French voters went to the polls on Sunday for the first round of snap legislative elections. For the first time, a victory for the far right is looking like a credible prospect – an extraordinary turnaround for a party that until 2022 held only a handful of seats in parliament.
The far-right National Rally has topped the polls with a score of more than 33% of the first-round vote (compared with 18.7% in 2022). The left-wing New Popular Front alliance is a few points behind in second place with 28% of the vote. And Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Ensemble alliance is languishing in third place after scoring a disappointing 21%.
This result puts the National Rally on course to become the biggest group in the 577-seat National Assembly. But there is still a high degree of uncertainty regarding whether the far right can win enough seats to obtain a working majority, and even greater uncertainty about what will happen if it does not.
