Sometimes you have no choice but to roll the dice. That is where France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, found himself on the night of June 9th. He had just received a thumping in elections to the European Parliament, in which the National Rally (rn), led by Marine Le Pen, won twice as many votes as his own party, Renaissance.
Already, in his own national parliament, he has to govern with a minority, cobbling together support as best he can to get his government’s domestic legislation through, usually with great difficulty. The boost to Ms Le Pen’s standing from her big Euro-win risked making him a lamer duck than ever, with the very real prospect that the opposition would anyway force an election later in the year by voting down his budget.
An untenable position, then. As in America, French presidents cannot pass much of their domestic agenda without a majority in the legislature; Mr Macron has a prime minister, who runs the day-to-day business of the government, but in the normal course of things the government still needs to win votes to pass legislation. At the moment, Mr Macron’s party has no majority, but neither can anyone else form a majority government.
