| The announcement by President Emmanuel Macron that he is dissolving the National Assembly and calling snap elections caught me (and the rest of the world, probably) by surprise just two minutes before I went live on TV on Sunday night. I was in the European Parliament preparing to comment on the overall preliminary results of the European elections. I had prepared the punch lines to deliver the message that there were no surprises because the opinion polls had predicted everything – including the huge rise of Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement national in France and the bad results for Macron’s Besoin d’Europe list. I was going to say that, with a majority of 400 MEPs representing the pro-European forces, the rise of the far right in some EU countries should not hugely impact the European Parliament. Then came the news from Paris – and I changed my discourse completely. Macron took a huge gamble with his move, which represents a potentially fatal risk for him personally but also for Europe. There was no apparent reason why the French president had to resort to this. France’s constitution doesn’t require such a reaction, and my French friends tell me no one had expected him to take such a step. Macron had personally denied time and time again that the outcome of the EU elections would have any repercussions on French politics. Under the French constitution, the president can decide to dissolve the National Assembly and call for new legislative elections. This is meant to get out of stalemates where the Assembly cannot decide on a clear political direction. But this possibility is seldom exercised – there have been only five instances in modern French political history where the national assembly was dissolved. | 