Macron’s dangerous game

Beware a surprise winner. Emmanuel Macron defied all of France’s received political wisdom when he launched a new centrist party – with little in the way of policy or personality beyond his own image – and in doing so became the dominant force of French politics.

The problem is that once one huge gamble has paid off, politicians have a tendency to think they can do it again. This was the hubris that led David Cameron to offer a referendum on leaving the EU, having successfully fended off Scottish independence in an acrimonious referendum.

That is the energy Macron has brought to French politics by calling an immediate snap election after getting trounced by National Rally (the new name for the National Front) in the elections for the European Parliament. Marine Le Pen’s party got double the votes won by Macron and came first overall in the contest.

The best case to be made for Macron’s decision making goes roughly like this: National Rally could claim to be France’s largest party while being nowhere near any actual political power – Ursula Von Der Leyen’s European People’s Party has actually increased in seats, and she will continue to run the Commission. A large platform without responsibility for any delivery can be a powerful one.

France’s parliament has been largely deadlocked for years, forcing Macron to govern largely through executive orders to get anything done. Dragging out that deadlock would likely only help fringe parties like National Rally, so rather than waiting for a situation that might help them, Macron has cut to the last page – following logic much like Rishi Sunak’s snap election decision.

Like Sunak’s decision, though, it is desperately difficult to see where the upside is supposed to lie. One possibility is that Macron is hoping that the French public is happy that they have got their protest vote out of their system and will vote differently at the ballot box in just under a month’s time. Voters, however, tend not to contradict themselves quite so obviously.

That leaves the possibility that Macron is hoping that National Rally actually wins the election – sacrificing the parliamentary election now in order to have a better shot for his successor at the next presidential contest.

This incredibly risky strategy would need to let Le Pen’s party into government to have any hope of working: if the mainstream parties held together a grand coalition to freeze them out of government, that only enhances National Rally’s status. Trying to show them up as not having real answers requires handing them some real power – but that would almost certainly mean they needed coalition partners.

It is all but impossible to see this plan working. It would rely on National Rally becoming the main force of government and having to own France’s political problems, but for the next two years it is Macron who will be the country’s most prominent politician.

Even if National Rally become the parliamentary holders of power, they can easily point to a president not of their own party and blame the country’s problems on him. Macron’s confused and confusing gambit seems bold but vacuous – it has certainly thrown observers of the country into a tailspin, but that is not always a good thing.

Rishi Sunak’s surprise snap election shocked the British political system, but clearly at the expense of his own party’s prospects. Emmanuel Macron’s gambit is just as likely to backfire, but with far higher stakes at play. Macron is gambling Europe’s future against the far right on a bet that looks like a no-win.