French politics is in chaos

Emannuel Macron's decision to call a snap election has thrown French politics into absolute chaos.

While us Brits face the most uninspiring and underwhelming election campaign in decades which amounts to a foregone conclusion between virtually identical versions of "more of the same" austerity politics, France has been thrown into absolute political chaos.

The turmoil was triggered when Marine Le Pen’s far-right nationalist party thumped Macron’s liberal capitalists in the European elections, but instead of taking the hit, Macron decided to trigger chaos by calling a snap parliamentary election.

His own job as President isn’t at risk, but a massive parliamentary shake up is on the cards, and if his gamble fails, he’s going to further empower the extreme-right, and leave himself in a weak and powerless position until his Presidential term runs out in 2027.

It’s difficult to understand why he would take such a risk, but it’s possible he’s attempting to imitate the tactic of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who essentially dared the Spanish public to either give him another four years in power or vote the extreme-right Vox party into government for the first time, which he won.

The big differences are that Sanchez had the majority of the left onside, and that the extreme-right Vox party would only have joined the government as a junior partner, rather than leading the polls like Le Pen’s RN.

This snap election has caused absolute chaos by forcing French political parties to hastily form their coalitions and pick all of their parliamentary candidates within the space of a week!

Amazingly the French left got their act together immediately to form a united "Popular Front" encompassing all of the major left-wing parties and the greens with Jean-Luc Mélenchon as the figurehead.

Macron has publicly attacked the left coalition as "antisemites" because of course anyone who shows the slightest solidarity with Palestinian civilians, or opposes Israeli genocide and war crimes is motivated by Jew-hate, rather than humanitarian principles and basic human decency.

Macron’s own group are far from happy with the surprise election, because with 245 of the 577 parliamentary seats between them, they’ve got by far the most to lose, and it seems unlikely that the French public would want to reward the guy who has just thrown the country into a chaotic election on the eve of the Paris Olympics.

The once powerful Les Républicains (Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy …) were thrown into civil war when the president of their party Éric Ciotti decided to unilaterally announce that they would run as junior coalition partners with Le Pen’s extreme-right fanatics, a move which would certainly have marked the absolute death of the liberal-conservative Gaullist tradition.

Many senior Les Républicains figures vehemently disagreed with Ciotti’s unilateral announcement, so he locked himself inside the party headquarters to prevent his party from deposing him!

Eventually the siege was broken and Ciotti was sacked and thrown out of the party, but he’s claiming that the procedure to remove him went against the party constitution, that he’s still the party president, and that the alliance with Le Pen is still on!

Another right wing party, Reconquête, was also thrown into turmoil after Marion Maréchal, who is Marine Le Pen’s niece and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s granddaughter, announced they’d be joining Le Pen’s coalition and then hinted that the main condition of such an alliance would be the removal of their party leader Éric Zemmour, who founded the party in the first place.

Now that she’s apparently orchestrating a coup to take his party from him, you’ve got to wonder what Zemmour was thinking when he allowed Maréchal to jump ship from her family’s political movement to become one of the most senior figures in his.

Macron’s liberal capitalist "centrist" party look set to collapse in popularity (down to 3rd on just 18% in recent polls), and both of the other main right-wing parties seem to be descending into civil war over potential alliances with Le Pen, all of which suits the extreme-right Le Pen dynasty perfectly.

This means that Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the left coalition could be the only barrier to keeping the far-right lunatics out of government.

The ideological battle between the left, the far-right, and the collapsing centre that the French are faced with is such a contrast to the stale non-contest between virtually identical versions of the same pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-investment, genocide-complicit ideology in Britain.

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