French far-right dominate elections amidst attempts to halt their victory 

By Monica Sestito

Shortly after Marine Le Pen’s far-right party, Rassemblement National (RN), emerged dominant in the first round of French legislative elections last Sunday, thousands of protestors poured into the Place de la Republique. 

A sense of urgent desperation gripped the crowd. As one university student protestor told Politico, “We have a week left, so we’ll keep fighting.” A RN-led government would be the first in French history since World War Two with a far-right political program and neo-Nazi lineage. 

President Emmanual Macron called snap elections in June after RN routed his centrist alliance, Ensemble, in the European parliamentary elections. This manoeuvre, which most mainstream commentators have dubbed a political gamble, has catalysed the dynamics already present in French politics: namely, the discrediting of the political centre and normalisation of the far-right as a supposed alternative.  

RN won around 33 per cent of the vote, in what amounts to a tremendous rise from 18 percent obtained by the party in the 2022 elections. The left-wing grouping, New Popular Front (NFP)––a coalition of the radical left party France Insoumise (FI), the Greens, the Socialists and the Communists––scored second-best, obtaining around 28 per cent of the vote. Macron’s Ensemble alliance won an embarrassing 21 per cent of the vote. Electoral participation reached 68 per cent, the highest figure since 1997. 

The far-right RN, whose program unashamedly includes restricting dual citizens’ participation in the public service, denying citizenship rights to children born and raised in France by migrant parents, and banning the hijab from all public spaces, therefore stands to hold the greatest weight in the 577-seat National Assembly. Its 28-year-old leader, Jordan Bardella, has made no secret of the explicit Islamophobia that would drive him as Prime Minister.   

Whether or not RN will obtain enough seats (at least 289) to form an absolute majority in the National Assembly remains, however, uncertain. The second and final round of voting this Sunday 7 July will be decisive. 

The French parliament is not formed through proportional representation. Instead, voters across the 577 French electoral districts are required to participate in two rounds––in the first instance, selecting from the full range of candidates in their district; and in the second, selecting from the candidates who won at least 12.5 per cent of the total first-round votes. 

In most recent elections, second rounds have generally amounted to a runoff between only two candidates. In 2022, for instance, only a handful of the 577 electoral districts involved a choice between three or more candidates. This time, however, three candidates progressed to the second round in 301 of the 577 districts, usually representing either RN, NFP or Macron’s Ensemble. 

The interval between the two rounds has put to the test the appeal often used by Macron in previous elections to demand support for himself instead of the far-right RN: that is, the need to faire barrage, to support any other candidate besides that of RN. 

On Sunday night, immediately after the first-round results came out, Jean-Luc Mélenchon declared that all NFP candidates who finished third would withdraw before the second round to help halt RN, reducing as many electoral district contests as possible to a battle against the far-right. 

Macron and his Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, later urged a ‘republican’ vote against the RN. Considering that Macron and his allies spent most the electoral period campaigning against NFP––slamming the party’s economic program as “four times worse” than that of the RN, condemning, in an ode to the racist discourse of the far right, their approach towards the rights of migrants as “immigrationist,” and weaponising their opposition to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza––their recent call to voters to block against the far-right rings hollow. 

And even despite this, some figures within Macron’s camp still cannot countenance withdrawing their candidates in favour of those from NFP. Former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire have said that FI, the single biggest political force within NPF, poses a threat to French democracy. The implication is that the party is politically unconscionable to the same, if not a greater, extent than the quasi-fascist RN. 

By Tuesday evening, the deadline for withdrawing candidates, at least 200 candidates from NFP and Ensemble had eliminated themselves. Reuters estimates that there are now 92 electoral districts in which voters will need to choose between three or four candidates on Sunday. One of the first polls published since the Tuesday deadline suggests that RN will now struggle to obtain the 289 seats required to control parliament. 

Much remains to be confirmed. Cohabitation between Macron as president and the RN as the main governing force remains a credible possibility. What is beyond doubt, however, is the ongoing centrality of the far right to the French political landscape, as per much of the European continent, and the so-called political centre accommodating, if not encouraging, its rise.