Emmanuel Macron and the Two Years That Changed France by Alistair Cole

Author:Alistair Cole [Cole, Alistair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Leadership, Presidents & Heads of State, Europe, Campaigns & Elections, Comparative Politics, Biography & Autobiography, Political Science, Political Process, France, History
ISBN: 9781526140500
Google: wXS5DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 55404908
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2019-03-26T08:31:20+00:00

The aftermath: the parliamentary election

In the volcanic register, the second position – the Pompeii analogy – might be the most accurate. The existing world was overwhelmed in May 2017, but vestiges remained in the ruins, as became apparent in the June 2017 parliamentary election. Though seriously shaken and divided, the Republicans (LR) would live to fight another day, though it was unclear whether as much could be said for the PS. With Macron's election, the old world of left–right partisan politics appeared to be crumbling at the edges, but two key mechanisms of presidential power reaffirmed their pertinence: the confirmation election and the presidential party.

One of the core assumptions of the presidential-parliamentary electoral series is that the presidential election brings in its wake a comfortable majority for the victorious candidate in the subsequent parliamentary election. Since the 2000 constitutional reform and the inversion of the electoral calendar, there has been a powerful institutional incentive to provide the victorious president with the ‘means to govern’ by way of a large parliamentary majority. Of course, the presidential call for a parliamentary majority preceded 2000; most notable was that in 1981, when the victorious Socialist president François Mitterrand called on the people to ‘give me the means to govern’ and implement his presidential programme. But the relationship has become more mechanical since the 2000 reform changed the order of the electoral contests to ensure that the ‘decisive’ presidential election came before the ‘confirmatory’ parliamentary contest. Certainly, the figures have produced rather different variations of the presidential bonus since 2002, but on each occasion a party with a plurality of votes in the first round has achieved an absolute majority of seats after the second: the UMP in support of President Chirac in 2002, the UMP for Sarkozy in 2007 and the PS for Hollande in 2012. The 2017 parliamentary election confirmed the trend: with 32.55% of first-round votes, Macron's LRM obtained the overall parliamentary majority called for by the president, without needing the numerical support provided by its allies, Bayrou's Mouvement Démocratique (MODEM, Democratic Movement). The flip side was that this Herculean majority was based on a record low turnout for a parliamentary election in the Fifth Republic: 48.7% in the first round; 42.7% in the second. The confirmation election is implicitly based on a lesser popular mandate (and hence legitimacy) than the decisive presidential contest, though this distinction is nowhere formally recognised.

The victory of the LRM–MODEM ticket was announced so far in advance that its actual majority was considered to be somewhat disappointing – and certainly well below the true ‘blue chambers’ of 1993 and 2002.3 The overall parliamentary victory was a remarkable achievement for a movement created barely one year earlier; it was crowned by the arrival in the National Assembly of a new generation of mainly inexperienced politicians, professionals and representatives of civil society (Ollion, 2017). The 2017 electoral series, however, left intact the overall crisis of confidence in the political system: not only was turnout in the two rounds

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