Macron succeeds in attracting conservatives to lead the Assembly and relegates Le Pen and the left

The alliance between the parliamentary bloc of President Emmanuel Macronwith his Renaissance party, with the conservative party, The Republicans (LR)concluded this Saturday the process of controlling the majority of the positions in the French National Assembly.

Tough the rapprochement of part of the conservative right with Marine Le Pen’s partyNational Rally (RN for its acronym in French), Emmanuel Macron has managed to make ‘an unexpected turn’ and to ‘bring LR back onto their side’ to share important positions in the Assembly and thus relegate Le Pen’s party and the left grouped in the New Popular Left Front (NFP).

After winning the presidency of the chamber on Thursday, a position held by Macronist Yaël Braun-Pivet againand securing four of the six vice-presidencies on Friday afternoon and evening, the alliance today took six of the eight committee presidencies.

The other two were for the left. The Finance Commission, which is always for the opposition, will once again have at its head Eric Coquerelof The Insoumise France (LFI).

Beyond the election of National Assembly positions, the alliance of the three centre and centre-right parties that make up Macronism with the conservatives seems to be consolidating itself as a possible alternative government against the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP).

This alliance slightly exceeds the left in number of deputies (213 to 193), although far from the absolute majority of 289.

President Emmanuel Macron shas yet to nominate a candidate for prime minister after the second round of early elections on July 7, and the left has not been able to reach a consensus due to differences between its two main members: the Socialist Party and LFI.

Rise of criticism

At the moment, the The pact between Macronists and conservatives was harshly criticized today by the far right and its allies.

“This is a democratic theft (…) a pitiful spectacle,” denounced Eric Ciotti, leader of the small faction of the LR that allied itself with the far-right National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen.

The RN is the party with the largest parliamentary group, but it has been left out of all the important positions in the General Assembly, for this reason the RN deputy Jean Philippe Tanguy has defined the situation as a “corruption pact“.

This morning, the RN had already reported as “a democratic scandal“the agreements between parties that left his party without any of the six vice-presidencies of the National Assembly despite having been the party with the most votes in the last elections.

The pact between the Macronist bloc and the LR (with only 47 deputies out of a total of 577), said on Friday night that these two groups each obtained two vice-presidencies, while the remaining two went to the left-wing alliance.

“This agreement has been seen by the whole world,” exclaimed RN leader Marine Le Pen, who He accused the LR of having “sold out” to the Macronist bloc.

“Democratic scandal”

Le Pen, in a statement to the press during the early hours of the morning after the end of a very long session of the Assembly, denounced that the LR achieved more than almost eleven million votes in the June and July elections, by 1.5 million of the conservatives.

This means that the LR has achieved representation at the Assembly table that “legitimately corresponded to the RN“, he insisted.

“It is a democratic scandal“, the RN stated in a message in Xin which he recalled that, without alliances, it constitutes the first parliamentary group of the new National Assembly.

The RN was also left without any of the twelve secretariats, of which nine went to the left, grouped in the New Popular Front, and the rest to Macronists or conservatives.