(LifeSiteNews) –– The European elections in France turned into a minor earthquake when in view of his party’s candidates’ dismal results, president Emmanuel Macron decided to “dissolve” the National Assembly, the French Parliament’s lower chamber.
He announced the move during a televised speech on Sunday evening, one hour after the first exit poll at 8 p.m. revealed that Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement national (“National Rally, RN) had won more than twice the number of votes nationwide under the party’s leader, Jordan Bardella, than Renaissance with its list of “Macronist” candidates led by the flavorless and virtually unknown Valérie Hayer. 31.37 percent and 30 seats in the European Parliament for the RN, versus 14.6 percent and 13 seats for the Macronists, to be precise, out of a total of 81 seats for France.
The socialists, with 13.98 percent and 13 seats, and the mainstream rightwing Les Républicains party, with only 7.25 percent and 6 seats, remain insignificant after having ruled over France for many years until Macron took over in 2017 and acted as an accelerator for the handing over of France’s sovereign powers to the European Union and for the increase of the “culture of death” in France’s legislation.
In particular, Macron touted LGBT and abortion “rights”: it was under his watch that lesbian couples were allowed to have recourse to artificial procreation, while the few remaining safeguards against elective abortions were dropped and abortion itself was enshrined in the French Constitution only a few months ago.
Macron’s move of dissolving the National Assembly – with immediate effect – had one very positive, and certainly unintended effect. Under his impulse, the government had presented a draft law on the “end of life” with the aim of making “assisted suicide” and “help with dying” legal. The bill, which avoided using the term “euthanasia” but meant just that, was heavily amended by the Legal Commission of the National Assembly and if adopted as such would have made France’s euthanasia rules the most liberal and “progressive” in the world.
The bill was supposed to have been discussed and adopted by last weekend, and everything was in place to have a solemn first reading at the National Assembly on June 11 before being fast-tracked to the Senate, being considered as a sort of legislative emergency by Macron’s will.
However, the debate lasted much longer than expected, with over 3,000 amendments and lengthy plenary sessions and last week, it was decided that an additional week of discussions was in order, with the solemn vote being pushed back until June 18.
The process has been unwillingly nipped in the bud by Macron’s political move, that bought France a reprieve from this further, grave step towards more state-approved killings which still looked inevitable only one day ago, as the bill was expected to be approved by Parliament without much opposition despite a number of minor tweaks.
On Sunday evening, somberly dressed in what looked like deep mourning garb, complete with a large old-fashioned black tie, Macron announced his decision to call a snap election, together with ominous warnings that France was at risk of being submerged by “extreme right-wing parties” who are “opposed” to the EU’s “steps forward,” who stand for the “impoverishment of the French” and the “downgrading of our country.” He also brandished the threats of “climate disruption” and “external hazards” – a veiled allusion to the Ukraine war – suggesting that the winning parties would not address them as required.
The parliamentary election will be fought in two rounds on June 30 and July 7. This means the competitors will need to set up candidates in as many as 577 constituencies in a record five days, by Friday, while talks take place at party level in order to negotiate withdrawal agreements: a must in a system where candidates need to obtain at least 50 percent of the vote in order to be elected in the first round, and all those who obtain more than 10 percent can compete in the second round if no one reaches the majority in the first round. In such a configuration, two candidates can lose to an opponent if the latter comes first, even if their scores are higher when combined. This process usually takes months: the top speed election will force parties such as RN and its main rival, Eric Zemmour’s Reconquête, as well as two or three smaller formations to decide on a strategy and to find the apt candidates whose likelihood of being elected to the National Assembly will be larger than ever before.
Reconquête, whose list for the European elections was headed by Marion Maréchal Le Pen, grand-daughter of National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and niece of the probable future candidate to the presidency of France, Marine Le Pen, obtained 5.3 percent of the vote and 5 seats in the Europarliament last Sunday.
Marion Maréchal Le Pen and several of the other elected members of Reconquête are openly Catholic and have much clearer stances on moral issues such as gender ideology, gender therapy, euthanasia and the like than the RN. The majority of the latter’s National Assembly members in the now-terminated legislative session voted in favor of the enshrinement of abortion in France’s Constitution. RN also stands for more “socialistic” solutions such as full pension rights at age 60, even though the population is aging and birthrates are falling rapidly, and has done all it could to obtain the popular vote at a time when France is suffering from high inflation linked to the COVID crisis and already suffers from compulsory levies of over 46 percent of the GNP, the highest rate in Europe.
France’s sovereign debt ratio with regard to the gross national product is so bad – over 5 percent – that its credit rating was downgraded by Standard & Poor’s on May 31, while immigration from non-European, mostly Muslim countries is on the rise, food prices are high, and interest rates are preventing many from buying new or old homes, and rental property is ever scarcer as “climate change” regulations become more and more stringent.
In this context, many political commentators are wondering whether Macron hopes to lose the upcoming elections in order to be “forced” to make an RN representative his prime minister, leaving the newly-formed government to wrestle with the many problems France is faced with and thus rushing his opposition to its downfall at the next presidential election scheduled for 2027.
Lack of income in the already bloated state will leave very little wiggle-room for the RN and at any rate, 80 percent of France’s legislation is already handed down from the EU, so the existence of such a Machiavellian scheme could in fact be close to the truth. The more so because both parties, RN and Reconquête, are firm on immigration issues which were central in the debates running up to the European vote, however these are largely controlled by the European Union.
On the other hand, Macron may well be anticipating a rush of multi-partisan support against the “extreme right,” such as he obtained in his two preceding presidential campaigns when faced with Marine Le Pen in the second round. If this is indeed his gamble and it does come off, he will be free to promote euthanasia and submit more completely to the internationalist policies of the globalists he so consistently serves: under his second term as president, since 2022, his policies were somewhat hampered by the minority rule of his Renaissance movement in Parliament, even though this did not prevent successive governments from forcing through highly unpopular legislation with very little regard for the elected Parliament, using Constitutional devices that allow short-circuiting the popular representation.
The most likely outcome, however, is that the RN will confirm its success and the true question is how it will use it for the good of the country.
France, the Church’s “eldest daughter,” certainly needs a political revival, but this would be both incomplete and weak if a spiritual return to its Christian identity, truth and robust morals are lacking. The spectacular thunderbolt that Macron has unleashed into France’s political arena can in principle make many things possible, even the best and least expected – but not without a rejection of the present collective apostasy of its rulers.