The first round of the French election took place on April 10, and predictably it did nothing to resurrect old-school parliamentarism, five years after Emmanuel Macron first burst into the country’s fragile party system.
On the contrary. Far from stabilising the political order born in 2017, it unveils an eerie landscape from which the old governing parties seem to be excluded, on the right as well as on the left. Five years ago, with candidate Benoît Hamon at 6.36%, it was the Socialist Party (PS) that was on its way out; now it is the turn of conservative Les Républicains (LR), torn between Emmanuel Macron (La République en Marche, LREM) and Éric Zemmour (Reconquête), tallying less than 5% of the vote. Meanwhile, the PS was overtaken by rural centrist Jean Lassalle (Résistons) and communist Fabien Roussel (Parti Communiste Francais, PCF), marking the lowest score in its history at less than 2%.
This is a terrible descent into hell in a two-tier society where political parties that are still the masters of the game at the local level are paradoxically ditched at the national scale.
