French voters propelled the far-right National Rally to a strong lead in first-round legislative elections Sunday and plunged the country into political uncertainty, according to polling projections.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who called the surprise elections just three weeks ago, urged voters to rally against the far right.
Projections by polling agencies suggest the National Rally stands a good chance of winning a majority in the lower house of parliament for the first time, with an estimated one-third of the first-round vote, nearly double their 18% in the first round in 2022. The party is building on its success in European elections that prompted Macron to dissolve parliament and call the surprise vote. The second round will be decisive but leaves open huge questions on how Macron will share power with a prime minister who is hostile to most of his policies.
The two-round elections that wrap up July 7 could impact European financial markets, Western support for Ukraine and the management of France’s nuclear arsenal and global military force.
France will return to the polls for a second time next week as both the far right and leftist parties failed to win a decisive victory, while support for President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist bloc collapsed.
Parties are competing for a total 577 seats in the National Assembly, the French equivalent of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Macron called the snap election a day after his party was crushed by RN during June’s European parliamentary elections. His decision was widely seen as an attempt to spook voters away from the political extremes, but his gamble backfired after a lightning-fast, three-week campaign, failed to turn the tide.
“The center has imploded,” said Samantha de Bendern, a geopolitical consultant for the news outlet La Chaine Info, said before the election. “Macron miscalculated. He was hoping the moderate left and moderate right would both come to him. Instead, they’ve both joined the extremes.”
Macron shocked the world when he called the snap election under no obligation to do so, sparking the extraordinarily high-stakes vote that may bring France into political turmoil and leave his legacy in tatters.
What’s next?
While first round results offer a picture of overall voter sentiment, what the French National Assembly will be made up of remains to be seen as parties regroup, make alliances in some constituencies or pull out of others, ahead of the run-off vote on July 7.
While RN will likely win most votes in the first round, they will still require another surge in support ahead July 7 to secure the remaining contested seats.
What’s likely to emerge is a hung Parliament populated with adversaries from opposing parties, setting up the possibility of political paralysis and damaging inaction, making it far more difficult to pass new legislation, and any pending legislation may struggle to advance.
If there is no majority, Macron will be tasked with naming a prime minister from the parliamentary group with the most seats at the National Assembly. The prime minister serves as head of government and oversees much of the day-to-day domestic policy, while the president has control over foreign policy.
But the contentious composition of the government could turn this into a tumultuous process — a candidate can risk being overthrown through a no confidence vote if other parties join together. France could be left without a prime minister as political parties jocky for power.
“Either we have no government, a technocratic government, or we haggle for months over who should be prime minister,” de Bendern said. “A year and one day after the dissolution of Parliament, Macron can call new parliamentary elections, so we will have a year of chaos.”
But the second round of voting is more difficult to predict as voters that supported fringe parties in the first round lend their votes to the leading parties.
France could still produce a surprise majority.
Who are the far right?
National Rally is the party poised to claim the most votes, which falls in line with pre-election polls that showed a surge in support for the far right and left, and a collapse in support for the center.
The flag-bearer for the party in these elections is Jordan Bardella, a clean-cut, media-savvy 28-year-old. A loyal protégé of Marine Le Pen, the party’s leader, Bardella was voted president in 2022. (Le Pen is believed to be angling for the French presidency in 2027). With Bardella front-and-center, National Rally wrenched power from the center during this month’s EU Parliamentary elections.
Bardella had pledged to fight a “cultural battle” against Islam, anti-immigration, a platform of “France for the French,” and policies that benefit the working class — a rebuke of some of Macron’s most controversial policies, including pension reform and abolishing a tax on France’s richest.
The party has also gained supporters after Marine Le Pen began steering it away from its roots as an extreme ethnocentric party, as it was under her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, its founding president who led the party until 2011.
Originally called the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen was openly racist and convicted multiple times of making antisemitic comments and dismissing the Holocaust as a “detail” of history.
Still, some members of RN continue to express racist, antisemitic or homophobic views, and according to a report published Thursday by the French National Consultative Commission on Human Rights, 54 percent of RN supporters described themselves as racist.
The far right has long been on the cusp of power. In 2017, Marine Le Pen came in second to Macron for the presidency. Macron beat her handily then, but by 2022, he did so with a smaller majority, with Le Pen winning 41.45% of the vote in the run-off.
Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris and a member of the Socialist Party, says she fears for her country’s future in the face of such extremism, calling Le Pen a huge risk for the country.
“People in France say we don’t have experience with these people, but we had the experience during the Second World War. … It is a very, very big risk for democracy, for minorities, for women,” she told NBC News, referring to France’s Vichy government during World War II, which collaborated with the Nazis.
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