After a series of votes to fill leadership roles in the newly elected French parliament, the far-right National Rally has ended up without any key positions – despite being the biggest single party in the assembly.
Top jobs within the National Assembly, the lower house of France's parliament, as well as the heads of its influential committees, are traditionally divided between lawmakers drawn from a mix of different parties.
But after MPs voted to fill the posts at the end of last week, the National Rally (RN) came away with nothing after mainstream parties joined forces to deny it plum roles.
Marine Le Pen, the party's representative in parliament, accused its opponents of "scheming" that "trampled on democracy".
The National Assembly "has become a lawless zone", she told Le Parisien newspaper.
Division of power
Appointing the new Assembly's internal leadership, known as the Bureau, was the first order of business when parliament opened its debut session last Thursday.
The powerful speaker's chair was filled by Yaël Braun-Pivet, who held it in the previous legislature.
An ally of President Emmanuel Macron, she was re-elected as president of the house thanks to a pact between his centrists and the mainstream right.
Her six vice-presidents are drawn from the right, left and centre (two each).
Three financial administrator jobs are divided equally between the same camps.
Nine of the 12 secretaries that make up the remainder of the Bureau come from the left. They are joined by two independents and one centrist.
Meanwhile the eight parliamentary committees are predominantly chaired by Macron's allies, who took six of the posts, with the remaining two going to left-wingers.
Notably Éric Coquerel of the hard-left France Unbowed party held on to the top job on the powerful finance committee, a post the RN had had in its sights.
Gains lost
The RN's opponents called for a united front to deny the far-right party a place in parliament's leadership, as they did in the snap elections that kept it from winning enough seats to form a government.
Those polls, which concluded two weeks ago, relegated the RN and its allies to third place behind left-wing alliance the New Popular Front and Macron's centrist grouping Ensemble.
Yet while each of those camps is made up of several smaller factions, the RN is the biggest single party in the Assembly and leads the largest unified parliamentary group.
French election leaves far-right National Rally down but not out
With 126 seats in the new parliament compared to the 89 it held before, the RN had been counting on increasing its presence in the executive.
Two of its members served as vice-presidents in the previous legislature, a first for the party, obtained in recognition of its growing clout.
In this weekend's votes, RN lawmakers voted for candidates from other factions in accordance with parliamentary convention, one of the party's MPs, Emeric Salmon, told RFI.
"Other groups should learn from our practices rather than denouncing them absurdly," he declared.
While the left announced it wouldn't vote for any RN candidates, Macron's centrist bloc called on its MPs to shun both the far-right party and the hard-left France Unbowed.
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