These numbers were published before the dramatic news broke on 11 June that Eric Ciotti, the leader of LR, had agreed to an electoral alliance with Le Pen’s party. On the face of it, that would put her in a stronger position than Macron imagined when he pressed delete. But traditionally LR regards Le Pen’s dynasty as a Vichy tendency, even if the two parties’ policy positions concur on immigration and law and order. Only three years ago, it was possible for a senior LR figure to describe RN as ‘the enemy of the Gaullist family for historical reasons, whose roots go very deep’. That figure, as it happens, was Ciotti.
Projecting from the Harris Interactive poll, you might think that a consensual alliance between LR and the RN would bring them in 40 per cent of the vote or more, but the consensus inside LR is being shredded as the party turns on its leader, accusing him of lies and treachery; some are calling for his head. Macron’s people may not have predicted this eventuality to the letter, but the ambient chaos that’s followed his announcement was surely part of the gamble. Alliance or no alliance, the explosive row inside LR will result in a debris of ballots landing in Macron’s camp as well as Le Pen’s. Ifop will inform us ahead of time how they might be distributed.
Le Pen has been waiting a long time for the extinction of the ‘Gaullist family’ and must be hoping this is the death rattle. She has ruled out an alliance with Reconquête! in a show of confidence and political hygiene, sensing perhaps that its share of the vote – 4.2 per cent in the first round of the 2022 legislative elections – would come her way in any contests outstanding on 7 July. According to Marion Maréchal, Bardella has told her that the RN wants no association, ‘direct or indirect’, with Zemmour. It isn’t clear that this new quarantine meets World Health Organisation standards.
Long before the European elections, a promising left-of-centre coalition had dissolved in a national parody of the ‘groupuscules’ which opted for internecine war in the nurseries of leftism during the late 1960s. Nupes, the new ecological and social union of the people, was formed in 2022. Its main components were Mélenchon’s LFI, the remnants of the Parti Socialiste broken by the presidential election of 2017, the Communist Party and Les Ecologistes. It failed to win a majority in the Assembly in 2022 but gained disruptive leverage over the parliamentary process in the absence of an absolute majority for Macron’s people.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/june/macron-en-feuFrom the European Parliament results, further up in that article, the mid-point of French politics is between Macron's party and the Republicans. Which is quite worrying, since that's the American equivalent of the dividing line between a faction led by Larry Hogan and one by Mitch McConnell being the center of American politics - with the McConnell figure being fully on board with enabling not just Trump, but Taylor Greene too.
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