French President, Emmanuel Macron, will meet party leaders including the far-right, Marine Le Pen, for talks, the Elysee Presidential Palace announced, after his (Macron) allies lost their overall majority in the National Assembly elections
Macron’s discussions with opposition leaders will start on Tuesday, June 21, 2022, with Christian Jacob, who is Head of the traditional conservative Republicans (LR) party that has been in decline in recent months, but could be courted to give Macron a parliamentary majority.
Socialist Party Leader, Olivier Faure, and Communist Party Head, Fabien Roussel, as well as members of the NUPES left-wing alliance, will also meet Macron, although the hard-left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who leads NUPES, is not scheduled to do so.
Aim of the Meeting
In a rare encounter, Macron will also host Le Pen, his presidential election rival and leader of the far-right National Rally. The aim is to “build solutions to serve the French” at a time when there is no “alternative majority” to that of Macron’s ruling alliance, a presidential official who requested to speak on anonymity disclosed.
Representatives of the Parliamentary parties will be received at the Elysée Palace separately and successively. The result of the parliamentary elections was a stunning blow for Mr. Macron and his reform agenda, leaving his camp to face the prospect of a political deadlock.
While Macron’s Ensemble (Together) coalition remains the largest party after Sunday’s (June 19, 2022) National Assembly elections, it fell dozens of seats short of keeping the absolute majority it enjoyed in the last five years. Mélenchon and Le Pen made big gains, leaving them as major players in the new parliament.
Resurgent Opposition
The left-leaning Liberation Daily (a newspaper firm) called the results a “slap in the face” for Macron, while the conservative Figaro (a French daily morning newspaper) said he is now “faced with an ungovernable France”.
Macron’s Together alliance won 244 seats, well short of the 289 needed for an overall majority, in a low-turnout vote that resulted in an abstention rate of about 53.77 percent in the previous elections.
Macron met Monday, June 20, 2022, with his embattled Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, and two top allies; former Premier, Edouard Philippe and Centrist Leader, Francois Bayrou. The election saw NUPES become the main opposition force along with its allies on 137 seats, according to figures from the Interior Ministry. But it appears unlikely the coalition of Socialists, Communists, Greens and the hard-left France Unbowed, will be able to retain a common cause in the legislature.
Mélenchon, the France Unbowed Chief, who orchestrated the alliance, called its results “fairly disappointing” and proposed Monday, June 20, 2022, to make NUPES a permanent left-wing bloc. He said it would not be a full-on merger, but simply an effective “alternative” force in parliament, though the offer was immediately rejected by the three other NUPES parties.
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