In an interview published by Franceinfo, Yaël Braun-Pivet looks back on the dissolution of the National Assembly. Emmanuel Macron decided it on June 9, 2024. The president of the Assembly says she was more informed than consulted, despite her institutional role. She also describes a lasting political wound within the presidential majority.
A Consultation Described As Being Presented With A Done Deal
The testimony concerns a short sequence, but one heavy with consequences. The podcast Dans les yeux d’Agathe is at the heart of her account. Franceinfo published excerpts on May 26, 2026, then an update on May 27. Yaël Braun-Pivet says the presidential decision remains, for her, “a mystery.” She does not dispute the formal existence of an exchange with Emmanuel Macron. She questions its real scope.
According to her account, the head of state announced before several majority officials that he would resort to dissolution. The president of the National Assembly then asked for a separate exchange, in the name of the consultation provided for by the Constitution. Emmanuel Macron replied to her, again according to her, that he was already consulting her. Yaël Braun-Pivet instead considers that she was “informed” rather than “consulted.”
This nuance shifts the debate. The decree records the procedure. But her account raises questions about the real place left to parliamentary voice in the face of a decision already made.
Article 12 Sets The Framework, Not The Quality Of The Exchange
The constitutional text gives the president of the Republic a distinct power. Article 12 of the Constitution provides that he may pronounce dissolution after consultation with the Prime Minister and the presidents of the two assemblies. It therefore requires a preliminary step, without detailing the duration, form, or intensity of that consultation.
The decree of June 9, 2024 does mention this consultation. It names the Prime Minister, the president of the Senate and the president of the National Assembly. Legally, the official document records the procedure. Politically, Yaël Braun-Pivet’s testimony questions something else. It contrasts entering the loop with being genuinely associated with the decision.
On June 9, 2024, Emmanuel Macron publicly presented his choice as a return to the voters after the European elections. In his address to the French, he said he had carried out the consultations provided for by Article 12. He then described the dissolution as an “essential moment of clarification.” The contrast with the account given by Yaël Braun-Pivet lies less in the written procedure than in the political experience of that procedure.
The Other Path Proposed Already The Next Day
Yaël Braun-Pivet says she proposed an alternative. She wanted to open, during the summer, a discussion with The Republicans. The goal was to build a coalition, then appoint a new government at the start of the parliamentary session. Dissolution would have come only in case of failure. According to Franceinfo, she says she advocated this option directly to Emmanuel Macron. He would have preferred the element of surprise and the rapid organization of legislative elections.
This disagreement is not only reconstructed two years later. As early as June 10, 2024, LCP reported a publicly known line. The outgoing president of the Assembly defended the idea of “another path,” that of a coalition. This continuity gives weight to her current testimony. Her opposition does not appear as a belated reinterpretation. It forms a line expressed the day after the announcement.
Her reservations are therefore not isolated in time. They accompany a presidential majority weakened by the European elections of June 9, 2024. The sequence then shifts to early legislative elections, and then to a more fragmented Assembly. Yaël Braun-Pivet returned to the rostrum on July 18.
A Personal Wound That Has Become An Institutional Question
In the interview, the president of the Assembly describes a sidelining that goes beyond procedure. She says she felt like “an insignificant quantity.” She recalls her experience as a deputy, her time on the Law Committee and two years already spent at the rostrum. She links this feeling to the broader unease of majority elected officials. They would have experienced the dissolution as a form of “betrayal” and “contempt.”
These words remain those of Yaël Braun-Pivet. No public element allows, at this stage, to establish the exact content of the one-on-one. She describes that exchange with Emmanuel Macron in the Élysée garden. No recent response from the Élysée has publicly clarified or contradicted this version.
The interest of this testimony therefore lies in its double reading. It tells of a personal wound, but it mainly sheds light on the real role of Parliament in a decision that sends deputies before the voters. The Constitution provides for a consultation; political life, however, is played out in the way that consultation is conducted, heard, and taken into account.
Two years after the dissolution, Yaël Braun-Pivet thus brings back to the forefront a question the decree does not resolve. In a regime where the president can dissolve, what is the value of the voice of the president of the Assembly? The question directly concerns the institution she leads.