The newly elected French president, with whom will he govern?
According to the first estimation published by the French public television France 2 at 20:00 Paris time, as predicted by all polls, the newcomer Emmanuel Macron, who created his movement En Marche ! on April 6, 2016, has won the 2017 French presidential election with 65.1% of the vote against Marine Le Pen from the extreme right-wing Front National with only 34.9% of the vote.
But the key question lies ahead: The newly elected French President Macron, with whom will he govern? Will he be able to get a presidential majority in the French legislative elections in June 2017? Will he need the support of other reformist parliamentarians in other parties? Who will become his prime minister? Will it be a woman? Could it be the managing director of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, as some rumors have it?
Will the new prime minister be someone of the political right, the center — for instance François Bayrou, who endorsed him when he needed it or Jean-Louis Borloo — or the left? The last option is unlikely and would be unwise because, as minister of the economy of President Hollande, his presidency would be perceived as a Hollande-bis, a continuation of the failed Socialist presidency.
The extreme right-wing Marine Le Pen sank her last, tiny victory hopes in the presidential debate with Emmanuel Macron. Since 2011, in the years as National Front party chief, she had successfully pursued a strategy of un-demonization (dédiabolisation) of her party. However, in the debate with Macron, she showed her vulgar, ugly, nationalist face. She did not look presidential at all. This was a surprising move since, just days before the runoff election, she had landed a coup and presented Nicolas Dupont-Aignan as her choice of prime minister.
Until January 2007, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan had been a member of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) of Nicolas Sarkozy, Alain Juppé, François Fillon and many other center-right politicians. He then founded the Gaullist and sovereignist Debout la France party (DLF). In the 2017 presidential election, Dupont-Aignan managed to win an honorable 4.7% of the vote, contributing to sink the chances of former prime minister François Fillon to qualify for the second round of the presidential election.
In November 2016, Fillon was the most likely winner of the 2017 French presidential election. He then stumbled over a series of scandals, which made him slip from first to third place in the polls in February 2017. He had presented himself as the honorable face of the French Republican Party (Les Républicians), contrasting his image with the tainted ones of party rivals Alain Juppé and mainly Nicolas Sarkozy. When it was revealed that Fillon was not clean at all, he (rightly so) imploded in public opinion. With his integrity lost, Fillon would not have had the moral integrity to push through his ambitious economic reform program.
Article originally added on May 7, 2017 at 20:01 Paris time. Added to our newly designed pages on December 7, 2021.
Beauty items at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Emmanuel Macron in April 2015. Photo Copyright © Claude Truong-Ngoc.
