Not even the Covid-19 emergency is stopping French President Emmanuel Macron's hemorrhage of consensus. And this time it is not only the polls that are losing blows, but the majority itself in the Assemblée Nationale, the equivalent of our Chamber of Deputies. The president, although returning fromimportant agreement found with Angela Merkel on the Recovery Fund, on the domestic front he instead collects the first real split of his party, La République en marche (LREM). After a series of failures over the years, the remaining deputies within Macroni's party were still 295, above the minimum threshold of 289 for having an absolute majority. Today though 7 of them still dropped out of LREM, and together with other previous exiles (and also from other parties) they founded a new group in the Chamber, the ninth: it is called "Ecologie, démocratie, solidarité" and will give you a hard time.
Above all, the birth of the new parliamentary group leaves the one headed by Macron with just 288 members, that is, below the absolute majority, albeit by just one deputy. Nothing to worry about then, at least for now, given that the centrist Modem party (of François Bayrou) with its 46 deputies, and the center-right party Agir which has 9 deputies. However, for the tenant of the Elysée, this is more than an alarm bell: the splitters are clearly the representatives of the left and ecological wing of LREM, which in the midst of an emergency they did not hesitate to express their disapproval especially on social, migration and environmental policies. Among them is also the former Minister of Ecology Delphine Batho, a "Hollandist".
The reactions to this move were not slow: Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire spoke of “grenouillages” (in French grenouille means frog, therefore jumping from one group to another). “I am sorry that someone is still playing on the left/right opposition, a paradigm that the French had chosen to overcome with the 2017 vote,” Le Maire said. "It is an affront to President Macron and a lack of respect for the voters," added LREM spokeswoman Marie-Christine Verdier-Jouclas. The case comes just a few weeks after the ballots in the municipal elections, the first round of which was held in March, only to postpone the second due to the virus. The Transalpine Scientific Committee has given the go-ahead to complete the electoral round which sees the renewal of the mayors of 35.000 Municipalities, including Paris, where the favorite is the outgoing mayor Anne Hidalgo, a socialist, and where Macron's party flopped in the first turn, having to change the candidate a few days before the vote due to a sex scandal.
