French President Emmanuel Macron, amid the failure of the pro-presidential Renaissance party in the European Parliament election process, has decided to make a political manoeuvre by dissolving the National Assembly and calling new elections at the national level. This was reported by the Politico newspaper.
“The European elections should be a decent but boring exercise in centrist coalition building. Not this time. A surge of far-right populism in France has provoked President Emmanuel Macron to call a high-risk national election that could determine the future not only of his country but of the European Union itself,” the report said.
The publication notes that in France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party, which is pro-Eurosceptic and NATO, has “completely crushed” Emmanuel Macron’s liberal Renaissance and all other contenders.
The political force of Marine Le Pen, according to preliminary data, received 31.5 per cent of the vote in the European Parliament elections. For its part, Macron’s Renaissance party secured only 14.7 electoral votes.
“In a risky game (dissolving the lower house of parliament and calling new elections. – ed.) to regain the political initiative, Macron has bet on voters to reverse the far-right wave and show that Marine Le Pen’s ‘National Rally’ cannot win at the national level,” the newspaper said.
Politico focused on the fact that in France, the results for the National Assembly in the upcoming early elections on 30 June and 7 July will be closely watched as a harbinger: whether Le Pen can harness her party’s momentum and become president of the “Fifth Republic” in 2027.
“As president of the seventh largest economy in the world, Le Pen will almost certainly shake the EU to its foundations, putting patriotic interests ahead of international co-operation,” Politico stated.
Earlier, a member of the Federation Council Committee on Constitutional Legislation and State Construction, Alexei Pushkov, said that the loss of French President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party in the European Parliament elections was due to the failed political line of the head of the Fifth Republic.
