In a letter published by the French media, the president Emmanuel Macron “promises” to “act until May 2027”, the date of the end of his second mandate. It is a denial of the rumors, relaunched by Marine Le Pen, of the possible resignation of the head of the Elysée in the face of a situation of political crisis.
On the eve of the week that will lead the French to vote early, tension remains very high and the horizon of an unprecedented crisis in the Fifth Republic is increasingly confused. Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s young dolphin has made it clear that he will only be prime minister with a relative majority, he will not do so. A prospect that would force Macron to find an alternative solution that is anything but obvious. Attal, the current prime minister, focuses on the Macronian camp: “we are the ones who are growing the most in the polls”. A gauche, broadside from former president François Holland to the head of La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Melenchon: “If you want to do the New Popular Front a favor, step aside and shut up.” The shadow of anti-Semitism always looms over the flash election campaign. In Courbevoie, where last week a 12-year-old girl was raped and threatened with death because she was Jewish, a thousand people took part in a protest march and President Emmanuel Macron tweeted: “We educate, we don’t give anything away, we punish.”
At the same time, a far-right candidate from the Rassemblement National, Joseph Martin, suspended for an anti-Semitic phrase, he was reinstated because it was clarified by an internal party commission that in the offending phrase he would have made irony about the death of a well-known far-right denier, Robert Faurisson. “Gas brought justice to the victims of the Holocaust,” wrote candidate Martin. Attributing, for unknown reasons, Faurisson’s death to a domestic gas accident that never occurred. The polls on the projections of seats in the vote show an unprecedented Assemblée Nationale, with the majority relative to the RN (between 210 and 250 seats), followed by the New Popular Front (180-210) and the Macronians of Ensemble (75-105). The Lepenists seem far from an absolute majority (at least 289 seats) and if this is the case, Bardella will not ask to be appointed prime minister: “I will only accept if we come to the top and if the French grant us an absolute majority.” For the current prime minister, Gabriel Attal , this insistence of Bardella in setting conditions “begins to look more and more like a refusal of the obstacle”, a term also used in horse racing when the racing horse stops in front of the barrier to be overcome. Meanwhile, score-settling and arguments continue in the variegated Front of the left, composed of elements in many cases incompatible.
The former president François Hollande, having returned to run for the occasion, he used very clear words against Mélenchon, whose possible arrival at the helm of the government as leader of the party that weighs most in the alliance is quite worrying, given his recurring verbal excesses. «If he wants to do the New Popular Front a favor – Hollande told a group of journalists – he must stand aside and keep quiet. I don’t deny the sensitivities that he represents – explained the former president – but when the numbers of those hostile to his candidacy are higher than those of Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella, we need to ask ourselves about the general interest”. Nicknamed “the tribune” of the left, Mélenchon had the name of the former president booed at one of his rallies, replying thus: “Popularity is not where he believes, you know what kind of man I am. If I am in this place it is because in these years I have never given in to anyone.”