Since the victory of Emmanuel Macron, Sunday April 24, insidious music has spread, aimed at calling into question the legitimacy of his election. Two types of arguments are invoked: the President of the outgoing Republic would be too bad to claim to carry out his project due to the important level of abstention (28 %) and white and zero bulletins (6.2 %). In addition, the 58.4 % collected on his name would not proceed from a membership vote but would result from a barrage vote against the extreme right.
In 1969, no one had questioned the legitimacy of Georges Pompidou, elected President of the Republic as part of a record abstention (31.15 %). In 2002, no one had challenged that of Jacques Chirac who had obtained 82.21 % of votes cast against Jean-Marie Le Pen. Questions existed on the nature of the policy that the leader of the right would have to conduct within the framework of the powerful republican front which had just been formed, but its ability to be president was fully recognized.
The illegitimacy trial is not new. François Hollande had been the victim during his election in 2012, when the mayor (UMP) of Aix-en-Provence, Maryse Joissains-Masini, had described him as “danger for the Republic” by accusing the media of Having “lynched” his opponent, Nicolas Sarkozy. Since 2017, however, the dispute has been intensifying and won the highest spheres of the Republic. In March, the president of the Senate, Gérard Larcher, exasperated that Emmanuel Macron is slow to enter the campaign, had estimated that this asked “the question of the winner’s legitimacy”. Coming from the third character of the State, the attack had shocked.
Political decomposition
This time, the dispute is rekindled by the radical left, which seeks to mobilize its troops for the legislative elections of June. By pretending to be “elected” Prime Minister and depicting Emmnanunel Macron as the President of the Republic “the most ill-elected of the V e Republic”, Jean-Luc Mélenchon continues his attempt to dynamize institutions And his challenge as an adversary to whom he has been the right to conduct his policy for five years. “There is no social basis in France for Mr. Macron’s policy. It has a problem of political legitimacy which results from the conditions of the second round,” he launched the day after the 2017 presidential election. Marine le Pen, for his part, behaved on Sunday evening as if he had been stolen from him, questioning “two weeks of unfair and shocking methods”.
The process being broken down and political recomposition partly explains the rise in this radicality. The right cannot bear to be marginalized in the national political landscape, and the extremes exploit as much as they can dispute in the country, including against institutions. But their game, which consists in claiming elective functions while contesting the rules, is particularly perverse. In 2017, Jean-Luc Mélenchon was elected deputy for Bouches-du-Rhône with barely 20 % of registered voters. In 2021, Valérie Pécresse was only renewed as president of the Ile-de-France region with 14.8 % of registrants. All those who have fun shaking the legitimacy of the vote, and thereby the foundations of representative democracy, would better reflect on the means of reinteading voters. Otherwise, they will be swept away like the others.