It is time to end the “fever”. That was how France’s president Emmanuel Macron explained his stunning decision on Sunday to dissolve the National Assembly and call snap legislative polls after the far right won a crushing victory in European parliamentary elections. His pro-EU centrist alliance limped in to a distant second place.
Before this weekend, France’s reckoning with the far right was scheduled for 2027 when Macron steps down. The campaign of Marine Le Pen, leader of the Rassemblement National, to succeed him as president was looking increasingly unstoppable — but still years away. Now that reckoning, with grave implications for France’s democracy and the future of Europe, will come in less than a month.
Macron’s snap election is an extraordinarily risky gamble. His intention appears to be to shake French voters out of their feverish delusions about what the far right would be like in power. The choice between France’s mainstream parties and a nationalist, Eurosceptic, anti-immigrant group whose policies would plunge the country into conflict with the EU ought to be an obvious one. The French may indeed balk at installing an RN government. But too many are bitterly disillusioned with the other parties and contemptuous of Macron for comfort.