| Macron called this summer’s snap election in the hope of drawing a line under his centrist coalition’s disastrous results in June’s European elections, and persuading French voters to send a clear message that the far-right National Rally (RN) should not be given power. In the event, his coalition lost more than 80 seats – and although the RN was eventually pushed into third place after victory in the first round, no one bloc has control. The leftwing alliance, the NFP, won the most seats – but fell well short of an absolute majority. In a country with no tradition of coalition negotiations in a divided parliament, that is not a recipe for stability. After a political truce during the Paris Olympics, Macron is now tasked with naming a prime minister. “But no one group has enough support to ensure clarity,” Kim Willsher said. Macron has said that “nobody won” the election and that a “broad gathering” is necessary; the left say that they finished first and should therefore have the right to choose a prime minister, calling on Macron to be a “referee … not a selector”. But Macron, who might be expected to chafe at that designation, this week rejected the left’s candidate, Castets. “He brought this on himself,” Kim said. “He was advised not to call this election, but he went ahead and did it. It’s pretty hard to see what the way out is right now.” Meanwhile, the acting government led by Macron loyalist Gabriel Attal staggers on. Why did Macron reject Castets? Almost nobody had heard of Castets untill a few weeks ago. A 37-year-old career civil servant who is director of financial affairs at the city hall in Paris, her candidacy was driven by France Unbowed, the party of radical left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Castets is not a member of the national assembly; until her selection, she did not have a Wikipedia page, and was surprised to get a phone call proposing her candidacy when out for a bike ride. But the fact of her low profile is one of the reasons she was able to gain support across the left, divided over the more familiar candidates under consideration. Also in her favour is her lack of ambition to run for the presidency. Castets wants to roll back pension reforms that increased the retirement age from 62 to 64, and to improve funding for health care and education by creating a new wealth tax. “But what Macron says is that, yes, you have the support of your bloc, but all these MPs from the other two blocs are against you, so you can’t possibly run a stable government,” Kim said. One crucial distinction is the one that Macron makes within the left: while he says that other parties in the coalition could form part of what he calls the mainstream “republican forces” that could come together, he excludes France Unbowed from that equation, calling them an “extreme movement” that is guilty of “antisemitism, factionalism” and, “a de facto break with the values of the Republic.” . “It’s not personal to Castets,” Kim added. “Macron would argue that he’s being responsible by looking for a leader who can command stable support. But nobody else has come up with who that would be.” Appropriately enough, she points out, casse-tête is French for a head-scratcher. How has the left responded? Unsurprisingly, France Unbowed is outraged that Macron puts them in the same category of political exclusion as the RN, pointing out that their success was a key reason for the far right’s failure. France Unbowed and the other members of the left bloc “do not see eye to eye on a lot”, said Kim. “They formed this alliance to see off the far right. So it’s shaky. But it’s holding together so far.” There is little prospect of the alliance collapsing to allow the left-centre coalition that Macron would like. The NFP has arguably been weakened by Mélenchon’s call for Macron to be impeached – a prospect with little chance of success given the high bar for such a move to succeed, and which was swiftly rejected by others in the coalition. Marine Tondelier of the Greens warned against such a move by saying that “polyphony should not become cacophony”. Nonetheless, there are those who feel that the left has a legitimate right to be in government given the absence of alternatives. See this editorial in Le Monde yesterday, for example: | 