French president Emmanuel Macron to meet rival parties after losing majority

French president Emmanuel Macron will invite all political parties able to form a group in the new parliament for talks on Tuesday and Wednesday after his camp lost its absolute majority, a source close to Macron said on Monday.

Macron lost his absolute majority in the National Assembly on Sunday night when extreme left and right-wing parties made unprecedented gains, throwing into question Macron’s ability to enact reforms. Some commentators predicted the country will become ungovernable.

Macron’s centrist coalition Ensemble won between 230 and 240 seats, according to predictions by polling institutes. The same centrist parties held 350 of 577 seats in the outgoing legislature.

The president, who was re-elected for a second five-year term on April 24th, would have needed an absolute majority of 289 seats to be assured of passing legislation. His plan to reform France’s complex pension system, and to raise France’s retirement age from 62 to 65, may now be doomed.

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The Nupes coalition led by the extreme left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party will have between 165 and 175 seats in the new assembly, nearly three times the number of seats held by the component parties of Nupes in the last assembly.

Mélenchon achieved the historic feat of uniting the communist, socialist and Green parties. Though he did not stand for re-election himself, and has lost his bid to become prime minister, the 70-year-old leader, an accomplished orator from the Trotskyist left, claims to be the leading opponent to Macron.

“The rout of the presidential party is total and there is no clear majority,” Mélenchon said last night, and evoking Macron’s “arrogance” and “moral failure” which, he said, led to the “bankruptcy” of the president’s camp.

“The France of rebellions and of revolutions has the face of our group, of popular union,” Mélenchon said. “Not for an instant will workers let down their guard. Not for a moment will youths tire of the struggle”.

The far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who won 42 per cent to 58 per cent for Macron in the presidential runoff, will be the other chief opponent to Macron. Her Rassemblement National party won between 80 and 85 seats, “by far the most numerous in the history of our political family”, Le Pen noted.

Le Pen was re-elected in her stronghold of Hénin-Beaumont, northern France with a score of 61 per cent. She was radiant as she promised “to embody a firm and responsible opposition, without being in cahoots with anyone, respectful of the institutions because the interest of the French people is our sole compass.”

The conservative party Les Républicains, which is seen as the only possible ally for Macron’s Ensemble, won between 62 and 68 seats, a poor showing for the Gaullists who governed France for most of the past 64 years. If Macron can forge an alliance with LR, he could reach the magical figure of 289 votes in the assembly, but the right of the party is closer to Le Pen’s RN than to Ensemble and opposes making deals with Macron.

The humiliation of Macron’s centrist camp was compounded by the fact that several of its leading figures, including the speaker of the National Assembly Richard Ferrand and the former interior minister Christophe Castaner, who headed Macron’s République en Marche party in the outgoing assembly, lost their seats. Half of the 15 cabinet ministers were candidates and all those who lost seats will be forced to resign.

Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, who was a candidate for the first time, won a seat in the Calvados department. The minister for European affairs Clément Beaune was also elected for the first time.

The 54 per cent abstention rate was the second highest ever. Macron barely campaigned and gave the impression of being more interested in the war in Ukraine than in domestic policy. — Additional reporting: Reuters