French leftist leader Melenchon says left ‘ready to govern’

Jeddah - Yasmine El Tohamy - BERLIN: A senior member of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s party said Sunday that France had “avoided the worst” after projections showed the far right losing the second round of legislative elections.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who stunned the country by calling the snap vote last month after the far right trounced his centrist alliance in EU elections, was “politically weakened,” Nils Schmid said.

Estimated results showed a broad left-wing alliance becoming the largest group in France’s National Assembly, with Macron’s centrists in second and Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) in a surprise third place.

Pre-election polling had put the RN in first, raising fears for the European Union’s future direction with an anti-immigration, euroskeptic party potentially controlling the government of a key member.

“The worst is avoided, the RN cannot form a governing majority,” Schmid, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) foreign policy spokesman in the German parliament, told the Funke press group.

Macron is “politically weakened” because his group lost a significant number of seats but “retains a central role” with no party claiming an outright majority, Schmid added.

Forming a government will be “tricky” and parties must show “flexibility” and an “ability to compromise,” said Schmid, whose country has long been used to drawn-out negotiations leading to seemingly unwieldy coalitions.

Scholz’s government is made up of his SPD, the Greens and the liberal FDP. But French politics is unaccustomed to such arrangements.

“The crisis isn’t over, quite the opposite,” said Germany’s conservative FAZ daily.

“France, and with it Europe, are heading for an unstable period” with the prospect of “fragile government coalitions depending on the extremes and liable to fall at any moment,” it added.

The country’s most-read daily Bild wondered if far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon, who it said was “contemptuous of Germany,” would take power.

For center-left daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, the “republican front stopped Le Pen” and the RN, but parliament will be “very fragmented” and Macron had “isolated himself on the Mount Olympus of power.”