After three tense rounds of voting, French lawmakers on Thursday re-elected a centrist ally of President Emmanuel Macron as president of the National Assembly, infuriating the left after its victory in parliamentary elections this month.
Yaël Braun-Pivet, a member of Mr. Macron’s Renaissance party, won with 220 votes in the 577-seat assembly to 207 votes for André Chassaigne, the candidate of the New Popular Front left-wing alliance that came in second.
In effect, after weeks of political tumult, the result gave the impression that nothing had changed in France. The so-called Republican front of left and center parties that kept Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally from power in the runoff election on July 7 turned into a center-right front to keep out the left.
The turnabout strengthened Mr. Macron’s position and enraged left-wing lawmakers. Olivier Faure, the Socialist Party leader, called the result “a form of holdup,” and Mathilde Panot, the president of the far-left France Unbowed party, condemned “an anti-democratic coup.”
In fact, it was a question of math. The New Popular Front, an alliance of leftist parties, won about 190 seats in the assembly, the largest of any group, and was able to nudge that score up by 17 votes on Thursday. But Mr. Chassaigne, a Communist Party lawmaker, did not have the votes to carry him over the line. Ms. Braun-Pivet, by contrast, benefited from support of center-right parties that rallied to her cause after the first round of voting.
“Our country is fractured,” Ms. Braun-Pivet told lawmakers immediately after she was re-elected. She called for a new spirit of understanding and promised to respond to anger over falling purchasing power and to the widespread feeling among people in what France calls the “periphery” that they are neglected to the point of invisibility.
She thanked Mr. Chassaigne, a veteran lawmaker with more than two decades in the National Assembly. He received a standing ovation, and came closer to leading a Parliament than any communist in Western Europe in recent years. But the anger of the left, expressed in some heckling of Ms. Braun-Pivet, will not quickly abate.
Zahia Hamdane of France Unbowed, the party of the firebrand far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, said, “We are experiencing a total denial of democracy that ignores the needs of French people and their wish to break with the current politics.” She predicted that there could well be “people in the street to demonstrate because this is just not possible.”
The likelihood of street protests did appear greater but could be offset by timing. Many Parisians have left town, the imminent Paris Olympics have brought enormous police reinforcements to the capital, and August is near, with its large exodus to the beaches and mountains.
The vote did not fundamentally alter the political impasse in France, with the Olympics opening in a week. No group in the National Assembly — left, center or far right — has a majority, and none appear able, for the moment, to form a coalition broad enough to secure one.
The president of the National Assembly does not have executive powers, but Ms. Braun-Pivet’s election seems likely to comfort Mr. Macron in his apparent determination to seek a prime minister from the center or center-right.
Anne-Laure Blin of the conservative Right Republican Party said its objective was to keep the far left from power. “It’s not a matter of conscience; it’s a matter of pragmatism,” she said.
There is no deadline for the selection of a new prime minister, whom Mr. Macron alone can appoint. But Patrick Weil, a historian at the Sorbonne University in Paris, said before the result was known that if “the left loses, it will give Macron an option to try to create a more right-wing government.”
The French Fifth Republic, established in 1958 with a powerful presidency conceived to curb parliamentary instability, has never previously been without a government for weeks or months on end, a situation familiar to countries like Germany, Italy and the Netherlands that have parliamentary systems. Nor does it have a tradition of opposing parties forming governing coalitions.
In this sense, it has entered a new and unpredictable phase in its politics.
The left-wing coalition that won the most seats in the election — though far short of a majority — is a jumble of parties spanning from the center left to the far left, and has spent most of its time since the vote bickering. It managed to select Mr. Chassaigne as its candidate only at the last moment.
Sebastien Chenu, a senior figure in Ms. Le Pen’s party, secured 141 votes in the final round.
Flavien Termet, a lawmaker with the National Rally, stood next to the ballot receptacle, a large vase, as the first-round ballots were cast. As the youngest member of the National Assembly, age 22, he was accorded this honor.
But several lawmakers walked past Mr. Termet without shaking his hand because the National Rally, with its quasi-fascist roots, is still viewed by some as an anti-democratic party.
The official groupings in Parliament have yet to be formed. So lawmakers sat in alphabetical order, creating unusual juxtapositions, including for Ms. Le Pen, who sat next to a far-left lawmaker, Antoine Leaument. He describes himself as inspired by Robespierre, who presided over the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.
Gabriel Attal, the French prime minister, tendered his resignation on Tuesday but will stay on in a caretaker capacity until a new government is formed. That will most likely be after the Paris Olympics, and perhaps not until September.
The National Assembly that emerged from the snap election is split between three large blocs. The New Popular Front left-wing alliance has about 190 seats, the centrist Renaissance party of Mr. Macron 150, and the far-right National Rally 142. The remaining seats are divided among smaller parties that were not part of those blocs.
The New Popular Front claimed the right to propose a name for prime minister on the basis of its election performance. But the two biggest parties in the coalition — the moderate Socialist Party and far-left France Unbowed — have not been able to agree on who that should be.
“The French left, we don’t like each other,” said Emmanuel Grégoire, the former deputy mayor of Paris and a newly elected lawmaker with the Socialist Party. “We fight all the time.”
Mr. Grégoire accused France Unbowed of being “people who shout very loud.” Certainly Mr. Mélenchon has been uncompromising, and last October he insulted Ms. Braun-Pivet, who is Jewish, by saying she was “camping in Tel Aviv to encourage the massacre.”
Lawmakers with France Unbowed, on the other hand, have accused the Socialist Party of lacking the courage to reject “Macronism,” a mishmash of centrist ideas whose core is simply the personality of the president, and to turn away from less-regulated market policies.
“We don’t want the Socialist Party to become a central force with a policy of accommodating the system,” said Aurélie Trouvé, a lawmaker with France Unbowed.
In the end, the splits in the left made the result today likely, leaving many people in France with the impression that nothing fundamental has shifted, other than the fact that the country is now more ungovernable.
“We have reached the limit of our institutions,” said Marie-Charlotte Garin, a Green lawmaker.
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