Denis Baranger, professor of public law at the Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas law school, is the author of La Constitution, Sources, Interprétations, Raisonnements ("The Constitution, Sources, Interpretations, Reasoning,") and Le Droit Constitutionnel ("Constitutional Law," as part of a series of academic introductory guides). He co-directs the "Jus Politicum" blog, whose posts were published in 2023 by Panthéon-Assas' publishing house (Les Démocraties Face au Covid ("Democracies in the face of Covid") with Cécile Guérin-Bargues and Olivier Beaud).

What do you think of the president's decision to dissolve the Assemblée Nationale?

This move clearly has far-reaching consequences. Dissolution is a prerogative that the president can exercise at his discretion, the Constitution requiring only that he consult the prime minister and the presidents of the Assemblées [the Assemblée Nationale and the Sénat].

In France, dissolutions are rare. Everyone remembers the great "failure" of former right-wing president Jacques Chirac's 1997 dissolution, which led to a cohabitation [a situation in which the president and the prime minister are from opposing political blocs] with the left, with the Socialist Lionel Jospin becoming prime minister. I was reminded this morning of what Patrick Devedjian [MP from 1944 to 2020] had said at the time: "We were in an apartment with a gas leak. Chirac struck a match to clear things up." Today, the spark could take the whole house out.

Traditionally, a dissolution is understood as an appeal to the people, but in this case, the people have just spoken, therefore it's not about that. Nor is it a kind of political gamble on the next election, as with a normal dissolution. It could well be that, with this rather risky gesture, Emmanuel Macron has put an end to his own political experiment, this "world that comes after" which will have been no more than an interlude. He has sacrificed his troops and his own term in office, at least in terms of the full possession of his presidential prerogatives. He may have just put an end to Macronism.

Is there an institutional logic to linking the French national political timeline to the outcome of the European elections? Or should we, more prosaically, analyze the dissolution as a political "move"?

There was nothing that required that the European elections be linked to the legislative elections, which are purely national: It was the president who, with the dissolution, has created a drive belt connecting the European elections, which are generally quite decoupled from national politics, and the institutions of the French Fifth Republic.

You have 74.41% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.