By: New York Times Paris June 11, 2024 03:01 IST Follow Us Facebook Twitter whatsapp On the face of it, there is little logic in calling an election from a position of great weakness. But that is what French President Emmanuel Macron has done by calling a snap parliamentary election in France on the back of a humiliation by the far right. After the National Rally of Marine Le Pen and her popular protégé Jordan Bardella handed him a crushing defeat Sunday in elections for the European Parliament, Macron might have done nothing, reshuffled his government, or simply altered course through stricter controls on immigration and by renouncing contested plans to tighten rules on unemployment benefits.
Instead, Macron, who became president at 39 in 2017 by being a risk taker, chose to gamble that France, having voted one way Sunday, will vote another in a few weeks. “I am astonished, like almost everyone else,” said Alain Duhamel, the prominent author of “Emmanuel the Bold,” a book about Macron. “It’s not madness, it’s not despair, but it is a huge risk from an impetuous man who prefers taking the initiative to being subjected to events.
” Shock coursed through France on Monday. The stock market plunged. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, a city that will host the Olympic Games in just more than six weeks, said she was “stunned” by an “unsettling” decision.
“A thunderbolt,” thundered Le Parisien, a daily newspaper, across its front page. For Le Monde, it .