterrand’s predecessor, Giscard, was, like Macron, a former Finance Minister who embodied, like all of them, a commitment to progress, modernisation and, above all, Europe.  Even de Gaulle was a centrist of sorts.  Today he seems like a giant in comparison with his successors but he also combined elements of left and right – “le progrès, mais pas la pagaille” (progress but not chaos) as he once put it in a very funny broadcast.  During the war, de Gaulle famously had Communists on his side even though he was the very embodiment of “la vieille France” of the army and the Church.

 

READ MORE:

https://forumfordemocracy.com/article/french-elections

 

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Macron earns a triumphless victory, tarnished by far right's historic score and fear of a 'third round'

 

Re-elected with 58.5% of the vote in the French presidential election on Sunday, President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged that 'the coming years will not be quiet.' 

In 2017, he crossed the Louvre courtyard alone, in a long filmed walk before delivering a speech hailing his own "audacity." On Sunday, April 24, the evening of his second victory, Emmanuel Macron appeared at the Champ-de-Mars accompanied by his wife and surrounded by children. The crowd was not jubilant this time. His supporters' mood was just relieved and somewhat stunned.

The president won once again in the duel against Marine Le Pen, but it was time to appear humble in the face of a result that came with obligations. The re-elected president is happy but wants to show that he is a new man, after a five-year term "of transformations, happy and difficult times, and exceptional crises." And after a half-hearted campaign that achieved little political gain.

More on this topic Emmanuel Macron's next quest is to keep his parliamentary majority

His score of 58.5% was more tenuous than in 2017, when he received 66.1% of the vote, and it will reduce his room for maneuver. Some in his entourage are nevertheless amazed by his re-election, perhaps in the way one would be at a sporting performance. Since the re-election of Charles de Gaulle under the new Fifth Republic in 1965, Mr. Macron is the first president to have won reelection outside a period of "cohabitation," when the president and prime minister are from opposing parties. "I am convinced that the qualities of both the man and the project meet the challenges of our time," congratulated the President of the Assemblée Nationale, Richard Ferrand, sharing his "deep joy" on Twitter.

 

But Mr. Macron knows that he must retain gravitas in the coming years that "to be sure, will not be quiet," as he put it himself. "France is experiencing a strong crisis," agreed Prime Minister Jean Castex.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/2022-presidential-election/article/2022/04/25/macron-earns-a-victory-without-triumph-marked-by-the-far-right-s-historic-score-and-the-fear-of-a-third-round_5981571_16.html

 

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