France is stuck.
Almost a week after a legislative election that produced a deadlocked Parliament, and two weeks from the start of the Paris Olympics, discord reigns and nobody can even agree on whether the vote produced a winner.
The left thinks it won. The right argues that France voted for it, if the 146 seats of the far-right National Rally are included. The center, diminished, wants to bridge the divide but for now nobody is interested.
Next week, on July 18, the new National Assembly is constitutionally obliged to gather for the first time. It will attempt to name a president of the Assembly in an atmosphere of deep mistrust and national restiveness. The caretaker prime minister, Gabriel Attal, is scarcely on speaking terms with his former mentor, President Emmanuel Macron, who did not consult him on his abrupt decision last month to call an election.
The New Popular Front, a left-wing alliance that won the most seats but fell far short of an absolute majority, claims victory. It has promised all week to propose a prime minister from its ranks, but it has yet to reach agreement on who that will be.
The impasse reflects internal discord, above all between moderate socialists and the far-left France Unbowed party. It is just one of many deadlocks within the larger French paralysis.
Sophie Binet, the general secretary of the large General Confederation of Labor union, has called for massive demonstrations in front of the National Assembly to press for the naming of a left-wing government. “Macron wants to steal our victory,” she wrote this week in the newspaper Libération.
Right-wing lawmakers, including Marine Le Pen of the National Rally and more moderate conservatives, have said they would immediately vote to bring down any New Popular Front government.
The left was incensed by a letter from Mr. Macron this week that said of the election, “Nobody won it.” The president, having plunged the country into turmoil with his recourse to a snap election, has largely withdrawn into a shell since its outcome.
“Macron might have said that the New Popular Front was the first in the Assembly, but compromise is needed for a government to be formed,” said Clément Beaune, a former minister in successive governments during the Macron presidency. “He chose not to, and that just reinforced the unity of the left.”
Under the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, the president names the prime minister, and there is no time limit for this choice.
Mr. Macron appealed in the letter for calm negotiations between forces with “clear republican values,” but excluded both Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed and the National Rally. In effect, Mr. Macron decreed that the two “extreme” parties, as he calls them, which won more than 200 seats in the 577-seat Assembly, were incompatible with the functioning of the Republic.
“It’s the return of the royal veto over universal suffrage,” Mr. Mélenchon declared.
Mr. Mélenchon is never short of a pithy phrase, but having said that not one comma of the New Popular Front’s agenda will be changed, he does appear short of conciliatory flexibility. With about 190 seats, including allied lawmakers, the left is close to 100 seats short of a working majority. It is unclear how he proposes to overcome this conundrum.
There is general agreement that Mr. Macron’s letter has created more tensions than it has resolved. The election revealed a country reinforced on the left and on the right, with Mr. Macron’s middle much weakened. He appears an increasingly isolated figure.
After seven years in office, trying to govern without building a strong centrist party and without adopting an identifiable political credo, Mr. Macron has succeeded in reviving the very left and right he declared obsolete when he took office in 2017.
“Macron lives in a closed world where political rationality no longer exists,” said Marisol Touraine, a former socialist health minister. “The election was an irrational decision that has produced total blockage. Will people stay calm because the Olympics are coming? I am not sure of that.”
Paris is rapidly transforming itself into an Olympic city, with most bridges in the center closed to traffic, temporary metal bleachers going up on several of them, sidewalks along or near the Seine fenced off for security and Olympic banners of strangely muted colors everywhere.
The talk of the town was supposed to be the summer games by now. Instead, it is the political mess precipitated by a wild presidential gamble and the country’s limbo.
Bruno Le Maire, the outgoing economy minister, has warned of “a financial and economic shipwreck for France” if the new government does not slash spending to confront a spiraling budget deficit and national debt.
That is not Mr. Mélenchon’s intent. He wants to lower the retirement age to 60 from 64, which would cost the state a lot of money.
“We are drowning in the grotesque,” said Philippe Labro, an author and political commentator.
How much the political crisis and the Olympics will intersect is unclear, but the clock is ticking. The Olympic flame will arrive in Paris on Sunday after crossing much of the country, a powerful symbol of the imminence of the games.
Sunday is also Bastille Day, when France commemorates its Revolution, the eternal symbol of this country’s ingrained, bristling rejection of anything that smacks of absolute rule.
“The prime minister has to be either a Socialist or moderate conservative from the Republicans,” said Mr. Beaune. “Macron cannot choose someone from his own party, as if the election never happened.”
The problem is that either of those choices would almost certainly provoke outright rejection from the other side.
Mr. Macron wants to be a unifier, giving lessons on a new French parliamentary political culture. But his capacity to bring France together, or to personify the ascent of the legislature he long scorned, is now minimal.
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