French election: Macron seeks allies after losing majority

French President Emmanuel Macron met with leaders of opposition parties on Tuesday, in the first step of potentially arduous negotiations after losing his parliamentary majority following elections on Sunday.

The loss means Macron's "Ensemble" (Together) centrist bloc needs support from opposition benches to salvage the president's reform agenda. Macron's bloc is 44 seats short of a majority. 

The meetings at Elysee presidential palace in Paris came after recently appointed Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne formally submitted her resignation Tuesday, which is in line with tradition after parliamentary elections. To keep his government going, Macron promptly rejected the offer. 

An unnamed presidential official told France's AFP news agency that Macron believed the government needed to "stay on task and act." The talks with opposition parties would seek "constructive solutions," the official added.

Macron looks for a potential conservative alliance

The political fragmentation following the election means Macron and his political allies may need to negotiate on a bill-by-bill basis with opposition parties where political priorities align.

The center-right alliance led by Les Republicains (the Republicans), which won 61 seats, has been seen as a potential ally for Macron's centrist bloc. Indeed, Macron's first meeting on Tuesday was with conservative leader Christian Jacob.

After the meeting, Jacob accused Macron of being "arrogant" during his first term as president and said the Republicans would not enter into a "pact of coalition" with the centrists, adding that his party would remain in the opposition.

"We're not going to betray those who showed faith in us. Those who voted for us did not do so for us to enter with little thought into any old coalition," Jacob told reporters.

However, Jacob said he would not "block the institutions," leaving the possibility open to voting in favor of policies that are in line with the Republican platform. These include pension reform and raising the retirement age.

Jacob's bloc is the only group that is both large enough in its own right to give Macron's bloc a majority and simultaneously not openly and obviously hostile to the president. 

Meetings with the left and right 

Macron also met with Olivier Faure, the head of the Socialist Party, a junior partner in theleft-wing NUPES bloc which would a be more unlikely political bedfellow.

Faure said his party would be willing to back Macron's policy proposals if the president took on some of the NUPES alliance's ideas. The leftist coalition has proposed a measure to raise monthly minimum wage from about €1,300 euros to €1,500 (around $1369 to $1580)

"We have had a so-called Jupiterian period when the president decided alone and where he was not accountable to anyone," Faure told reporters.

"From now on...he is forced into accepting a bigger role for parliament ... and it's rather healthy that he be accountable, negotiate, seek points of agreement."

However, Faure's center-left party only holds 26 of the 137 seats belonging to NUPES overall — not enough to push Macron over the finishing line. The majority of NUPES' seats, 71, lay with the far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon's La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party, which is far less likely to seek common ground with Macron. 

Macron is also set to meet with far-right leader, and presidential election rival, Marine Le Pen, whose Rassemblement National (National Rally) posted its best-ever election performance, winning 89 seats.

France's political culture differs from that of Germany, for example, where political coalitions are more common.

The 2022 election is the first time that a sitting French president does not have a legislative majority since Socialist President Francois Mitterand after 1988's elections. 

If Macron's Ensemble fails to secure support from the opposition, France will likely face political deadlock that could ultimately force Macron to dissolve parliament and call a new election.

wmr/msh (AFP, AP, Reuters)