"Poker move," "Russian roulette," "gamble": Since Emmanuel Macron's surprise announcement that he was dissolving the Assemblée Nationale, the semantic field of irrationality has dominated political commentary. The foreign press, incredulous, has even gone so far as to ask: Has the French president gone mad? Let's not get lost in conjecture about his mental state: In politics, psychologizing explanations often betray an inability to grasp what is happening. However, I think it's important not to neglect the psychological approach to the political moment we're going through.
Starting with the act of dissolution in and of itself. Judging by its effects – a state of shock akin to that caused by the announcement of the Covid-19 lockdown – it would be wrong to view the analysis solely from a strictly political angle: If you think about it, the president has carried out what could be called a "psychological coup d'état." The expression has nothing to do with the legal aspect: The decision falls within the prerogatives of the president of the Republic, as set out in Article 12 of the Constitution.
The expression takes on its full meaning at the symbolic level: A psychological coup d'état is a political act with so much destabilizing power that it can provoke a form of mental neutralization. Firstly, by producing a strong sense of unreality: Did the event really take place, or did I dream it up? Have I missed an episode, and ended up in the middle of a film that I don't understand at all?
At the same time, this unreality brutally comes up against hyper-real consequences – and it's this clash of opposites that creates such confusion. The dissolution has all the hallmarks of a performative act, a kind of speech that has become so rare in politics, one that has real-world effects: As soon as it is uttered, it triggers a campaign that, from the outset, is characterized by urgency. A temporal urgency, with barely 20 days to campaign; and a political urgency, with the prospect of the far right coming to power. As former MP François Ruffin (La France Insoumise, radical left) summed up on the radio station France Inter: "We thought we had three years to give the country a way out. In the end, we have three weeks." Many would stay in bed low for less.
Plate tectonics
Among those most affected by this psychological coup d'état are the various political parties' campaign staffs. Worn out by a grueling European election campaign, they're now forced to get right back to work. Gone are the prospects of summer holidays, not to mention recovering hours of lost sleep: In the weeks to come there promises to be a huge increase in intensity.
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