And was he right? Yes and no. Voters didn’t put the National Assembly in power, but they didn’t put his own centrists back in power either. In fact, they put nobody in power, delivering an almost three-way tie between the left (182), centre (168), and right (143).
So Macron (whose own term runs until 2027) then had to figure out who could cobble the numbers together to form a new government. He went with centre-right former Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, achieving the difficult balance of equally irking everyone just enough to keep the show on the road. But the left (who won the most seats and so wanted the top job) were particularly peeved, and rejected Barnier from the outset.