French Elections, Setback of Majority's Loss in Parliament: Op-ed

The ruling coalition "Together" led by French President Emmanuel Macron suffered a resounding political loss after it had lost the absolute majority in the second round of the legislative elections. The coalition has previously enjoyed overwhelming majority in the National Assembly.

Final results showed Macron’s centrists taking 245 seats, well short of the 289 required for an absolute majority.

But his party, La République En Marche, which is soon to be renamed Renaissance, suffered several symbolic defeats as key figures in Macron’s circle were voted out.

These included Christophe Castaner, the former head of Macron’s party in parliament. Richard Ferrand, an architect of Macron’s centrist movement and the former head of the French parliament, was ejected from his seat in Brittany.

Le Pen's National Rally (NR) party, which had just eight seats in the outgoing parliament, saw its biggest parliamentary success in decades, winning 89 seats and becoming the third power in the legislature, according to the preliminary results.

La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), led by Jean-Luc Melenchon, became the first opposition pole in the country by entering with 150 deputies to the National Assembly.

Most observers of French political affairs said that France will enter a period of uncertainty and political instability.

The parliamentary elections did not give a majority to any party, and it was marked by the far-right’s achievement of great progress.

These elections pided the political scene into three blocs: the center led by Emmanuel Macron, the extreme right led by Marine Le Pen and the left coalition, starting with the radical left and ending with the socialists, led by Jean-Luc Melenchon.

This mean that even if the French people elected Macron as a president for the second time, they did not give him a "blank check."

His party punished the French voters in these elections and made it difficult for him to reach consensus that would have enabled him to form a ruling majority, pass his economic reform agenda, deepen integration with the European Union, raise the retirement age and inject new blood into the French nuclear sector.

"France is not doing well," this is the prevailing impression in the intellectual salons and in the prominent French institutional reports.

The state suffers from a crisis of trust between the citizens and the state.

We remember one of Newsweek headline in the French magazine "Le Point," titled “How are revolutions born, are we in the year 1789?”.

As is well known, the French Revolution broke out in 1789 in a period of social and political turmoil that greatly affected France and all European countries, during which the absolute monarchy that had ruled France for several centuries collapsed within three years.

French society underwent a process of transformation with the abolition of feudal, aristocratic and religious privileges, the emergence of radical left political groups, as well as the emergence of general public role and the rural peasants in determining the fate of the society.

It also raised what was known as the principles of the enlightenment, which are equal rights, citizenship and freedom, as well as, eradicating prevailing ideas of traditions, hierarchy, the aristocracy, and the royal and religious authorities.

In this period, the state experienced a phase of mistrust, like what is happening nowadays, and at that stage the state was at the mercy of the beneficiaries of the quarter economy, which feed the state treasury.

Nowadays, the state is politically subject to the French, that are financing them. According to many strategists, all political actors are not in the correct political movement and they are all mired in the quagmire of situational self-defense.

King Louis XVI had created a powerful totalitarian feudal system. The same thing is said of the French Fifth Republic by De Gaulle.

The disaster came when you create a strong state and it is ruled by weak or illegitimate people.

There is a huge trust problem between the French people and politicians.

The French people no longer trust them, their ideas, or their ideology, and every time, they change their electoral orientation and it has an effect on state's fate.

What is important from this example is that the issue of trust is one of the determinants that characterize the course of the stat's formation and institutions.

Although the political societies are different from one country to another, the extent of their cohesion and strength in response lies first and foremost in trust.