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法國七月國會國選舉選前報導 -- Henry Samuel
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這篇文章從傳統政治角度看法國的七月大選；請對照下一篇從「權謀」觀點的分析。該文甚為有趣。
How Emmanuel Macron lobbed a grenade at the hard-Right and blew up French politics
Henry Samuel, 06/16/24
It is a picture that will go down in the annals of French political history.
Taken from behind Emmanuel Macron at the Elysée Palace, the black and white photograph captures the moment the French president told his cabinet he was dissolving parliament and calling snap elections.
Shock, resignation and anger are etched onto the faces of those present, including that of Garbiel Attal, Mr Macron’s ascendant prime minister who like many of his MPs could soon be out of a job.
“You can feel the contempt in Gabriel Attal’s eyes,” said Philippe Moreau Chevrolet, a specialist in political communication and lecturer at Sciences Po. “The emotions running through the characters are sincere, violent and negative.”
“France’s youngest-ever prime minister understands that he has reached the pinnacle of his career at the age of 35, and that it’s over,” noted Gaspard Gantzer, ex-Socialist president François Hollande’s former communications adviser.
But even then, Mr Macron’s cabinet could not have anticipated the turmoil that the president’s decision would unleash in the week that followed.
Mr Macron himself reportedly said that Sunday’s extraordinary announcement, moments after his crushing European election defeat to Marine Le Pen’s RN party, led by her 28-year-old dauphin Jordan Bardella, was an act of political arson designed to upend French politics.
‘I threw my unpinned grenade at their feet’
“I’ve been planning this for weeks, and I’m thrilled,” he told an Elysée confidant on the sidelines of an event commemorating a Nazi massacre on Monday morning, according to a report in Le Monde. “I threw my unpinned grenade at their feet. Now we will see how they get on…”
The French president’s metaphor was apt. Since Sunday’s extraordinary announcement, the French Right has imploded while the Left has formed an unlikely and precarious alliance.
Mr Macron’s gambit has set up a battle for the soul of France that could see the hard-Right return to govern the country for the first time since the Second World War.
It was a small clique of the President’s closest advisers, including his eminence grise Alexis Koehler and influential “heritage adviser” Bruno Roger Petit, who, unbeknownst to his ministers, spent weeks working out the plan, some say with the help of ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy.
Their logic appears implacable.
After two years hamstrung by a lack of parliamentary majority, the elections on June 30 and July 7 will end what Mr Macron calls an extremist “fever” afflicting French politics. The rationale echoes Charles de Gaulle’s famous appeal to voters to halt “le chienlit”, or mess, of the May 1968 Left-wing street revolt.
The theory is that the French will come to their senses and rid the nation of what Mr Macron has dubbed “far-Right demagoguery” which captured 40 per cent of the vote on Sunday.
“The clarification of the political landscape that the President called for on Sunday evening is in the process of taking place. In chemistry, we call this precipitation”, one satisfied aide remarked.
‘Macron wanted to blow up France’s political landscape’
Political journalist Francois-Xavier Bourmand of L’Opinion said: “When he was elected in 2017, Macron wanted to blow up France’s political landscape by replacing the traditional Left-Right split with conservatives versus progressives.
“Dissolution is an attempt to finish what he started in extremely brutal manner,” he told the Telegraph.
“More prosaically, Macron also knew he was heading for a no confidence motion this autumn over the budget and that his government would likely fall anyway. So he chose dissolution rather than having it imposed upon him.”
The prospect explains why “the master of the clocks”, as Mr Macron likes to be called, told stunned ministers: “It is better to write history than to submit to it.”
So much for the theory.
Many from within his own alliance are furious at a ‘coup de poker’ they fear will likely lead to legislative Armageddon.
‘Many people are stunned and bewildered’
Arnaud Michel, who ran for MEP in Mr Macron’s camp and is a member of the allied Horizon party of ex-prime minister Edouard Philippe, was scathing.
“Many people are stunned and bewildered. RN clearly has the wind in its sails and will campaign on placing Jordan Bardella as prime minister,” he told the Sunday Telegraph.
“I am doubtful that the electoral dynamic will change in the space of three weeks compared to the EU vote, which had nothing to do with European issues and was fought and won on national considerations.”
The legislative elections risk being another referendum against the President, he warned. “I can tell you from personal experience his name was not welcome when I canvassed at markets.” Many legislative candidates from his camp have already indicated he will not feature on their campaign tracts.
He also warned that Mr Macron’s “project fear” approach to the Le Pen camp, including claims the markets will collapse should it win power due to its hugely costly programme was increasingly inaudible.
“The threat that they will arrive with jackboots and the sky will fall in no longer works. I come from the Pas-de-Calais region where towns run by RN can see that has not been the case, on the contrary people are voting for them more and more.
On Friday, finance minister Bruno Le Maire, warned that an RN victory would spark a financial crisis in the euro zone’s second-largest economy due to its untenable pledges to cut electricity prices, VAT on gas, and increase public spending.
“The economic argument doesn’t work that well either. Yes there will be certain number of market shocks if they win, but history has shown when you look at Georgia Meloni or Liz Truss, markets force governments to act a certain way. RN will likely be in a coalition with certain conservatives who will refuse to let the economy go to the dogs,” said Mr Michel.
Already, the Macron plan appears to be going awry.
If anything, Ms Le Pen’s anti-immigrant party is gaining ground, polls have shown, as voters shun Mr Macron’s warnings of disaster if it comes out in front in the legislative ballot.
The Rally is on course to increase its parliamentary seats from 88 at present to 220 to 270 seats in the National Assembly, a survey by Elabe for the news channel BFMTV suggested. That is close to the 289 seats that would give it an absolute majority, forcing Mr Macron to ask it to govern in “cohabitation” with his presidency - and turning him into a lame duck.
Mr Macron’s centrist Renaissance bloc would be further weakened and overtaken by a revived alliance linking the centre-Left Socialist party, the radical Unbowed France, the Greens and the Communists, the survey showed.
To reach power, Ms Le Pen and Mr Bardella, her campaign leader, are seeking an alliance with parts of the stricken Republicans party, the closest France has to the Tories and heir to the conservative movement founded by Charles de Gaulle.
Squeezed between Mr Macron’s centrist bloc and Ms Le Pen’s Rally, the Republicans’ leadership this week collapsed after Éric Ciotti, its chief, announced a pact with the Rally without telling colleagues. They united to fire Mr Ciotti, 58, a hard-line MP from Nice long the Right’s “Mr Security” and who once called for a Guantanamo à la française for convicted terrorists still deemed a security threat.
The politburo expelled him from the party, but he has refused to go. He turned up for work at party headquarters in central Paris on Thursday and said the courts would rule on the “illegal” decision to oust him by party heavyweights including Senate leader Gérard Larcher.
Arguing that he was in tune with the party faithful who wanted an alliance with the Rally, Mr Ciotti said his colleagues were “far out of touch with reality when they hammer on about the ‘dangers of fascism’.”
On Friday night, the meltdown on the Right continued after a Paris court annulled his exclusion, leaving it unclear who is in control of the party of Chirac and Sarkozy.
As the power struggle dragged on, Ms Le Pen - who is gunning for the presidency in 2027 and wants Mr Bardella to run the government - confirmed that her party was preparing a “national unity” cabinet with experienced conservatives from outside its ranks. Mr Bardella said the Rally would field joint candidates with LR in “70 constituencies” but for now it is unclear who they are.
Like Mr Ciotti, Ms Le Pen’s niece Marion Marechal has sought to capitalise on the RN’s rising popularity and has been striving for a formal alliance for her the Reconquest party since the snap election call on Sunday.
But Eric Zemmour, the television pundit who founded the party in 2021, was clearly shocked when she announced the plan live on Television.
“Let’s put the interests of France before those of the party,” she said.
An incensed Mr Zemmour later said his vice president had “beaten the world record for betrayal”.
A ‘New Popular Front’
In a bigger blow to the Macron camp, the French Left has miraculously set aside vitriolic splits over Europe, Ukraine and the Middle East that festered during the EU elections to forge a “New Popular Front” – a nod to the pre-war Left-wing alliance to keep out fascist sympathisers.
On Wednesday, Mr Macron depicted its most radical member, Unbowed France, as a “dangerous” threat equal to Ms Le Pen but such scaremongering has gained little traction. The Elabe poll showed the Left-wing front on 28 per cent of voting intentions, compared with 31 per cent for the Rally and 18 per cent for Mr Macron’s Renaissance.
Unbowed France, or LFI, and its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 72, a fiery Trotskyite who admires Hugo Chavez and who refused to call Hamas a terrorist organisation, has the largest Left-wing group in parliament but its presence in the coalition is a bugbear to many in the moderate Socialist party.
Mr Macron slammed the new alliance as “unnatural, baroque and indecent”. He wondered, he said, how its voters would square LFI’s support for Gaza, their antisemitism, hostility to the EU and Nato, and approval of President Vladimir Putin with the Socialists’ pro-EU and pro-Ukraine stance.
However, that line of attack was seriously dented when Raphael Glucksmann, a former political journalist and film director whose Socialist-backed Place Publique group came third in EU elections, threw his weight behind the Left-wing alliance on Friday.
“We can’t leave France to the Le Pen family,” Mr Glucksman, 44, son of a French philosopher,” he told broadcaster France Inter.
The new coalition was the “only way” to prevent a “far-Right victory” in the forthcoming polls, he said, reassuring his electorate that a more consensual figure than Mr Mélenchon would be picked as prime minister.
One person alone was responsible for plunging France “into chaos, he went on, and “that is Mr Macron”.
“He has opened the way to power for the far-Right. Since Sunday night, I’ve had a knot in my stomach.
Then on Saturday, as tens of thousands of people took to the streets of French cities to march against the rising hard-Right, Mr Hollande, the former president, said he would stand again – a political comeback that took even his allies on the left by surprise.
Mr Hollande left office with record levels of unpopularity and is detested by some within the radical left, while even the Socialist leadership regard him with suspicion. But he will nevertheless stand as an MP for the southwestern Correze department for the New Popular Front.
“An exceptional decision for an exceptional situation,” Mr Hollande said of his comeback.
But even as Mr Hollande joined the fray, LFI appeared to be sliding towards the same chaos that has riven the Right amid allegations of a “purge” of members who criticised its leadership.
With chaos unfolding across the political spectrum, Mr Macron remained defiant at this week’s G7 summit in Italy, insisting that his counterparts had praised his move.
“They all said: ‘This is courageous’”, said Mr Macron.
Courage or political suicide, France will find out on July 7.
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馬克洪分析 -- J. ANDERLINI
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我轉載這篇文章的原因不在於介紹作者對馬克洪的分析，它大概至少 75%基於作者個人的感覺和他被建構而來的思考模式。我認為作者的風格和文筆都相當有趣，可以參考。
我不清楚作者標題中 “magnificent” 一字的「用法」。但它顯然跟 “The magnificent Seven” 中該字的「用法」有別。或許它只不過相當於 “complex” ；或許作者故意「用」它來消遣馬克洪。請參看本欄上兩篇文章。
The magnificent mind of Emmanuel Macron
The president is a lonely, tragic figure whose strange personality has inflicted chaos and carnage on French politics.
JAMIL ANDERLINI, 07/08/24
Lounging with Emmanuel Macron in the lavish stateroom aboard France’s Air Force One, I asked the French president who he confides in. With whom does he share his deepest feelings when the burden of office weighs him down?
At first, he didn’t seem to understand my question. To help him out, I suggested perhaps his wife and former high school drama teacher, Brigitte? His media adviser sitting across from us loved this idea and eagerly encouraged him to endorse it.
Instead, Macron responded rather dismissively. After another long pause and much rumination he finally hit upon the answer — “myself,” he said.
I accompanied Macron and his entourage to China in April last year on an official state visit, during which I spent many hours in the presence of the president and his closest advisors, including two separate sit-down interviews in the stateroom of his plane. Several of his retinue spoke openly to me about the president and his personality, on the understanding they would not be publicly identified.
Last month, in the wake of a crushing defeat in the European Parliament election, Macron shocked even his closest advisers by calling a snap election, and I was reminded of what I learned about him on that trip.
Relying almost entirely on his own counsel, the incredibly unpopular president took a great gamble, one that has thrown the country’s politics into chaos.
On Sunday, in a record turnout, the French people defied polling that had suggested the far right would be the biggest force in the country’s parliament. Instead, a leftist alliance that includes a large contingent of far-left parliamentarians garnered the most seats.
The result leaves Macron’s centrist coalition in tatters, losing about one-third of its seats and on track for a distant second place in the parliament. France is now more politically divided than it has been in decades.
If the people I spoke to on my trip to China are correct, the verdict doled out by the French people must be devastating on some level for a president who — having become in 2022 the first in two decades to secure a second term — seemed to have convinced himself that his audacity, his powers of seduction and his chameleonic showboating would get him out of any political pickle.
“Macron doesn’t listen to anyone,” one of his closest advisers told me on the trip to China last year. “And he really hates losing.”
“He is the great seducer, he wants to seduce everyone,” said another member of the inner circle. “But much of France has a personal, violent hatred for him … he is too young, too handsome and too bright for many French — and it is in our DNA to want to decapitate our leader.”
“He really deeply needs to be loved,” said another, just out of earshot of the president as we relaxed over drinks on a river cruise through the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
But Macron can take some solace in the thwarting of his far-right bête noire. And at least he still remains the central character in the drama of French politics.
* * * * * * * * *
The French president is a genuinely captivating character — and not just for politics nerds. A psychiatrist friend of mine is equally obsessed with the man whose advisers and public relations minions describe as a master of pensée complexe — in other words, a complex mind.
They usually mean it in a “philosopher king,” wunderkind kind of way. My friend means it more in the Oedipal, narcissistic sense.
In person, Macron is magnetically charming — a bantam-sized, handsome man with unusually large hands and a penetrating stare.
Each time the presidential jet was preparing for takeoff last year, he would walk up and down the length of the Airbus A330 greeting and chatting with every single member of his delegation, including the wait staff and even the three lowly journalists (including me).
“He is very kind, and the closer I get to him the more impressed I am by him,” one of his inner circle told me. But “he hardly has any friends, none of them are older and probably 80 percent of them are male; he surrounds himself with advisers who are all young men and all of whom are fascinated by him.”
At a distance, he comes across like a plastic Napoleon; an ersatz Charles de Gaulle, the soldier, statesman and architect of France’s post-war democracy.
“He has de Gaulle’s imagination but none of the gravitas,” one person who worked closely with Macron when he was a Rothschild investment banker told me a couple of weeks ago. “Perhaps calling the snap election was the right political instinct, but it won’t work for one big reason — Macron is hated by France with a vicious passion.”
Therein lies the Macronian paradox — he comes across simultaneously as a global statesman with grand vision and an eager puppy desperate for love.
He’s a man of interstellar ego who is deeply insecure; a kind, charming and warm person with almost no friends; a retail politician who cannot connect with or relate to the French public.
Why do people, especially “the people” of France, hate him so much? As one of my expert colleagues says, he is a weirdo — seen as arrogant, elitist, unrelatable and a stranger to the French.
It starts with his unorthodox relationship with Brigitte. They met through a school play workshop when he was a 15-year-old student and she was a married 39-year-old teacher with three children. They married in 2007, when he was 29 and she was 54.
On his Wikipedia page, under the listing for family, there are just two names: Brigitte Macron and “Nemo (dog).”
The French electorate is used to its presidents being family men but also having mistresses, children out of wedlock, torrid affairs.
They didn’t despise former President François Hollande because he had an affair with the glamorous French actress and film producer Julie Gayet — if anything, the incident probably enhanced the pudgy, dorky Hollande’s image.
They despised him because he looked ridiculous when photographed riding pillion on a little scooter with an unflattering motorcycle helmet.
Nothing is worse than looking ridiculous in the eyes of French voters.
And while Macron might not appear ridiculous to a French audience, he does often seem fake and insincere.
He somehow seems a bit less than human, a little too perfect, like a humanoid robot that gets the human part a little bit wrong — a concept known in robotics and computer animation as the “uncanny valley,” for the unease and even revulsion it elicits in a viewer.
Indeed, it can sometimes seem as if he is playing the character of the president of France, complete with cosplay photo shoots — unshaven in a military hoodie in obvious emulation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, or taking to a heavy bag in an intense boxing session.
“Everything is an act,” my psychiatrist friend said recently. “He is always posturing and posing; the psychology of that is fascinating and disturbing.”
* * * * * * * * *
On the trip to China last year, there was one tall, military chap who went everywhere with the president and who sat near me on the plane. At first, I assumed he was the soldier responsible for the French nuclear “football” — the briefcase carrying the tools for the president to launch a nuclear attack.
But not long into the trip, I realized his job was actually to look after Macron’s extensive wardrobe and carry his many changes of outfit.
On the three-hour flight between Beijing and Guangzhou, I noticed at least three costume changes — from a formal suit when we boarded, to a hoodie with “French Tech” emblazoned on the front, to a different suit when we got off the plane.
Like an eager, thespian student trying to impress his beautiful drama teacher, his costume changes between scenes were accompanied by changes in demeanor, rhetorical style and body language.
From a more formal reception with the French community in Beijing to a relaxed event at an art gallery, to touring a university campus in southern China, where he was greeted like a rock star (“It’s amazing how much they love him; he couldn’t set foot on a French campus these days,” one of his entourage told me) — Macron played a different character in each setting.
The most jarring character shift came at a formal ceremony with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Macron stepped onto the stage looking very severe, almost scowling.
The Chinese dictator spoke for just eight minutes, reading a perfunctory, prepared speech off a piece of paper. Then it was Macron’s turn; without notes, speaking directly to Xi in a highly performative, almost lecturing, style that was clearly aimed at the cameras and any French people watching.
Xi’s entourage of sycophantic ministers grew increasingly uncomfortable as the lecture continued: 10 minutes, 15 minutes, it just went on. Xi, who is treated in the Chinese system as a modern-day emperor, blinked furiously and looked as if he’d just swallowed a particularly noxious frog. At around the 21-minute mark, he let out a clearly audible sigh — intense impatience emanating from every pore of his body.
Macron seemed blithely unaware. His speech went on three times longer than Xi’s — an unforgivable breach of protocol in the Chinese system, especially since it came from the leader of a former colonial, barbarian country that has now fallen on hard times.
By the end, Xi’s ministers could not contain their agitated muttering and fidgeting.
“Macron will not let you leave a meeting until he is convinced he has managed to convince you, that he has convinced whoever he is speaking to,” said one of his inner circle.
The problem is, his insistence can easily backfire.
During the trip to China, “His advisers told him to speak with respect and humility to Xi Jinping — but that is quite hard for any president of France,” one senior official involved in the trip told me. “He said the words of respect, but that is not how Xi interpreted them.”
Quixotic efforts to convince other world leaders make up a recurring theme for Macron.
With former United States President Donald Trump, his attempt at a charm offensive — complete with military parades and perversely rigorous handshakes — seemed to work at first but ultimately backfired.
“He hated Trump a lot,” one close adviser told me. “He was overconfident he could personally charm him, and it failed.”
Similarly, as Europe braced for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Macron insisted only he could convince Vladimir Putin not to realize his dream of reconstituting the great Russian empire.
“France believed until the last minute that Putin wouldn’t invade Ukraine,” one senior European Union official with access to top intelligence briefings told me late last year.
Pumped up on hubris and disdainful of intelligence from the United States, other European leaders and even his own diplomats, Macron shuttled to Moscow to seduce the Russian dictator into backing down.
Instead, he was treated to humiliating dismissal at the end of an extraordinarily long table.
“Putin was another failed project,” one of his advisers told me.
* * * * * * * * *
On the China trip, one of the things that most struck me was how Macron appeared to be winging things, with little or no input from the French diplomatic service or anyone with deep knowledge and expertise on Xi Jinping’s China.
The Chinese Communist system has legions of experts who prepare voluminous tactical briefings so Xi can gain advantage in any interaction with foreign governments. They prepare extensive psychological profiles on leaders like Macron so that Xi can know when to flatter, when to threaten and when to cajole.
“I think [Xi] rather sees France as having a leadership role,” Macron told me in one of our interviews. “And with regards to leaders who last … he respects them. And then he understands our logic of building strategic, financial and military autonomy.”
For the Chinese Communist Party, these are the words of a useful idiot. Macron is not an idiot — far from it — but nobody can be the smartest person in the world on every single topic. It was totally clear to me that he was unprepared for the flattery and manipulation the Chinese system is famous for.
It was also clear that his desperate desire to be loved by his audience made him willing to make major concessions to a totalitarian dictator.
The well-prepared Xi easily played on Macron’s “strategic narcissism” (as American diplomats like to call it) to extract all sorts of rhetorical concessions, including on the crucial topic of Taiwan — a democratic, self-ruled nation that Beijing threatens to absorb by force.
The same character flaws I saw up close in China have led Macron and the French nation to this critical moment.
Locked up with a tiny coterie of sycophants, he made the fateful decision to call a snap election without consulting anyone but himself — one more bold gamble befitting his dream role of the audacious, heroic president of France.
In the process, he has driven the embittered French electorate to the extreme right and extreme left. Even if he is able to form a functioning government in the coming days and weeks, he has left the French polity deeply divided.
In the past, Macron’s main pitch to the electorate was that only by choosing him and his party would they avoid what he describes as the horror of a far-right government of neofascists.
He may have avoided that outcome this time, but he has further fractured France and left the country even more ungovernable.
My strong impression is that Macron remains the eager drama student trying to seduce all the audiences he performs for. When he doesn’t get the love he craves, he tries out a different character, a different performance.
You (the audience) don’t love me? Well, how about I play Zelenskyy? How about de Gaulle? What about a snap election?
One close adviser told me Macron hardly ever sleeps and feels imprisoned in the Elysée Palace, the official residence of the French president in the center of Paris.
So he walks around the city at night on his own.
For some reason, I can’t get this image out of my mind — the lonely thespian who nobody understands, who listens to nobody but himself, wandering the beautiful streets of Paris in the dark, playing the tragic figure of the embattled president of France.
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《馬克洪總統：當代馬夏維里》讀後
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政治原來是這麼玩的。
這篇分析在深度上比開欄文高兩、三個層次(本欄第二篇)。這大概就是「熱鬧」和「門道」的不同；也是所謂「行家一出手，就知有沒有」的實例。
不過，我雖然沒有把整本《君王論》讀完，就我讀過的部分來說，我認為把馬夏維里歸入「權謀家」或「縱橫家」一流，可能不盡公允。稱他為「政治現實主義者」庶幾近之。我認為，馬夏維里該書的主旨在於：鞏固領導中心以保護人民。
我對馬克洪總統的政策和施政並不熟悉。但從他的中國政策、戰略思想(該欄2024/03/18、03/19；此欄開欄文)、和國內政治操作來看(本欄)，他的確有馬夏維里「面對造成現實原因並化解之」的風範。論智力和智商，他可能是目前歐洲檯面上政治領袖中的翹楚。如果馬克洪三年後能出任總理，以他「少壯派」的身份(日本標準) ，還有縱橫歐洲政壇至少10年的機會。
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馬克洪總統：當代馬夏維里 -- Daniel Foubert
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Macron introduces Le Pen to Machiavelli
Daniel Foubert, 06/17/24
The dissolution of the National Assembly announced by President Macron on June 9th, after the disastrous result of his party in the European election, is no accident. Emmanuel Macron devoted his master’s thesis in philosophy to the subject of Machiavelli.
The influence of the sly Machiavelli on Macron’s outlook started early. For years, Brigitte Trogneux’s husband thought that the young Emmanuel, who was still just a teenager, was merely friends with his wife.
One day he discovered this was not the case.
Again, former President François Hollande trusted Macron, his young Minister of Economy, because he had the privilege of holding such a prestigious office while never having been elected or having led any organisation. Hollande thought Macron would support him in the presidential election.
He was deceived, too. Two years later, the slippery Macron became President of the French Republic, after backstabbing and firing his former boss.
If there is one thing Emmanuel Macron knows how to do, if he has one fundamental skill, it is to conceal and deceive.
Therefore, it would be very naïve to think that such an important decision as this dissolution of the National Assembly has not been carefully considered, that it is not in Macron’s interest, or that he does not have a plan forward.
He has decided to get ahead and hand over the keys to the government to his adversaries for three years before the next presidential elections — for which he cannot be a candidate, but more of that in a moment — but not the keys to the state institutions.
This method has long been used by French leaders. There have already been what are called “cohabitations” in France, during which time the president of the republic and the prime minister were not from the same political party.
At the end of each of these, the prime minister and the president have faced off in a presidential election. Each time the president of the republic has won.
Why? Because on one hand, the president of the republic has almost no power when the parliament does not allow him to control his prime minister, and on the other hand, the French people like to vote systematically against those in power, no matter what they do.
A French president therefore knows how to use absence as a weapon to stay in power.
But there is something else that can serve him too: disorder. De Gaulle was long absent after World War II, and it was the inability of the Fourth Republic to manage the Algerian War that allowed him to return to power, imposing the constitution he dreamed of on France.
One cannot help but notice that Napoleon I and Napoleon III took power and then strengthened it under similar circumstances.
For example, during a time of troubles under Louis XIV, Cardinal Mazarin simply left the kingdom twice, letting the civil war develop, before returning to restore order when his adversaries were sufficiently weakened by the chaos reigning in the kingdom.
Here is what happens when there is no strong central power in France. It is enough to let the French fight among themselves and come back to a field of ruins. All the above-mentioned leaders had an interest in increasing the disorder. The most talented in this area was Mazarin. He went as far as using agents and corruption to multiply conflicts between his adversaries.
How could France sink into chaos during a government led by the National Rally?
It is very simple and it will start immediately. The government will immediately find itself in a disastrous situation. It will have to start governing at the time of the Olympic Games, which will start two weeks after the legislative election. It will be off to a rough start, with maximum national security in place because of the threat of terrorist attacks.
The inexperience of the National Rally and the fact that it knows nothing about the functioning of the institutions, which are built in the spirit of elitist men such as Macron, will mean that the government will be completely infiltrated by Macron’s sympathisers.
Traditional “leaks” of information from ministries to the press will be commonplace and will discredit the new ministers.
It should be noted that the National Rally has no experience in government and does not have competent staff to replace the establishment’s administration. It will be like a tenant.
This would be, for example, very different from the rise to power of Law and Justice in Poland, because that party had many supporters within the administration. A real guerrilla war will be waged against the new French government, from which it will not be able to escape.
Then, the new government will have to fight a legal war, the beginnings of which were seen during the last immigration law. Macron seemingly showed conciliation by accepting amendments from the National Rally, but the Constitutional Council members then torpedoed these amendments, judging them unconstitutional.
At this point, you may notice the resemblance of the situation to the Polish constitutional crisis and how the legal conflict could escalate in France. The National Rally will find itself paralyzed by the Constitutional Council and unable to implement the projects that the French expect from it.
Macronists will engage in all kinds of sabotage, for which they have the means, to give the French the impression that their country has ceased to function.
After three years, the National Rally will be exhausted by the incessant attacks from the Macronist deep state.
But what will Emmanuel Macron’s future be in all this? He has nothing to lose because he cannot serve a third term, and he has already implemented the reforms for which he was elected.
He will be able to place his President in three years and become prime minister again, like Vladimir Putin with Dmitry Medvedev. This is all the more probable as he has already expressed his frustration at the idea of not being able to serve a third term.
The French will not hold him responsible for the disorder, as he will have acted democratically by handing over power to his opponents. His supporters will not abandon him either, as his movement will obtain enough deputies to continue to exist.
The impending defeat will also allow him to eliminate cumbersome allies with whom he had to negotiate. As Machiavelli taught him, a leader does not give priority to what is moral or immoral.
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