Emmanuel Macron's political agony

The second round of these legislative elections, to be held on Sunday 7 July, will confirm or not the absolute majority that a euphoric Marine Le Pen claimed as soon as the exit polls announced her victory. A new day that will certainly be historic, whether the RN confirms its hegemony or comes within a hair's breadth of achieving it. 

The final result will depend as much on the strategy decided by the left as a whole as on whether there is only one candidate, from any of the NFP parties, even if there is one who is also entitled to stand because he or she obtained more than 12.5% of the vote in the first round. This is the slogan dictated by the leader of La France Insoumise (LFP), Jean-Luc Mélenchon, in order not to disperse the ballots "to prevent the extreme right from winning a single more seat". Of course, voters will also have to obey this slogan, so that a socialist voter will vote for a communist, for example, instead of staying at home, especially if he or she remembers the historical reasons why social democrats abhorred communist parties, whether they had that name or disguised it under other names. 

In this decisive fight between the extreme right and the extreme left, the liberal centre that President Emmanuel Macron claims to be a part of has been laminated. The French head of state, who always wanted to claim to be the president of all French people, has this time taken sides by calling for a cordon sanitaire for the RN, "a large, clearly democratic and republican rally". Such an appeal means at the very least that Macron is agreeing with that third of French people, not only the old working class but also many others with the same common denominator of feeling dissatisfied, unheard and undervalued by himself, who voted for the RN, and have given him his first electoral victory. 

Of course, if Marine Le Pen wins an absolute majority in the National Assembly, it is hard to imagine that Macron will remain in the Elysée Palace, swallowing every day the gigantic toads of the "radical change" promised by both Le Pen and the man who would then be his prime minister, Jordan Bardella. Bardella's speech on election night could not have been more blunt: "France is in existential danger and we are going to rebuild it. The people have voted. On one side was the alliance of the worst, which was leading us to ruin. On the other, our project of national union to defend security and jobs. And anticipating events, he issued a warning to Macron himself: "I will be respectful of the Presidency of the Republic, but I will also be inflexible in carrying out our project with full respect for democratic rules, and as a guarantor of freedoms". 

By so openly taking sides against the RN, Macron will have to resign if the RN consummates the humiliation it has inflicted on him in the first round. It will be the end of the political agony of France's president, and in the process surely the end of his Fifth Republic. Macron may have exaggerated in the week leading up to the election by predicting "civil war" in the event of a victory for the RN. But, of course, what is more likely is that the country will be plunged into a chaotic spiral. A scenario that will, of course, have serious consequences for the European Union and the Atlantic Alliance.