| Some empires take centuries to die. Others fall in a matter of days, like overripe fruit. President Emmanuel Macron is neither a tsar nor a sultan, but he has ruled France unchallenged since 2017 and his time is now running out. Since announcing the dissolution of the National Assembly on the evening of the European elections on 9 June, the French president has been watching the “new world” he wanted to create crumble around him. His early allies are starting to abandon ship. “It was the president of the republic who killed the presidential majority,” former prime minister Edouard Philippe explained a few days ago, calling for the formation of a majority with “a new logic” after the early legislative elections on 30 June and 7 July. Bruno le Maire, Macron’s minister for economy and finance for seven years, pulled no punches in criticising the cloportes [woodlice] surrounding the president. Le Maire has decided not to run, explaining that “his greatest political battles [are] ahead of [him]”. Summoned to the front line to try to save what can be saved, and in fact having become the main figure of the majority, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is urging voters to “choose” him in the elections, avoiding any association with a president to whom, in his own words only a short while ago, “he owed everything”. On the ground, the bravest members of the majority are fighting to save their seats, Others are already packing their bags. Whatever the outcome of the forthcoming elections – and so far it looks like both the far-right and the left will come out ahead of Macron’s list – the president has given assurances that he will not resign. He intends to see out his term of office, which runs until 2027, watching from the Élysée Palace the implosion of the French political scene that he himself organised. The programmes of the hastily arranged left-wing alliance Nouveau Front Républicain (NFP) and the far-right movement Rassemblement National (RN) would lead “to civil war”, he continued to explain in a podcast broadcast on 24 June. | 