France in limbo, Macron rejects Attal’s resignation: “Stay for stability”

France is in limbo after the legislative elections. The second round decreed a National Assembly divided into three main blocs: left, centre and far right, with a left-wing majority, but none of the three groups close to the 289-seat threshold for an absolute majority. So, as Paris prepares to host the Olympic Games, the country faces the dilemma of what a new government could be. There is no simple answer. The outgoing Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, submitted his resignation in the morning, but President Emmanuel Macron rejected it, asking Attal to stay “for now” to “guarantee the stability of the country”. The Elysee Palace announced immediately after the polls closed that Macron “will wait for the new National Assembly to be structured before taking the necessary decisions”. On the other hand, there is no precise date for the appointment of the Prime Minister and the French President, who will remain in office until 2027 and has always ruled out resigning, is expected in Washington soon for the NATO summit. There is no clarity about the name of the new prime minister, nor about what majority the new executive could count on. The left-wing bloc, that is, the New Popular Front (NFP), which came first and obtained 182 deputies according to the final results, immediately asked to be entrusted with the government.

However, this scenario cannot be taken for granted, since there is no fixed rule requiring the choice of a prime minister who is a member of the largest party in Parliament. However, a completely different mood is blowing in the Rassemblement National (RN), where the wound of having come third still stings, while the party dreamed of Jordan Bardella as prime minister in Matignon. Speaking at the party headquarters, Bardella spoke of “defeat” and acknowledged “mistakes”, assuming his “share of responsibility”, stressing, however, that “the RN is today the main political force in terms of number of votes and the electoral agreements between Mélenchon and Macron prevented us from obtaining a majority”. The reference is that, in terms of absolute votes, the RN received around 8.7 million preferences, the NFP around 7 million and the centrist Ensemble bloc around 6.3 million (the translation into seats depends on the electoral system of single-member majority voting). In the New Popular Front – which includes a very broad spectrum of parties ranging from the communists to the ecologists, via the socialists and La France Insoumise (LFI) of the controversial Jean-Luc Mélenchon – internal negotiations began on Sunday evening. A meeting of representatives of all the NFP parties, preceded by a pre-meeting of the LFI, aims to lay the groundwork for identifying a candidate. unitary for a prime minister to propose to Macron, a name that the front intends to indicate this week.

That it is “neither François Hollande nor Jean-Luc Mélenchon”, specified the MP Clémentine Autain when requesting the meeting on Sunday. Mainly because it is clear that Mélenchon is a name too controversial to be accepted. However, Mélenchon himself does not exclude Matignon: while stressing that “we will have many candidates to propose” – and mentioned the names of Manuel Bompard, Mathilde Panot and Clémence Guetté as examples – as a guest of LCI he said that he considered himself “capable” of covering the task. But from Macron’s centrist camp, there are many voices that have risen against a government with the LFI, with the aim of splitting the New Popular Front. Throughout the election campaign, the centrists sought to portray as dangerous both the far right of Marine Le Pen and what they call the far left of Mélenchon, who has drawn accusations of anti-Semitism from many critics for his anti-Israel positions, especially after the outbreak of the war in Gaza. Edouard Philippe, Macron’s former prime minister, called on the political forces to “promote the creation of an agreement”, but without the Rassemblement national (RN) or La France insoumise. And the outgoing Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, defined the possibility of governing with the RN or the LFI as “out of the question”. Darmanin, among other things, mentioned a “right-wing government”, thus raising the hypothesis of a government with the conservatives of Les Republicains (LR).

Meanwhile, once again from the centre, Modem leader François Bayrou called for an “agreement” that “goes from the left without LFI to the right that excludes the RN”. What options are there if the centrist camp wants to exclude the LFI but the left wants to remain united? Macron could seek an agreement with the moderate left to create a common government, reaching out to the Socialists and the Greens for example, but they could refuse to accept it. Furthermore, unlike other European countries, France does not have a tradition of coalition government. Another option under discussion could be a provisional government, but everything will depend on the negotiations in the coming hours and perhaps days. Meanwhile, on the left, many names are currently being circulated as hypotheses: among the most mentioned are Marine Tondelier, leader of the Ecologists, and MP Clémentine Autain, who has announced that she will no longer be part of the LFI group in the National Ensemble; the same applies to François Ruffin, another potential candidate from Matignon, who a few days before the second round of the legislative elections announced his break with the LFI in disagreement with Mélenchon.