Even before the start of the « consultations » of the President to appoint a Prime Minister, the New York Times already prophesied on July 8 that the outcome of the legislative election would plunge France into a “imbroglio that could last for months”Faced with an Assembly fragmented into three blocs, none of which is asserting itself, the leading American daily doubted that the “Napoleon in the making” French people succeed in “to submit to the throes of laborious negotiation” between parties with different points of view “very divergent.”
Nearly two months – and no nominations – later, this prediction is confirmed in the eyes of the Western press, which points to the responsibility of the French president. By refusing to accept the defeat of his camp, and by continuing his Jupiterian presidency while the result of the legislative elections would require a change of policy, Emmanuel Macron has made France “ungovernable”she believes at the start of the school year.
“On both sides, ideological stubbornness prevails,” noted the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung at the end of August, deploring the absence of a “culture of compromise” on this side of the Rhine. And for the German conservative daily, this “political paralysis ” is first to be attributed to the president, who “conducts consultations in an authoritarian manner” and “refuses” to the New Popular Front (NFP), which nevertheless came out on top in the legislative elections, “a leadership role in the negotiations.”
In Belgium, where the search for a coalition is “a well-established habit”, The Free is also surprised in an editorial: “Whether on TV sets or in the columns of newspapers, political “leaders” and observers only talk about him [Emmanuel Macron]. But to stop there would be to forget that, precisely, the French voters, by voting as they did in June, have shifted the centre of gravity, which has passed from the Elysée to the headquarters of the parties.
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“As if there had been no election”
Parliamentarian logic would thus require Emmanuel Macron to let go and leave it to the Prime Minister to create and lead his coalition. But by persisting in “micro-manage the formation of the new government”the head of state “gives the impression that he has not digested the consequences of his electoral gamble”, raise the Financial Times from the UK. “Macron is behaving as if there had been no election “, adds the Spanish daily The Countrywho fears that this “unprecedented interim situation” in France leaves the European Union without a leader, at a time when the German far right is making a historic breakthrough in certain regions.
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