The German media are particularly on the attack, three weeks after the political earthquake caused by Emmanuel Macron with his decision to dissolve the National Assembly on the evening of the European elections.
On Sunday, the National Rally (RN, far right) and its allies came first in the votes and obtained their best score in the first round of voting, with 33.14% of the vote and 10.6 million votes.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung (liberal left-wing newspaper) denounces Macron’s “poker move” which “opened the door wide to the far right”. “If the Lepenists come to power, it will also be his failure, his fault,” analyzes the newspaper, because “his optimism and self-aggrandizement come into such conflict with the pessimism of the French that many simply want to see him go.”
For Die Welt (conservative-liberal), “this election buries macronism” and a president who “made the wrong calculation” with his “me or chaos” strategy.
The Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung (also conservative-liberal) criticizes the French president’s “inconsiderate reaction to the European elections”. “The country is moving towards cohabitation, perhaps towards a blockade of its political system. France could be absent from the EU and NATO for years. This would please Moscow,” asserts the daily.
In the United Kingdom, the French legislative elections are making headlines in most daily newspapers, which have not spared their criticism of the executive.
The French political situation rebounds in Belgium and causes unease among Les Engagés
Macron “humiliated”
“The French right humiliates Macron,” writes The Times on its front page. A view shared by the Daily Mail tabloid, which writes that the French head of state has “opened the door to economic and political instability.” “This is not just a crisis for France. It is a crisis for the European Union, with one of its main founding members set to have a parliament, and perhaps a government, full of Eurosceptics,” the newspaper, a fervent defender of Brexit in 2016, continues.
In Italy – the country of far-right leader Giorgia Meloni – the first print run of the country’s Il Corriere della Sera is scathing: “the French right yesterday went from the heirs of de Gaulle to those of Vichy and French Algeria, a provincial and resentful France that believed itself beaten by History.”
“History will tell whether Macron was the man who delayed this worrying metamorphosis or the one who offered France to the new right,” summarizes the newspaper.
The centre-left daily La Repubblica and the Turin newspaper La Stampa nevertheless note that “nothing has been done yet”, welcoming the withdrawal agreements announced to counter the RN.
In Switzerland, the major German-speaking daily TagesAnzeiger headlines: “The Le Pen wave erases Macron’s aura of power.” And to deplore that “the country of Enlightenment, human rights and cosmopolitanism is drifting further to the right than ever – and perhaps towards darkness, isolation and xenophobia”.
“French democracy speaks and it scares,” judges the editorial of the leading French-speaking Swiss daily Le Temps.
Finally, on the other side of the Mediterranean, an editorial in the independent French-language Lebanese daily L’Orient-Le Jour concludes that “France is not an island”. “What is happening there is essentially part of a dynamic that goes beyond it and that could be summed up as follows: democracies are in crisis, nation-states are deeply fractured, the West lives in the real or imagined feeling of decline”.
And “all this naturally provokes fears, anxieties and identity withdrawals which far-right populism feeds on like no other movement.”
