Political frustration – France votes: Macron on edge

Macron is concerned about Sunday’s general election, which takes place after every presidential election. Since the latest polls, alarm bells have been ringing in the presidential camp: not the right-wing Marine Le Pen turned out to be the real “danger”, but the left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon (70), a political veteran, founder of the party “Unconquerable” and finished with 22 percent in thankless third place in the presidential election.

Melenchon put together a left-wing alliance
Now he wants to force Macron to appoint him prime minister if he has a majority in the National Assembly. Mélenchon has managed to build a broad left-wing alliance. The last time there was such a “cohabitation”, a forced coalition in the French style, was in 1997. It is feared that the president and prime minister will then block each other. That would be the last thing France needs in its current situation: a permanent political crisis, an ice age in the Élysée.

Years of political frustration in France
Macron is threatened with trouble because Mélenchon is a left-wing populist who comes from the radical communist camp. No compromise policy is known at Radikalinski. The road to the dreaded deadlock became clear during the presidential election. President Macron has a legitimacy problem. 78.07 percent did not vote for him: 41.46 percent voted in the second round for Marine Le Pen, 28.01 percent stayed at home, 8.6 percent deliberately cast an invalid vote.

If in all three presidential elections, voters are forced to vote for a president they really don’t want, just to avoid the opposing candidate or far-right candidate, and if centrist parties are crushed in the process, the system has failed. The crisis of legitimacy is one of the causes of the eternal frustration that has plagued France for years. This eats away at the content of democracy and stimulates spontaneous revolts such as that of the yellow vests. Something like this could happen again at any time.

Admittedly, we in Austria also had such compulsion during the last presidential elections. Here too, the election campaign was about “preventing the other”. But it remains to be hoped that it was just a systemic exceptional case.

France needs electoral reforms
France urgently needs electoral reforms. The current system of the Fifth Republic was introduced because the Fourth Republic failed due to the party chaos and the overthrow of the government. The war hero General De Gaulle, who was called as a savior as head of state, ordered French politicians to slim down, because: “How else can you run a country that has 246 varieties of cheese?”

The ulterior motive: Faced with the predicament, the majority would never choose extremists. At the time, the extremists and opponents of the system were the communists. They already had 27 percent in parliament (The National Front of the two Le Pens grew as the communists weakened: angry citizens anyway). Marine Le Pen had now become (relatively) dangerous for Emmanuel Macron because she had softened, thus blurring the impression of extremism.

General de Gaulle had given himself and his successors (by referendum) enormous powers to ensure stability. Once, when Queen Juliane paid a state visit to President De Gaulle, a newspaper in Amsterdam wrote: “The President of the Netherlands is traveling to see the King of France.”

De Gaulle confused the state with the barracks
That’s the problem with stability. It can also be counterproductive. In his old age, General De Gaulle mistook France for a barracks. In “May 1968” (student uprising, workers’ general strike) he was at his wits’ end. In 1969 he resigned, insulted after losing his wanton referendum (“Me or the Chaos”). In 1981 this electoral system, which he had always condemned, got a (alleged) socialist to the highest office: François Mitterrand – without the heavens falling. His two seven-year terms in office were, according to some, France’s last “good years”. After that, the need for the “wind of change” in France was not really recognized.

reformed
Macron feels the need to relax the electoral system. He can afford it: there is no such thing as a third installment. France has a reform deficit that the president, in all his loneliness, cannot solve, no matter how powerful he is. Only an increase in democratic participation can allay the frustration.

The electoral system needs to be aired because it is no longer up to date. The president must curtail his power for the sake of democracy! “Jupiter”, according to his own profile, must descend from the divine throne – not just in the few weeks of the election campaign. Don’t we know this saying from France: “If you make reform impossible, you make revolutions inevitable”.