French president Emmanuel Macron’s loss of his government majority in the National Assembly in Sunday’s election has triggered immediate challenges from far left and far right MPs who say they will block his attempts to legislate and to reform the state pension system.
Éric Coquerel, an MP from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party that leads the new left-green opposition alliance, threatened a vote of no confidence against Macron’s prime minister Élisabeth Borne on July 5, the day she is due to announce her government’s programme.
At the other end of the political spectrum, Marine Le Pen of the far right Rassemblement National (National Rally) told reporters on Monday that Macron was now a “minority president” whose pension reform plan was dead and buried.
The left would, in fact, find it impossible to obtain the majority needed to successfully censure Borne without the support of the conservative Les Républicains (LR), whose secretary-general Aurélien Pradié on Monday rejected the idea of an immediate no-confidence motion to topple the government.
But the triumphant rhetoric from both the far left and far right shows how hard it will be for Macron to govern France from the centre now that he has lost the National Assembly majority he enjoyed in his first term after his 2017 election victory.
The hung parliament produced by the second round of the legislative elections on Sunday means that Macron will need to strike deals with other parties such as the LR in the assembly to pass legislation over the next five years.
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Final results from the interior ministry showed that Macron’s centrist Ensemble (Together) alliance had won 245 seats in the assembly, well short of the 289 needed for an outright majority.
Mélenchon’s left-green alliance — the New Ecological and Social People’s Union (Nupes) — was supported by many young urban voters and emerged as the main opposition bloc with 131 members in the 577-seat chamber.
However, cracks appeared in the leftwing alliance the day after the election when its junior partners — the Socialists, Greens and Communists — rejected Mélenchon’s proposal that they set aside their party identities to form a single parliamentary group. Olivier Faure, the Socialist leader, also said Coquerel’s talk of a no-confidence motion against the government was not “at this stage” a common position of the alliance.
Le Pen’s anti-immigration RN was the big surprise of the election, winning 89 seats — more than 10 times as many as the eight it secured in the previous legislative elections. The conservative Les Républicains and its partners won 74 seats.
Borne, who was meeting Macron at the Élysée Palace on Monday, said in a post-election speech that the situation was “unprecedented” and represented “a risk for the country”. Bruno Le Maire, finance minister, admitted the results were “disappointing” and said the government would have to be “imaginative” to enact its next round of reforms.
If Borne survives as prime minister after the election setback, one of her first tasks is expected to be a cabinet reshuffle because three government ministers standing as candidates were defeated, which triggers automatic resignation under guidelines imposed by Macron.
Brigitte Bourguignon, Macron’s health minister, lost by 56 votes to a far right candidate in northern France, and Amélie de Montchalin, environment minister, lost to the left in Essonne, south of Paris. In one constituency in the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, Justine Benin, junior minister for the sea, was beaten by a leftwing rival.
Other Macronist scalps claimed by the left in the election included Christophe Castaner, a former interior minister who has been head of Macron’s party in the assembly, and Richard Ferrand, the assembly’s outgoing chair.
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