“That's not the issue,” the French president responded when asked about the prospect of nominating a prime minister from the Left. Speaking on France 2 television, Emmanuel Macron did finally acknowledge that he had lost the recent parliamentary elections but, writes Mediapart’s publishing editor Carine Fouteau in this op-ed article, he still refuses to face up to the consequences, and instead imagines he can carry on with the policies that have led both him and France into a dead end. She argues that the president's continuing scheming to remain in power – which includes calling for a political 'truce' during the Paris Olympics - poses a threat to the rule of law.
IfIf one wants things to stay as they are, things will have to change. Rarely has this overused quote from Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel 'The Leopard' applied so aptly to French political life. Through the policies he has pursued over the past seven years and as a result of his recent high-handed decision to dissolve the National Assembly, the President of the Republic risked allowing the far-right – fresh from its success in the European elections - to come to power in France for the first time since the wartime Vichy regime.
