From Your Survival Guy’s many trips to Paris, I can tell you that in my conversations with folks on the ground, Parisians aren’t a real political group. What they do enjoy is pointing fingers at me about who we have running for president. “That’s the best you can do?” they imply. Yet those who have glass pyramids at the Louvre should not throw stones. The populist groundswell has landed on their beach. Last week, after populist parties trounced France’s establishment politicians in EU elections, French President Emmanuel Macron attempted to surprise his opponents by calling for snap parliamentary elections. So far, that decision appears to have been a mistake. Stacy Meichtry and Noemie Bisserbe discuss what they call “Macron’s Gamble” in The Wall Street Journal, writing:
PARIS—President Emmanuel Macron has always aspired to become one of the great men of history, saving Europe from the fires of populism and setting its economy on course to compete with the U.S. and China.
The question now looming over Macron is whether he will go down in history as the man who ushered Marine Le Pen and her far-right party to the threshold of power in France.
Macron’s decision to call snap elections broadsided France and shocked the world. It was also vintage Macron: bold, risky and timed to catch his opponents off guard. Macron was operating under the assumption that he and his candidates for the National Assembly would benefit from the element of surprise, according to his aides. Leftist parties would have no time to form alliances crucial for making it past the first round of voting on June 30. That, in turn, would compel many of their voters to rally behind Macron’s pro-business party in the July 7 runoff as they had in Macron’s previous showdowns with Le Pen.
Those assumptions are now unraveling. A range of left-leaning parties have managed to quickly stitch together a coalition that will go toe to toe with Macron’s and Le Pen’s forces. Macron’s own party, meanwhile, is in disarray, with shellshocked lawmakers struggling to rally around a leader who they say acted unilaterally, without consulting them, much as he has since taking office in 2017.
Polls taken this week show Le Pen’s forces qualifying for runoffs and finishing with up to 270 seats. Such a haul would be just shy of a majority in the 577-seat National Assembly, but about triple the number of seats that Le Pen won in 2022. National Rally would become the biggest party in the lower chamber, and Le Pen would have a strong argument for picking the next prime minister.
On Wednesday, Macron bristled when a reporter asked what he thought of the idea of becoming the first president in France’s post-World War II history to hand the keys of government over to the far right.
“Everyone sees the rising water of the extreme right,” Macron said. The president then acknowledged a truth that haunts the political establishment: In 2027, Macron will finish the second of his two consecutive terms, the legal limit, leaving Le Pen to run for the presidency in a field bereft of major competitors.
Macron said he was unwilling to sit idle until then. Voters, in handing National Rally an overwhelming victory in Sunday’s European elections, were protesting in anger, Macron said. In calling national elections with much bigger stakes, Macron said he was providing voters with a means of “clarification.”
Action Line: What will Parisians and the French as a whole do with Macron’s surprise? Will they reward him for his steadfast adherence to the globalist European vision? Or will they punish him for it by electing populists who would reverse course? Click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter.
E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy
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