Unlock Editor’s Digest for free
FT editor Roula Khalaf picks her favorite stories in this week’s newsletter.
Breaking his silence for the first time since Sunday’s snap election, President Emmanuel Macron called for a broad “pact of government” to end the political impasse in France’s badly fractured parliament.
Macron claimed in an open letter to the public on Wednesday that “no one won” the vote, as no party or alliance even came close to an outright majority.
Without using the word “coalition”, the president called on political parties to “engage in a sincere and loyal dialogue to build a solid majority for the country, which must be pluralistic”.
The news enraged the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), which came out on top with 180 seats, ahead of Macron’s Ensemble alliance with 150.
Since Tuesday, the NFP has accused Macron of “democratic delay” for dragging his feet and not offering them the chance to form a government.
The leader of the extreme left Jean-Luc Mélenchon criticized Macron: “It is the return of the royal veto over universal suffrage! That’s enough. They have to bow out and call NFP. That’s just democracy.”
The letter suggests that Macron wants to avoid at all costs a power-sharing government known as “coexistence” with the NFP, which has a heavy tax-and-spend economic program that is completely at odds with the president’s trademark supply-side policies. .
The NFP, hastily formed after Macron called snap elections last month, is a disparate grouping of Mélenchon’s far-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), a small group of communists and the more moderate Socialists and Greens.
The alliance wants to scrap Macron’s unpopular pension reform, which raised the retirement age to 64, raise the minimum wage and reintroduce a wealth tax.
“The NFP program would be fatal for the French economy,” wrote Patrick Martin, head of business lobby Medef, in an op-ed in Les Echos newspaper.
While Macron is ignoring the left, some in Macron’s Ensemble are instead negotiating a pact with the conservative Les Républicains, who have around 45 seats, a maneuver that has caused divisions in the president’s camp.
The constitution gives the president the power to choose the prime minister, but does not specify how or set a timetable. But presidents usually call on the party with the most MPs to form a government.
Macron has used his presidential prerogatives to keep the current government in place, leaving Prime Minister Gabriel Attal in place while negotiations between the parties take place.
He suggested that both the far-right and the far-left should be excluded from the governing majority and called on other political parties to set some “guiding principles” based on “clear and shared republican values” to come up with a “pragmatic project” to address voters’ priorities.
“The nature of these elections, marked by a clear demand for change and power-sharing, demands [mainstream parties] to build a great power to rule together,” he wrote.
“What the French chose at the ballot box – the republican front – political parties must implement with their actions.”
Macron argued in his letter that the real message of the election was that the French public strongly rejected the idea of a government led by Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National.
Instead, they voted tactically, often for candidates and parties they didn’t like, to build so-called a leading Republican defeat the far right.
As a result, Macron has argued that politicians need to put aside their differences and compromise on governance out of respect for the voters who elected them, despite not agreeing with their agendas.
Indeed, the RN, which came first in the first round on June 30, managed to become the third largest party in the new council with 143 MPs.
However, the far-right party won 10 million votes, far more than the Left’s 7 million or the Ensemble’s 6.3 million.
Macron’s letter was published as he traveled to Washington for a two-day NATO summit.
“As the president of the republic, I am both the protector of the national interest, the guarantor of institutions, and the one who must respect your choice,” he wrote.