I am now thinking that maybe this gamble was not so crazy. I say this cautiously, without totally believing it because, since the announcement of the dissolution of the National Assembly, I have been through all the stages. First of all, I thought and said publicly, in the heat of the moment, that we should indeed, yes, absolutely, ask the country whether the 40% or so of the vote that went to the extreme right was only an expression of anger or of a real desire to bring the Lepenists to power. I was convinced that we had to go through this moment of truth, because in my view it was impossible for 4 out of 10 French people to have swung to the extreme right, but the next day, Monday morning…

What a hangover! There was not a radio station or TV news programme that wasn’t already debating the conditions under which the Rassemblement National would be able to govern and the reasons that had led the President to commit such a folly. I could already see them, these professional liars, these demagogues, these public dangers, entering the ministries and announcing very quickly that they were going back on their promises, cutting social welfare, slashing the European budget and blocking aid to Ukraine.

I could see Trump and Putin smile with delight, as the Union was unravelling at the very time when it needed a common Defence and industrial policies, and the paper I had sent to Libération seemed, on re-reading, frankly absurd. I had entitled it “How not to become a Lepénist”. I set out the three conditions under which we could avoid such a disastrous fate, but all my reasoning now seemed wrong, because just by the speed at which the unthinkable was entering the conversations, I understood that everything was ruined. In 48 hours I had been back and forth 48 times, but in the last few days… what can I put it?

Let us take the facts and describe them. Whatever was left of the once Gaullist right wing – not nothing but not much – has exploded. In statements whose vigour did credit to their political family, virtually all the elected representatives, leaders and major figures of the right condemned the electoral agreement that the president of their party had just concluded with the far right.

It was “no, no, and no!” and those 99% of the right who had not already joined the Macron caucus thus found themselves on the fringes of that great moderate, European and increasingly Keynesian centre to which they are in fact so close. So why shouldn’t they one day come to accept the idea, advocated on Wednesday by Emmanuel Macron, of a “federation” of social democrats, the centre, the right and the ecologists?

Obviously, there will be no agreement between the right and Macron before the elections. Like the left, the right will want to defend its identity at the ballot box, but once the results are in, everything could well change. If the Lepénistes win an absolute majority, the right, the left and the Macronie will find themselves together in opposition to the far right and in support, de facto at least, of Emmanuel Macron, who remains President and uses all his constitutional powers against it. If, on the other hand, the Lepenists do not win enough seats to govern, the possibility of a rapprochement between a large part of the right and the Macronist centre will become strong, even very strong.

On the right, this dissolution has already brought about many changes, but on the left?

The dissolution has resuscitated the left. The repulsion that the mere prospect of a far-right government inspires in the Socialists, the Insoumis of the radical left, the ecologists and the Communists’ ranks is such that it did not take them two days to agree on the need to reach an agreement. Despite the substantial differences between these four currents, there is a strong unitary dynamic on the left, the advantage of which is to mobilise its voters, every single one of them, in the fight against the Lepénistes.

The left is not yet in a position to obtain an absolute majority, but it could contribute to closing the doors of power to the Rassemblement National and would then have to choose between paralysis of the Assembly and a form of rapprochement with the centre and the right. Faced with this alternative, it is not impossible that the left will divide as deeply as the right has just done and that its more moderate components will agree to support some of the initiatives of the centre and the right or even join them in a unity government.

We do not know, but on both the left and the right, this dissolution has reopened the field of possibilities at a time when the humiliating defeat of the presidential camp in the European elections had added to the unpopularity of Emmanuel Macron, who had already been governing for two years without a parliamentary majority. France was condemned to a mortifying stalemate that would lead to further gains for the far right, but this dramatic turn of events turned the tables and forced everyone to make immediate and radical changes. More than politics, it is prestidigitation, but there was probably nothing better to do and… who knows?