The battering has not been lacking in recent years, and it would be unfair to blame a single president, a single manager. From ever-increasing abstention in legislative elections, over 50% in both rounds in 2017, to increasingly contested representativeness, MPs have been facing an existential crisis for some time now. Does Emmanuel Macron only integrate it or does he accentuate it through his successive democratic experiments?

During the first five-year term, he took the gamble of the Citizens’ Convention for the Climate, the results of which are severe. He is now launching the National Council for Refoundation to associate a maximum of forces with it and also, again, citizens drawn by lot.

The choice by the Head of State of the calendar, with this announcement ten days before the first round on June 12, is not the best publicity for the legislative elections. There is more troubling in this decision. It is first of all the sign of a paradox: it is therefore a question of finding a way to go and draw the necessary energy from society, but when the country is exhausted, finding the strength to move forward is not a matter not obvious.

Above all, it is the ultimate proof of a political power, including the presidential one, that has run out of steam: four rounds of voting in two months no longer give sufficient legitimacy to carry out an action. “Institutions have ceased to be the fabric of politics,” notes François Sureau in the JDD. And since nature abhors a vacuum, where will it go to nest?