started on heavy heavy, the legislative election campaign which ends on Friday, June 17, threatens to end in caricature. Every day, the tone rises a little more between Emmanuel Macron and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, as if we were still an extension of the presidential match, when it comes to electing 572 deputies (five already having it been in the first round) for essential work to develop the law and control of the executive. The excessive presidentialization of the regime can be read through the impossibility of existing for the other actors, starting with the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, who fails to print her brand at the start of the five -year term.
The feint that the presidential camp has been using for months against the turnaround and the unpopularity of his retirement project at 65 years is about to turn against him. By saying as little as possible, the President of the Republic hoped to anesthetize the debate and avoid the crystallization of a camp against him. By managing to make the union of the left behind his person, the “rebellious”, which had only reached third position in the first round of the presidential election, thwarted the trap. He got into a position to be able to deprive the President of the Republic of a majority, Sunday, June 19, if a sufficient number of abstentionists rally.
Since then, the Elysée has struggled to regain control, alternating silence and dramatic declarations, like that pronounced on the tarmac of Orly airport, Tuesday June 14. Before flying to Romania, the President of the Republic solemnly urged the French to give “a solid majority to the country”, emphasizing the risk of adding “a French disorder to the disorder of the world”.
Excessive dramtatization
It is normal for a freshly re -elected head of state to ask his people to give him the means to preside. But the excessive dramatization of the tone, while the campaign took place under anesthesia, as at a distance from the chaos of the world, surprised. If France lives, as Emmanuel Macron says, “a historic moment”, it would have been necessary that citizens were associated with it closely.
For lack of having done it, the head of state is reduced to practicing what he has long denounced: political policy. In an attempt to wake up the voters of the center and the right, he is working to reject Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the camp of those who threaten the Republic. In doing so, he returns back to back the extreme right and part of the left, breaks with the logic of the republican front which prevailed since 2002, arouses discomfort within his troops, for a random result. On the left, the dynamics are based on the pride of having found the way to the Union, so that, at this stage, the road trips from its standard bearer count relatively little, as well as the programmatic inconsistency of the coalition he gave birth to.
The conditions for an end of the campaign are thus met alongside the real subjects: the more the international environment is darkening, the more the effects of global warming become tangible, the more France shrinks in quarrels which do not have to be. The Nuts camp takes its part. Since Sunday, his point is not to try to credible an expensive rupture project which promises retirement at 60 years or the minimum wage at 1,500 euros net, but to reveal alleged housing tax increases from the Macron project. The string may be big, it is complacently relayed, completing to give this campaign the character it should not have: that of not being serious, in extreme gravity.