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President Macron’s professed purpose in dissolving the National Assembly was to achieve a “clarification” of the political picture in France. People had supposedly become confused about what they were supporting. Are things clearer now?
Serge Klarsfeld, the famed Nazi-hunter, is supporting the Rassemblement National, a party founded by an officer of the Waffen SS and the man remembered for his antisemitic pun on the name of Michel Durafour (“Durafour crématoire”). A “clarification” to be sure: we know now that we are in an entirely new political universe.
Accordingly, a New Popular Front has formed in the hope of preventing a landslide victory by the RN, bringing together François Hollande, Bernard Cazeneuve, and Manuel Valls with their erstwhile sworn enemies Manuel Bompard and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Were it enacted, the program of the NPF (roll back the retirement age to 60, raise the minimum wage, price freezes on essentials) would obviously incur unintended consequences that should give any rational voter pause. My heart is with Raphaël Glucksmann, who has given the NPF a human face; my head wonders if the victory of such une alliance contre nature would not merely deepen the populist reaction owing to its predictable economic effects.
As for the RN, its spokespersons, nonplussed by the sudden proximity of power, are struggling mightily to figure out which previous positions have been rendered inoperative by the sudden advent of good fortune. Will they now postpone the repeal of retirement reform they had once advocated? Was forbidding dual nationality now the order of the day, as spokesperson Sébastien Chenu said on C8, or was it off the table by order of Marine Le Pen, as he declared shortly afterward? All of France was grateful for the “clarificatiion.”
Meanwhile, the Macronistes, having had the rug pulled out from under them by their chief, seem to be in total disarray. Yaël Braun-Pivet, the ex-president of the National Assembly, appeared before the hostile tribunal of Europe 1’s Grand Rendez-vous only to reveal her utter embarrassment at having to defend Macron’s decision to dissolve the parliament. Minority government was working, she protested with a whimper and a hint of self-justification: we deputies, hommes et femmes de bonne volonté, were making it work. But our impetuous president has now placed us in the impossible position of having to defend the muddled compromises necessary to make it work in the name of a false clarity that cannot possibly be achieved in a country as divided as ours. I am, of course, putting words in her mouth. She herself could never have formulated such a paradox and was reduced to hoping against hope that voters would find both the NPF and the RN even less palatable than they find Macron.
If “clarity” has been achieved, it is that the emperor is clearly without clothes, and so are his would-be successors.
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