Was Macron right to warn of a ‘civil war’ in France after the coming election?

With the far right posed to take more seats than at any time since 1940, and politicial tensions at thier highest point in decades, why did the French president call for an election in the first place, asks Richard Ogier

Why would Macron bring populism knocking at the door in France? (AP)

Macron the self-aggrandiser? Impulsive seeker of the media “buzz”? It always seemed that the French president’s most hectoring critics portrayed him thus, despite cutting unemployment to record lows, enabling business and being a major, ideas-driven figure on the world stage.

And yet dynamic Emmanuel Macron lent credence to the view of him as an unusually narcissistic leader last week, when he raised the spectre of “civil war” should either the extreme right or left win snap parliamentary elections in France, the first round of which is today.

On a podcast, the centrist president said the solutions of the far-right National Rally (RN) to problems of crime and immigration “categorise people in terms of their religion or origins, and that is why it leads to division and to civil war”. Meanwhile, he suggested the hard-left France Unbowed – leaders of the four-party New Popular Front (NFP) – advocated a particular brand of identity politics “solely categorising people in terms of their religious outlook or the community they belong to”, which could also lead to civil war.