Antoine Bristielle is director of the Opinion Observatory of the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, associate professor of social sciences and researcher at Sciences Po Grenoble.
FIGAROVOX. - "
I ask the French people to elect me Prime Minister
", declared Jean-Luc Mélenchon on BFM TV.
Certainly we do not elect a Prime Minister, but can we imagine a cohabitation imposed on the elected president, from next June?
Antoine Bristielle. -
Let's say something important first: Jean-Luc Mélenchon is right, strategically, to personalize the legislative elections with this issue of the election of the Prime Minister.
Its electorate, which is rather young and popular, tends to become demobilized once the presidential election is over.
Keeping him on alert by speaking of “third round” to qualify the legislative elections can prevent, in part, this demobilization.
That being said, the hypothesis of a cohabitation next June is clearly not unthinkable.
Ordinarily, we find that the legislative elections confirm the result of the presidential election, the French wishing to "give a chance" to the newly elected president by giving him a majority in the National Assembly.
The games are therefore not made for the next legislative elections.
Antoine Bristielle
But in the event of a – probable – victory for Emmanuel Macron next Sunday, the deal could be different.
In fact, when a president was re-elected in the Fifth Republic, he was coming out of a period of cohabitation each time.
The citizens could therefore think that he had not been able to carry out his policies in the last phase of his mandate and therefore wished to restore him to a majority in the Assembly.
This is not the situation in which Emmanuel Macron would find himself if he were re-elected and we can therefore assume that the motivations for the vote will be different.
The games are therefore not made for the next legislative elections.
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The National Council of the Socialist Party adopted a resolution on April 19 proposing to discuss with all the forces of the left, including La France insoumise, to find an agreement in the legislative elections. Can we think that the legislative elections will finally allow a great union of the left?
The union of a part of the left seems indeed possible but the union of the whole left will be much more complicated.
The New Anti-Capitalist Party, responding positively to Jean-Luc Mélenchon's call for union, also declared that it was unthinkable that this union also concerns the Socialist Party.
All parties or parliamentarians agreeing to subscribe to the main measures of the People's Union are welcome.
Antoine Bristielle
In an attempt to resolve these contradictions, the strategy of Jean-Luc Mélenchon - who finds himself de facto at the center of the game - is clear: put the program of the Popular Union, "l'Avenir en commun", at the center of the discussion .
All parties or parliamentarians agreeing to subscribe to the main measures of the People's Union are welcome.
It is therefore not so much a strategy of unity that seeks to establish Jean-Luc Mélenchon, but a recomposition of all the political space to the left of Emmanuel Macron.
Is this possible and desirable for rebellious France?
In 2017 as in 2022 Jean-Luc Mélenchon comes out of the first round of the presidential election in a clearly hegemonic position on the left.
Yet in the previous five-year term, Jean-Luc Mélenchon had failed to transform the presidential trial: the intermediate elections had not been favorable to the rebellious and he had thus had to start the 2022 campaign with a fairly low, around 10%.
We are indeed in the presence of a multilevel partisan system as the forces which dominate the presidential election are unable to reproduce these results in the other elections.
On the left, this is particularly striking: the PS and EELV, which emerged moribund from the 2017 presidential election, managed to make interesting scores in the following elections.
Everything'
The challenge for Jean-Luc Mélenchon is that this situation does not happen again and that the whole of the left rebuilds itself in a sustainable way around him.
To carry out this strategy, you clearly have to do it when you are in a position of strength, as is currently the case with Jean-Luc Mélenchon.