Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

FRENCH ELECTIONS

French left vows ‘total break’ with Macron policies

France's left Friday vowed a "total break" with President Emmanuel Macron's policies if its new alliance wins historic polls that could propel the far right to major gains in parliament.

Published: 15 June 2024 12:12 CEST
French President Emmanuel Macron gestures as he speaks to the media during the G7 Summit at the Borgo Egnazia resort in Savelletri, near Bari, Italy
French President Emmanuel Macron gestures as he speaks to the media during the G7 Summit at the Borgo Egnazia resort in Savelletri, near Bari, Italy, on June 14, 2024. An alliance of French left-wing parties has vowed to break with Macron's polices if it wins the forthcoming election polls. (Photo by Ludovic MARIN / AFP)

Far-right figurehead Marine Le Pen, also making a pitch to voters, pledged a “national unity government” if her party takes power in the snap legislative elections.

Macron on Sunday stunned France by calling polls after Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) scored more than double his centrist alliance’s result in last week’s European elections.

Left-wing groups including hard-left France Unbowed (LFI), the Socialist, Communist and Green parties on Thursday agreed an election alliance called the New Popular Front.

On Friday, they unveiled a joint manifesto, whose headline measures included jettisoning Macron’s controversial immigration and pension reforms if they win the polls, which open on June 30 with a second round on July 7.

They also promised to “rise to the climate challenge” — without agreeing on whether to go ahead with modernising France’s fleet of nuclear plants — and to maintain support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion.

“It’s going to be either the far right, or us,” Greens party leader Marine Tondelier told reporters.

READ ALSO: Podcast special episode: What now for France after Macron’s great election gamble?

The coalition won backing from leading left-wing politician Raphael Glucksmann, 44, who led the Socialist-backed list in the European elections.

“We can’t leave France to the Le Pen family,” he told broadcaster France Inter.

The name of the alliance is a nod to the Popular Front, a political alliance founded in France in 1936 to combat fascism.

Opinion polls suggest Le Pen’s party will massively increase its parliamentary presence from its current 88 out of 577 seats.

She took over the National Front — founded in 1972 by a former SS member — from her father in 2011, renaming it and standing three times as its presidential candidate.

‘Hate and discrimination’ 

Francois Hollande, the Socialist former president, backed the new union, saying the left-wing forces had “got beyond our differences”.

It remained unclear however who would lead the New Popular Front and become prime minister in case of victory. Glucksmann ruled out the LFI’s abrasive leader Jean-Luc Melenchon.

Aurelien Rousseau, a former health minister under Macron, announced on Friday he was switching his allegiance to the Popular Front.

“The RN must not come to power,” he said, adding that only the Popular Front was capable of stopping it.

Hitting the campaign trail in the Pas-de-Calais region of northern France, Le Pen claimed the RN could win the elections and form a “national unity government”.

“We need to pull France out of the rut,” said the 55-year-old, who is expected to run for a fourth time in the 2027 presidential election.

The country was in a “catastrophic situation”, she added.

The far right suffered one setback Friday in the shape of an Instagram post from one of France’s top YouTubers, Squeezie — the alias of 28-year-old Lucas Hauchard.

“I’ve never wanted to talk to you about politics,” he told his almost nine million Instagram followers.

“But I think firmly opposing an extremist ideology that preaches hate and discrimination goes beyond any kind of political positioning,” he said. The post garnered almost 900,000 likes within a few hours.

‘Profoundly wrong’ 

Other right-wing forces were mired in infighting.

Eric Ciotti, leader of the conservative Republicans, broke a historic taboo this week, announcing his party would form an electoral alliance with the RN.

The rest of the party leadership promptly expelled him, confirming the decision with a second vote on Friday according to party sources.

But Ciotti appeared to have successfully challenged their decision Friday. A Paris court suspended the decision against him pending a more in-depth ruling within eight days.

The 28-year-old RN chairman, Jordan Bardella, said the far-right party and the Republicans would put up joint candidates in 70 of France’s 577 parliamentary constituencies, hailing what he said was a “historic agreement”.

READ ALSO: Paris stock exchange sinks amid France’s political turmoil

Macron remained defiant, defending his decision to dissolve parliament and call snap elections.

Speaking at a G7 summit in southern Italy on Thursday, he said his G7 counterparts had praised his move.

“They all said: ‘This is courageous'”, Macron told journalists.

He took time too, to take a swipe at the programmes of both the Popular Front and the National Rally, describing them as “totally unrealistic”.

Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Thursday accused Macron of seeking to score points with voters at home, saying it was “profoundly wrong” to use the G7 summit for “campaigning”.

France’s stock market suffered its worst week since March 2022 and the first weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The CAC 40 index fell 6.23 percent between the election announcement and close of trading Friday.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.
For members

ELECTION

Explained: What was France’s Fourth Republic and why it’s in the news again

With projections for a deadlocked parliament after the second round of voting and widespread predictions of political chaos, many French commentators are starting to make comparisons with France's Fourth Republic - for those of us who didn't grow up in France, here's what that means.

Published: 2 July 2024 12:06 CEST
Explained: What was France's Fourth Republic and why it's in the news again

Le spectre de la IVe République plane-t-il sur Macron ? – Is the spectre of the Fourth Republic hanging over Macron?

If you’re following French press coverage of the chaotic political situation in France right now, you might be coming across more and more sentences like this.

But while the Fourth Republic is a standard part of the French history syllabus, it doesn’t make it into many lesson plans outside France.

Here’s a look at what the Fourth Republic was, and why it might be relevant to the modern political crisis.

When 

The 4th republic ran from 1946 to 1958. French history is divided into the ancien regième (pre French Revolution) and the post-Revolution period which is divided into a series of republics, interspersed with a few non-republic periods such as when Napoleon got carried away and declared himself emperor.

You can find a fuller history here, but in brief the republics go; 

  • 1792-1804 – first republic. Runs from the abolition of the monarchy during the French Revolution until Napoleon declared himself emperor
  • 1848-1852 – second republic. Ended when Napoleon’s nephew Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) overthrew the government and declared a second French empire with himself at the head
  • 1870-1940 – third republic. Ended with the Nazi invasion of France in 1940 when the republic was suspended and the period of the occupation and Vichy government began.
  • 1946-1958 – fourth republic. This one ended with a threatened military coup over Algerian independence, a panicked government brought WWII resistance leader Charles de Gaulle back into government and passed a new constitution.
  • 1958-present day – fifth republic. 

Each republic has its own constitution with significant differences in aspects such as how the political system works and the powers of the president versus the government.

What was going on?

The Fourth Republic covered a turbulent period in French politics – in 1946 the country was emerging from one of the most traumatic periods in its history; the Nazi occupation of World War II.

Nearly bankrupt, the country was also dealing with the national shame of the occupation and the collapse of the democratic government in 1940 (replaced by the un-elected collaborationist Vichy regime). 

The Fourth Republic ended in turmoil (as have all French republics so far, in fact) during the exceptionally brutal war of independence in Algeria.

Sensing that the government in Paris was paving the way for Algeria to be given independence from France, French soldiers in Algeria launched a military coup in opposition to this – the military also seized power in Corsica.

The national government panicked, fearing that insurrection could spread to France itself and other colonies.

Charles de Gaulle – who made his name as a figurehead of the French resistance during WWII and as the country’s first post-war leader – was called out of retirement to unite the country, restore order and avoid what some feared would become a civil war.

But what about the politics?

The Fourth Republic wasn’t just a turbulent period in history – it was also an extremely unstable period for governments.

Over its 12-year duration, there were a total of 24 governments. 

Governments rose and fell with dizzying regularity – a man named Pierre Pflimlin was prime minister for a grand total of 18 days in 1958, and he wasn’t even the shortest-serving PM of the fourth republic.

Parliament was also frequently deadlocked, coalitions and alliances were made and broken rapidly and prime ministers came and went as through a revolving door – the shortest serving PM was Robert Schuman who served just nine days, but that was his second shot at the job.

Henri Queuille was prime minister three times, in 1948, 1950 and 1951 and his first period in the job was the longest premiership of the Fourth Republic, lasting a whopping one year and 47 days.

It was a reaction to this political chaos that strongly influenced the constitution of the Fifth Republic – set up with Charles de Gaulle at the head in 1958.

De Gaulle insisted that the president was given widespread powers, at the expense of parliament, in order to curb what he saw at the excess of parliamentary powers that contributed to the turmoil of the Fourth Republic.

It’s why the French president to this day has constitutional powers to over-rule parliament, for example through the tool known as Article 49.3 which allows a president to force through legislation even if parliament opposes it.

The Fifth Republic also set up the president as the dominant political power in France – previously that had been the prime minister, with the president having more of a ceremonial role.

Its sheer instability means that these days the Fourth Republic is little lamented – those who call for a complete change of the system of government and the creation of a Sixth Republic tend to skip over the fourth altogether and use as a model the Third Republic.

But this is ancient history, why are we talking about it now?

The Fourth Republic is back in the news because it looks like France may be facing a new period of chaos in parliament.

The snap parliamentary elections called by president Emmanuel Macron were intended to restore a sense of consensus, but look like they are backfiring and instead creating a more turbulent situation.

Current polls suggest that the far-right Rassemblement National will be the biggest party, but it’s not certain whether they will win enough seats in parliament to gain an absolute majority.

If the party wins a majority the most likely outcome is that Macron will be forced to appoint far-right leader Jordan Bardella as prime minister and rule jointly with him in a very uneasy cohabitation.

If the far-right become the biggest party but don’t get a majority the most likely result is chaos – with attempts to build fragile alliances or coalitions between parties.

The “spectre of the Fourth Republic” is therefore the spectre of chaos and deadlock in parliament and maybe even a PM who will break Robert Schuman’s unenviable record of just nine days in office.

OPINION: The best that France can hope for now is 12 months of chaos

SHOW COMMENTS