Macron’s gamble begs some uncomfortable questions about the future of Europe

President Emmanuel Macron has been, since Angela Merkel’s retirement as Germany’s chancellor in 2021, the pre-eminent political personality in Europe. Heading the EU’s only nuclear power, in charge of its second biggest economy and assuming the traditional French posture of political leadership, Mr Macron has shown a sure touch… at least in European affairs.

Lately, he has taken it upon himself to stiffen European resistance to Russian aggression in Ukraine, after an earlier unsuccessful attempt to become the Putin-whisperer. Mr Macron is still a powerful figure, at home as well as abroad. After all, he placed himself at the head of a breakaway centrist vehicle, En Marche!, now renamed Renaissance, and, against the odds, captured the Elysee Palace. In 2022, he secured a second presidential term – again, against the odds. He lost his parliamentary majority soon after, but his grip on his country’s affairs, despite some dismal polling, remained firm.

Has he now lost that grip? At first sight, his surprise decision to hold fresh elections to the French parliament appeared an act of panic in response to disastrous results for Renaissance and its allies in the European elections. The pronounced swing to the hard right, mirroring a similar humiliation of Olaf Scholz in Germany, is certainly a clear repudiation of the president’s record. Faced with such a popular vote of no confidence in his leadership, Mr Macron’s call for another such vote in quick succession looks a little quixotic. Indeed, on the face of it, it seems to have been inspired by a similar decision by the British prime minister, calling an earlier general election than widely assumed – and which is not going well. Surely, observers wondered, Macron can’t have done a Sunak?

On closer inspection, the president’s move, though freighted with risks, is the more rational. He is relying on the peculiar nature of the French electoral system to renew his mandate to govern. Because of the two-stage process of elections, with a second and final ballot between two frontrunners, the president hopes to repeat his victories in 2017 and 2022, in which he defeated Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front (later, National Rally). The system forces voters to make unpalatable but necessary choices and should have the effect of unifying the anti-fascistic forces against National Rally candidates for the National Assembly. It’s true that this didn’t happen in 2022; but this time, perhaps, there is less room to treat such elections as a protest vote.

Mr Macron seeks to present French voters with a serious choice of government. If he pushes National Rally back, then he will have achieved his purpose. If he fails, France will enter a difficult period of cohabitation and, more acutely, immobilisme on domestic policy with a National Rally prime minister, such as the 28-year-old leader Jordan Bardella, left to run the economy and migration policy, presumably badly, while the president focuses on defence and foreign affairs.

This gamble begs some bigger and more uncomfortable questions about the future of France, and of Europe. What is to become of Mr Macron’s Renaissance party at the next scheduled presidential and parliamentary elections in 2027, when he is ineligible to run? What is his succession strategy? Where does it leave the republican conservatives, and what is left of the socialist party? Who, in other words, will stop Mr Bardella and National Rally next time around?

There are many more dismal aspects to the latest elections across Europe. The rise of the hard right in Germany, via the AfD, and in France, the two most populous nations, has been especially pronounced among the young (in stark contrast to Britain, where the kids are green, progressive and, ironically, very much starry-eyed pro-Europeans).

There is an especial horror for Germany in the resurgence of people who view the Third Reich with a degree of detached equanimity previously unthinkable in the federal republic. In Austria, equally shockingly, they topped the polls. Yet in countries that have actually experienced hard-right administrations (or with coalition elements), the nationalist populists fared less well. Geert Wilders, for example, lost ground after his win in the Netherlands elections last year.

The Belgian separatist Vlaams Belang and the so-called Swedish Democrats were also disappointed. Donald Tusk, EU bureaucrat and now centrist premier of Poland, saw off his old extremists’ revivals. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni only finished marginally ahead of the leftists and in Hungary, Viktor Orban’s party also faced stronger opposition.

When the horse-trading is complete, Ursula von der Leyen will be permitted to continue as president of the European Commission. She will need to flex policy on migration but the centre has held. Being such a vexatious bunch, each focused on different national interests first, there doesn’t seem that much chance of the hard right and far right melding into a cohesive bloc, and for now, the Christian Democrats will continue to be the more dominant force on that wing. Ms Von der Leyen will continue to be able to divide Ms Meloni and Ms Le Pen to the EU’s advantage. Ironically, the person who might have been able to “unite the right” in the European parliament, Nigel Farage, has waved goodbye to the place.

It seems that there is an evolving pattern in the Western democracies whereby a period of lacklustre, dull, centrist government is followed by one where the populists take over – and also tend to fail. Arguably, with the benefit of hindsight, that is what happened in the United States during the prospective Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump cycle. The same is true of the UK, where the flirtation with populism yielded the traumas of Brexit and a succession of chaotic Conservative government, soon to be replaced by a decisive shift to the social democratic government led by “centrist dad” Sir Keir Starmer.

Notwithstanding the popularity of Mr Farage among older Britons, the country as a whole is swinging to Labour. Unlike in the 1930s, then, Europe’s current shift to the right is not permanent – and President Macron, for one, is at least determined to take the initiative and fight back.