According to initial projections, the National Rally party won an overwhelming victory in the first round of voting in the French National Assembly, bringing the party’s nationalist and anti-immigration political stances, long considered taboo, to the threshold of power for the first time.
Pollster forecasts are usually reliable and, based on preliminary results, show the party taking about 34% of the vote, well ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Ennahda party and its allies, which received about 21%.
The results of two rounds of elections, which will culminate in a runoff between the main parties in each constituency on July 7, are not reliable predictors of how many seats each party will win in parliament. But it now looks likely that the National Alliance will emerge as the largest force in the lower house, though not necessarily with an outright majority.
The New Popular Front, which consists of moderate socialist to far-left parties, was predicted to win about 29% of the vote. The voter turnout was very high, reflecting the importance voters attached to this early election, with a turnout of more than 65%, compared to 47.51% in the first round of the last parliamentary election in 2022.
For Macron, who has been president for seven years, the result represents a serious setback as he had gambled that his party would not repeat its crushing defeat to the National Rally in recent European Parliament elections.
“The time has come to build a large and clearly democratic and republican coalition in the second round of elections, facing the National Rally,” Macron said in a statement immediately after the predicted results were released.
At the moment, when the national rally is apparently going smoothly, it is unclear whether this is still possible.
National Front leader Marine Le Pen declared that France’s vote was “unequivocal and opens a new chapter after seven years of corrosive power”. She urged supporters to ensure her protégé, Jordan Bardella, 28, becomes the next prime minister.
Macron’s decision to hold the election just weeks before the Paris Olympics shocked many in France, especially his prime minister, who knew nothing about it. The decision reflects a top-down style of governance that has left the president even more isolated.
While Macron had no obligation to plunge France into summer chaos with a hasty vote, he was convinced it was his democratic duty to test the mood of the French with a national election.
He also believes that by October the dissolution of the National Assembly and elections will be inevitable because his proposed deficit-cutting budget is expected to meet insurmountable opposition.
“It would be better to hold elections now,” said an official close to Macron, who requested anonymity in line with French political practice. “According to our polls, by October the National Rally will inevitably have an absolute majority.”
Of course, when the second round of voting is held a week later, the National Rally could have an absolute majority of 289 seats in the 577-seat parliament. Since the last parliamentary vote in 2022, Macron’s party and its allies have taken about 250 seats, but due to the lack of an absolute majority and the inability to form a stable coalition, Macron has suffered setbacks in his efforts to achieve his agenda.
In the run-up to the election, Macron tried various threatening rhetoric, including potential “civil war,” to warn people not to vote for so-called “extremists” – the National Rally, which treats immigrants as second-class citizens, and the far-left France Indomitable, which promotes anti-Semitism.
He told retirees they would be left penniless. He said the National Rally represented “the abandonment of all that made our country attractive and attractive to investors.” He said the left would cripple the French economy by taxing it too heavily and shut down nuclear power plants that provide about 70 percent of France’s electricity.
“These extremes are precisely the cause of poverty in France,” Macron said.
But those calls fell on deaf ears because Macron, whose once-dominant centrist movement suffered a crushing defeat, has lost touch with the people his National Rally appealed to despite his achievements, including a sharp drop in unemployment.
People across the country feel the president disrespects them. They feel the president doesn’t understand their struggles. They feel the president pretends to listen, but that’s all. To find a way to express their anger, they joined a party that believes immigration is the problem, even though an aging France needs it. They shut down that party, the National Rally, whose leader didn’t go to an elite school.
The rise of the National Rally has been unstoppable. Founded more than half a century ago as the Front National by Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and Pierre Bosquet, who was attached to a French Waffen-SS division during World War II, the party has faced an iron wall on its way to government for decades.
This stems from the humiliation of the collaborationist Vichy government during World War II, which deported more than 72,000 Jews and sentenced them to death, and the French are determined not to try to establish a far-right nationalist government again.
Le Pen expelled her father from the party in 2015 after he insisted that Nazi gas chambers were a “historical detail.” She renamed the party and took on the articulate, hard-to-rage Bardella as her protégé. She also abandoned some of her most extreme positions, including her push to leave the European Union.
It worked even though some of its principles had not changed, including the party’s eurosceptic nationalism. Also unchanged was the party’s willingness to discriminate against foreign residents as well as French citizens and its insistence that the country’s crime rates and other ills stem from too many immigrants. Some studies question the claim.
For Macron, who has a limited term and must leave office in 2027, it looks like he will face three tough years. Just how tough will be will only be known after the second round of voting. It looks like he may be remembered as the president who allowed the far right to enter the highest office of government. It is not clear how he will govern at the head of a party that represents everything he has resisted and condemned throughout his political career. If the National Rally wins the premiership, it will lead to Mr. Badella is already positioned to set much of the domestic agenda.
Macron has vowed not to resign under any circumstances, and the president of the Fifth Republic typically has broad control over foreign and military policy. But the National Rally has already said it wants to limit Macron’s power. There is no doubt that if the party wins an outright majority it will try to do so.
Macron took a huge risk. “Refuse to fail. Accept the awakening and let the Republic move forward!” he declared soon after his decision. But as the first round of elections approaches, the Republic seems to be hurting and divisions are deepening.
