A fragmented and unruly assembly

Parliament is divided into four groups, leaving Macron’s allies without a majority. Assembly’s coexistence coalition not easy:

Liberal Centre

Macron’s party and its allies. They have a relative majority, which forces them The opposition has to agree. Renaissance is the party founded by Emmanuel Macron in 2017. He then named it Republic on the Move, but changed its name after the 2022 presidential elections. It is a pro-European party that previously sold itself as “neither right nor left”, although most militants consider themselves center-right. The AFP agency defines it as “center-right in France, center-left in Europe”. At the time the French media compared it to Albert Rivera’s group Ciudadanos.

Modem and Horizons. They are liberal, centrist parties. They support Macron. The first (Democratic Movement) was founded in 2007 by François Bayrou, who ran for president three times. Horizons was created in 2021 by former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, who is also considered center-right.

Conservative right

The Republicans. They are the traditional right, the heirs of the UMP, a conservative party that came to rule with Jacques Chirac or Nicolas Sarkozy. Like the Spanish PP. They take the legacy of Charles de Gaulle as their own. They are on the right side of the parliamentary arc, but they have always tried to distance themselves from Marine Le Pen. There are several sensibilities in this party: those who might give their vote to Macron at a given moment and those who would support Le Pen. The president, Eric Ciotti, has just been expelled from the party for suggesting a pact with the far-right leader. There are also former Republicans in the French government, such as the interior minister.

perfect

They are the first force of opposition. There are two parties that represent it. Leading the pole is the National Rally (also called National Rally), led by Marine Le Pen. The party was founded by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 1970s under the name Front National, but she changed its name in 2018 as part of a process of normalizing her political discourse. She has softened the positions of Le Pen Sr., who was convicted of anti-Semitism, denialism and hate crimes. The RN has an anti-immigration and anti-Islam narrative and is Eurosceptic. She is trying to shake off his legacy by relying on young figures like Jordan Bardella to attract new voters.

The other party at this end is Reconquista. It is headed by Eric Zemmour, who was a candidate for president and is considered in France to the right of Le Pen: a more hardline extreme right. Nationalist and Eurosceptic, he opposes immigration and criticizes Islam. He promised to reduce immigration to zero and remove France from NATO. Le Pen considers his positions too radical and does not want to be identified with them.

Left

The third force in the opposition, the leftist bloc, is made up of several parties. In 2022, after the last legislative elections, they united under the Nupes bloc, but divisions dynamited the coalition.

La Francia Insumisa is the group that has the most weight. It is led by 72-year-old Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whom Macronism considers extreme and populist. It is they who make the most noise in the Assembly. Their positions are controversial and have caused rifts within the left, for example, when they refused to classify Hamas as a terrorist group after the October 7 attacks. They are also Eurosceptics. The forthright personality of Mélenchon, who came third after Marine Le Pen in the last presidential election, is uncomfortable. These have been imposed on environmentalists and communists, whose political weight has diminished greatly in recent years.

Socialist Party. Together with the Republicans, it was the dominant influence in French politics. The last president before Macron came to power was a socialist: François Hollande. Macron was in fact his finance minister. When he came out with his new party in the 2017 elections, he submerged the two large groups that had alternatives: the Republicans and the Socialists. Raphaël Glucksmann, the party’s candidate for the European elections, positions himself as a hope for the left, tired of Mélenchon’s profile.