France Heading Towards a Vacuum or a Crisis in Governance!
Nidal Hmedeh
The second phase of the French presidential election is nearing and so too are the great dues awaiting France as well as electoral options that will at best produce a crisis of power or a power vacuum, judging by the chaos the traditional parties - both the left and the right - are going through.
The arrival of Emmanuel Macaron - the former employee of the Rothschild banking family of France - who came from nothing to clinch a second round face-off in the presidential election with far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, launched a coup d'état in the political life of the Fifth French Republic, where the political scene has been dominated in the past four decades by the Socialist Party and the traditional conservative right. The two sides have lost the election battle. However, the loss of the conservative right-wing candidate Francois Fillon is not as grave as the loss of Socialist Party candidate Francois Hamon, due to the huge support that Fillon had from Catholic groups.
Thus, the scene of the winners of the second round clearly indicates that the current traditional parties that ruled France are on the way to disintegration, according to the MP of the Socialist Party in the French Parliament Gerard Pappet who spoke exclusively with the "Al Ahed" website.
"The French Socialist Party is witnessing a current internal crisis that threatens to break it up, and this is due to a great division over how to deal with Emmanuel Macaron if he wins the post of President of the Republic," he said. "There is a large section of the deputies, cadres and members of the Socialist Party who want to enter a compromise with Emmanuel Macaron in a presidential coalition of government while a section of the party rejects this and wants to enter the opposition."
"The British and Spanish experience proved that when the Socialists entered the opposition they became weaker and disintegrated," he added.
The new opinion polls show Macron leading ahead of Le Pen by 19 points [59/41 which is not wide enough. Marin Le Pen needs 10 points to catch up. Meanwhile, the difference between Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002 was 60 points 82/18].
Thus, a Le Pen win scenario, which would be disastrous for France will face another scenario of Le Pen losing with this small margin, allowing her to gain 40% of the votes of the French people and putting her in the forefront of the political life. This is especially likely if she garnered a large proportion of the votes in the parliamentary elections slated for the second week of June, as echoed by her supporters.
Wallerand de Saint-Just [the National Front's chief financial officer and the head of the front block in the Ile de France County Council] spoke about this particular issue during an interview with the "Al Ahed" website saying that Marine Le Pen's party is waiting to get 50 parliamentary seats in the upcoming legislative elections and this will constitute a major change in the future of the French political life because of Le Pen's rejection of the European Union and her desire to withdraw from NATO.
Meanwhile, Macron has virtually no program and has no party on the ground. Therefore, he will rely on a parliamentary coalition representing all the parties in order to govern.
This will complicate the style of governance and his administration since the combination of conflicting parties does not lead to intact rule. Thus, he has the option of dealing with the parties that will enter his governmental coalition case by case, with the difficulty of applying his ideas of liberalism, in case socialists join his coalition.
He will also rely on a right-of-center prime minister to ensure that a large segment of the deputies of the traditional parties join his presidential alliance, and thus he will be the head of a government from all the conflicting and contradictory sides that are almost never in agreement.
Al-Ahed News
