Legislative in France | The “most serious, but most responsible” decision, says Macron

(Paris) The decision to dissolve the Assembly was “the heaviest, the most serious, but the most responsible”, declared President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday to worried French people who questioned him at length on this subject, on a Breton island symbol of the Resistance during the Second World War.

“We cannot fear the people in a democracy,” he added, telling them: “Don’t be afraid,” “go vote and choose your future.”

Nine days after the surprise announcement of the dissolution, Mr. Macron came to mark the 84th anniversary of the appeal of June 18, 1940, launched from London by General de Gaulle to resist the Nazi occupier.

“There is a silent majority who, like you, do not want this to be disorder,” assured the Head of State, while his camp was given third position in the first round of the legislative elections, on June 30, far behind the far right of the National Rally (RN) and the alliance of the New Popular Front (NFP) formed by the left.

“Without dissolution, it would have been doglit,” added the head of state, the term “chienlit”, used precisely by de Gaulle, but during the 1968 demonstrations in France, meaning disorder or mayhem.

Rarely, the French president indulged in confidences: “it hurt me on June 9”, on the evening of the Europeans. “I have lots of faults, things I didn’t do well,” he added a little later.

But “we cannot fear the people in a democracy”, “we experienced chaos” during the yellow vest crisis, “an election is not chaos, it is democracy”, Mr. Macron also said.

An allusion to the social movement of “yellow vests”, late 2018-early 2019, whose anger was directed against the policies of the president designated for the first time a little over a year earlier.

Twelve days before the first round of legislative elections in France, the electoral campaign debate focused on Tuesday on the level of the country’s public deficit, left at 5.5% of GDP in 2023 by the outgoing government.

“Respecting [our fellow citizens] also means recognizing the demands of reality, and not widening even further heavy deficits that we cannot finance well,” warned the governor of the Bank of France, François Villeroy. from Galhau.

On Wednesday, the European Commission should open the way for disciplinary procedures for excessive public deficits against around ten European Union countries, including France.

The deficit actually slipped in 2023 to 5.5% of GDP, instead of the expected 4.9%, so much so that at the end of June the American rating agency S

In addition, borrowing rates in Europe’s second-largest economy have increased since President Emmanuel Macron announced the dissolution of the National Assembly, following his June 9 European debacle.

Although responsible for this situation, it was the outgoing government which attacked on Tuesday the two camps at the top of the voting intentions for the elections of June 30 and July 7: the far right of the National Rally (RN, credited with 33% according to Ifop) and the left-wing alliance New Popular Front (at 28%), the president’s camp being at 18%.

According to Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, RN and NFP “promise, in their programs, tax daggers at all levels to finance their budgetary follies.”

The country will experience “a debt crisis, if their programs were fully implemented”, added Bruno Le Maire, Minister of Finance for seven years, to the newspaper Le Monde.

For the New Popular Front, socialist Valérie Rabault, first female budget rapporteur in the Assembly (from 2014 to 2017), responded to them in real time.

She estimated the new spending planned by the alliance program “over the period 2024-2027” at 106 billion euros. And announced the following budgetary trajectory: “deficit of 5.7% of GDP this year, then 5.4% in 2025 and 5.1% in 2026 before landing at 3.6% in 2029”.

“Certainly, we are extending the deadlines for the restoration of public accounts. But […] we must understand that the urgency is to revive the French economy,” she said.

For his part, the leader of the far right, Jordan Bardella, announced in the morning a phased implementation of the first measures of the RN program, if the latter came to power.

The “first measure” will be to pass a corrective budget including a reduction in value added tax (VAT) on energy and fuel, while purchasing power is one of the central subjects of the campaign.  

On the other hand, the abolition of VAT on “essential products” will wait until the next budget, “at the start of the school year”.

“There are emergencies and reforms,” argued the man who says he is preparing to “inherit a country in a situation of near bankruptcy” and first wishes to carry out “upon (his) arrival” an “audit of the state accounts”.

On Monday, Mr. Bardella also confirmed that he would repeal Mr. Macron’s unpopular pension reform, but “from the fall.”

The president of the RN also suggested on Tuesday that in the event of his party’s victory he would only want to be prime minister if he was certain of having an absolute majority in the Assembly.

“If there is a relative majority, the prime minister cannot act.”  

Is the far right preparing minds for possible renunciations? According to Mr. Attal, “when it comes to Jordan Bardella, there are fewer and fewer programs and more and more conditions, it’s starting to look like a refusal of obstacles.”

Meanwhile, the left alliance remains divided over a possible headliner.

One of the leaders of La France Insoumise (LFI, radical left) thus affirmed that it would be up to the party with the “largest group in the Assembly” on the left to “propose the name of a prime minister to the other forces”.

This could benefit the party of the very divisive Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has nominated 229 candidates, compared to 175 for the socialists, 92 for the ecologists and 50 for the communists.

The leader of the Socialists Olivier Faure defends another path: “a vote” by the future deputies of the alliance if it has a majority on the evening of July 7.

French voters who will not be able to cast their ballot themselves are scrambling to make their voice heard during the legislative elections by registering in their hundreds of thousands to entrust their right to vote to a loved one by proxy.

The Interior Ministry said Tuesday it counted 410,000 such requests in the first week after President Emmanuel Macron’s June 9 announcement of the dissolution of the National Assembly. This bombshell follows the resounding victory of the National Rally in the European elections on the same day.

The ministry said this figure is 6.5 times higher than that recorded for the same week during the last parliamentary elections in 2022.

Voters’ rush to fill out paperwork that will allow a proxy they trust to vote for them in the first round on June 30 is partly due to time constraints.

President Macron’s surprise decision and the tight deadline between the dissolution of the National Assembly and the first round took voters by surprise, some having already made other plans.