At the National Assembly, a return to the fog

Signs stamped “17th legislature” indicate the way to new deputies. An employee passes a final mop in the “sacred perimeter” where only deputies are admitted, which borders the hemicycle. The Assembly hairdresser reopens its doors... The lower house returns to its rituals at the dawn of a mandate which promises to be unprecedented.

In the main courtyard, two long white tents show the way to the hemicycle.

Inside, deputies can collect the paraphernalia of the perfect elected official: the tricolor sash, the cockade for their vehicle, the "barometer", a badge worn in public ceremonies, and a regulation of the Assembly.

At 14:00 p.m. sharp, the two heavy carriage doors slowly open. Aurélien Saintoul (LFI), re-elected a few hours earlier in Hauts-de-Seine, crosses the threshold. “I’m going to start the administrative work,” breathes the deputy, red tie around his neck and blue suit on his shoulders.

Behind him comes with a determined step his departmental neighbor Pierre Cazeneuve, one of the two Macronists elected in the first round.

“Honored” but worried, he calls on voters to “mobilize”: “if the National Front has an absolute majority on Sunday it will be the ruin of our economy, the capitulation of our republican values, and submission to foreign powers.”

“Mixed feeling”

If the approximately 39 far-right deputies have not planned to arrive with fanfare on Monday - RN executive Sébastien Chenu entered without speaking to the press - a good part of the 32 winners on the left are there.

“It’s a way of saying to French people: +keep hope, there are many parliamentarians from the New Popular Front who have already been elected”, explains the First Secretary of the PS Olivier Faure, quiet winner in Seine- et-Marne who takes the time to mime a boxer guard in front of the photographers.

But the clouds and the gray-black sky reflect the fears of certain arrivals and the boss of the PS himself has a "mixed feeling", faced with the projections giving more than 200 deputies to the National Rally: "it's always impressive to see that the extreme right occupies such a space in the hemicycle I dread this moment.

"I'm going there with responsibility but I'm really going there with something heavy", confides to AFP the ecologist Sandrine Rousseau, "very worried" about a democracy "won by a form of Trumpization".

Clémentine Autain (Seine-Saint-Denis) says her “pride in representing a popular territory”.

“And at the same time this joy totally tarnished by the result,” she admits.

No crystal ball

With around twenty re-elected deputies, the Rebels packed up, meeting near the Assembly to enter together around 15:30 p.m. behind their leader Mathilde Panot.

“We are all in the fight,” insisted the elected representative of Val-de-Marne, castigating the supporters of “neither RN, nor LFI”: “history will record that some would be more shocked by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, our strong voices and our tone that of the far right in power".

Sitting on a sofa, Philippe Juvin will not see any comrades from the Les Républicains group joining him there on Monday. Certainly Christelle D'Intorni who sat with him was re-elected in the Alpes-Maritimes, but within the framework of the agreement between Eric Ciotti and the RN. “I am sad for my party which suffered a defeat. We must draw the consequences,” he judges, even if he hopes for “25 to 50” LR deputies next Monday.

The fact remains that the anesthetist-resuscitator is cautious about the near future of the National Assembly, identifying two paths. Either "the RN has an absolute majority, governs, it's called parliamentary democracy, and then we see what happens, good luck to them", or "there is no majority and in this case we enter into something no one has ever experienced.”

Will the Assembly be ungovernable? Will the RN want to access responsibilities without an absolute majority? “I don’t have a crystal ball, I don’t know,” admits the MP, who in any case imagines LR remaining “in the opposition”.