PARIS — Emmanuel Macron faces a bitterly painful choice: Throw everything he’s got at stopping the far right, or try to save what remains of his once-dominant movement before it dies.
For the 46-year-old leader of France, Sunday’s first-round parliamentary election was a humiliation every bit as personal as his stunning rise to the presidency as a fresh-faced outsider seven years ago.
He called the snap vote, after a disastrous defeat at the hands of the far right in June’s European election, with one aim in mind: to halt France’s lurch to the extremes in its tracks. He achieved the opposite.
Europe’s second-biggest economy and its only nuclear-armed power is now closer than ever before to ushering in a far-right government for the first time, after Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) took a dramatic lead in the first stage of voting.
If the second-round vote on July 7 delivers a parliamentary majority for the National Rally — and forecasts suggest it’s possible — France will be in uncharted waters. France will be governed, at least in part, by politicians who made their names sympathizing with Vladimir Putin while vowing to rip up the European Union, wage war on migration and quit NATO.
Although Le Pen’s party has softened some of its sharper-edged positions, it remains deeply skeptical of Western mainstream political positions. A victory in this election would provide a powerful boost to her chances of winning the French presidency in 2027.
“We can say with lucidity that the detoxification of the National Rally is reaching its final stages,” said Bruno Cautrès, a political analyst with Sciences Po institutes.
“They won the European election three times in a row and Marine Le Pen twice got through to the second round of the presidential election; if they win France’s second-most-important election [the parliamentary election], they’ve become mainstream,” he added.
According to analysis from the Ipsos polling institute, Le Pen’s party’s projected results put it within touching distance of power. Her party got 33.2 percent of the vote in the first round, meaning the far right could get between 230-280 seats in parliament, according to the institute.
With the threshold for commanding an absolute majority in parliament is 289 seats, the far right may even be in a position to form a government in a week’s time, with National Rally President Jordan Bardella as its prime minister.
The question now is whether anything, or anyone, can stop it.
How close Le Pen gets to an absolute majority depends on how other parties, and Macron, react to her resounding victory. Do they put their differences aside and unite to beat the far right?
The parliamentary election is a complex, two-round process in which the two candidates who get the most votes in the first round go through to a second round. But in this crucial election turnout was high, and that meant that in up to an estimated 315 constituencies a third candidate, often someone from Macron’s “Ensemble” coalition, also qualified for the second round.
On Sunday evening, Macron’s allies were trying to work out what to do.
Protests in Paris
Ensemble candidates have been eliminated in half of France’s 577 constituencies. Macron’s centrist parliamentary group is set to shrink from 250 lawmakers to fewer than 100 in the National Assembly. Now his centrist allies face enormous pressure to pull out of the race in many areas and advise their supporters to vote for the left-wing alliance, which includes far-left radicals, in an attempt to beat Le Pen.
After the initial projections were released, thousands of French citizens converged on the Place de la République in Paris to protest against the far right. The scenes were reminiscent of protests against Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, who qualified for the second round of the presidential election in 2002 as the candidate for the party then known as the National Front.
Back then, parties and voters joined together against the far right, putting their differences aside to beat the extreme candidate under a policy known as the cordon sanitaire. But European politics has changed dramatically over the past two decades.
The far-left France Unbowed party and its leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon has emerged as arguably an even greater foe for the centrists than Le Pen, after a year spent fighting in the National Assembly. Macron himself has spent much of this campaign slamming the policies of the left wing New Popular Front alliance, which includes the far left, as “grotesque” and destructive for France.
Speaking a couple of hours after the defeat, Macron’s Prime Minister Gabriel Attal underscored the point: He called for “no vote to go to the National Front,” but he hinted that candidates belonging to Macron’s coalition should only bow out in cases where a candidate from “republican forces” was better-placed to win — possibly excluding France Unbowed candidates.
The clearest sign of the cordon sanitaire breaking came from Macron ally and former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, who explicitly called on voters to oppose the National Rally and France Unbowed, too.
“As the left has made Macron its big opponent, and Mélenchon and Macron have spent months fighting a huge political battle, it’s hard to resuscitate the cordon sanitaire,” said Bruno Jeanbart, a pollster from OpinionWay. “We also don’t know if it will make a difference with voters.” Jeanbart added that often centrist voters abstain when given the choice between the far left and the far right.
Tuesday deadline
Candidates who have qualified for the second round of voting have until Tuesday evening to decide whether they will pull out of the race or continue to fight. On Sunday night, it appeared that in many constituencies the third best-placed candidate was pulling out to help an opponent beat the National Rally.
This means seat estimates for the far right were “already out of date” as they were based on second-round contests before candidates started withdrawing, according to Brice Teinturier, director of Ipsos polling institute, speaking on BFMTV.
The National Rally has said it would not try to form a government if it does not win an absolute majority in parliament. On Sunday, Le Pen insisted Bardella would only become prime minister if National Rally had the support of parliament. Traditionally, the French president nominates a prime minister from the largest parliamentary group in the National Assembly.
“Without a clear majority, there will always be old feudalisms, wilful inertia and political maneuvering that will wreck the true alternative that the country needs,” Le Pen said during a campaign event in the Eastern town of Hénin-Beaumont.
To be able to reach an absolute majority, Le Pen would need to strike a deal with MPs from the conservative Les Républicains party. But Le Pen’s pre-election alliance with Les Républicains leader Eric Ciotti sparked a fierce backlash from party heavyweights.
If the election delivers a hung parliament, Macron’s political project may take a little longer to die.
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