France has dodged a bullet. We have no idea how the country will be governed in the coming months with a hung parliament without any natural majority. But at least we know who won’t be in government for now, and that is an immense relief for millions of voters.
If the first round of this snap parliamentary election was a referendum against liberal centrist President Emmanuel Macron, the second round was a referendum against Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN), just when power appeared within the grasp of the far-right party.
In France, as in the UK, people voted massively for change and against the status quo. There was a big protest vote over the cost of living and Macron’s unpopular raising of the retirement age, as well as immigration and economic uncertainty.
Yet faced with the risk of hard-right national populists taking power with an agenda of discrimination against immigrants and dual-nationals, the electorate turned out in force to vote for any alternative to Le Pen’s candidates, producing a spectacular last-minute turnaround. Rejecting the temptation to abstain, Communists held their noses and voted for Macron’s centrists or conservative Gaullists. Centrists voted for Trotskyists. Anti-capitalists voted for economic liberals, and vice versa. Anything to stop the RN winning. And this so-called republican front paid off.
It’s not so much that the leftwing New Popular Front (NPF), a hastily cobbled-together alliance of opposites running on a Santa Claus electoral platform, won the election, even though it emerged as the surprise largest group in the National Assembly with at least 182 out of 577 seats.
Macron’s centrists won 168, down from 246 in the outgoing chamber, the RN and its allies won 143 and the centre-right Republicans won 60.
Opinion polls right up to last Friday placed the RN in front, so the result was a second shock after the far right’s first-round lead. People voted against Macron and Le Pen rather than in favour of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the firebrand leader of the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI), whose bellicose rhetoric and perceived borderline antisemitism have been seen by many leftwingers as a liability for their cause.
The inconclusive outcome, with no bloc strong enough to govern without making improbable compromises, is a relief in Brussels, where the prospect of founder member France joining a growing awkward squad of Eurosceptic governments opposed to further integration and sympathetic to Russia was viewed with undisguised alarm.
A wounded Macron may no longer be in a position to offer bold pro-European leadership, but at least Paris will not be lining up with Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, and the new Dutch government dominated by Geert Wilders’ far-right Freedom party to block EU green energy policies or eastward enlargement of the union, or demand a rebate on its EU budget contribution.
The guardians of fiscal orthodoxy may be dismayed that the next French government, once one is eventually formed, is unlikely to rein in Paris’s ballooning budget deficit or cut its debt mountain. Both the left and the far right made promises that would blow fresh holes in its public finances, while Macron’s centrists stuck to their promise of no tax increases without saying how they would deliver the deficit reduction promised to Brussels.
If this were Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium or Sweden, the parties in parliament would spend weeks or months in painstaking negotiations led by the largest group in parliament, hammering out a costed and funded agreement as the basis for a coalition in which no party achieves all of its demands. However France, like Britain, has no tradition of political compromise. It is a winner-takes-all system in which compromise is a dirty word.
Many eyes are already on the big prize of the 2027 presidential election, when Macron cannot run again after serving the maximum two five-year terms. As a result, no one has a political interest in cutting deals either with the lame-duck president or with potential rivals for his crown.
In that sense, Le Pen may well feel that this was a good election to have lost. She can focus on preparing her campaign for the top job in 2027 without having to get her hands dirty in government now. Moreover, her matinee-idol No 2, 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, who threatened to outshine her after leading the RN to top spot in the European elections and consolidating that surge in the first round of legislative elections on 30 June, will be off to Brussels to sit on the backbenches of the European parliament rather than entering the Hôtel de Matignon as prime minister and a potential rival to her.
It’s no surprise that she chose to play down Sunday’s setback as just another stage in the RN’s inexorable march to power. “The tide is still rising,” she said. “Our victory is merely delayed.”
The kaleidoscope of French politics has not stopped turning. The leaders of the NPF are demanding that Macron immediately appoint one of their number as prime minister. He is unlikely to oblige. The outgoing centrist prime minister, Gabriel Attal, may first try to cobble together a coalition, or ad hoc issue-by-issue alliances with the Socialists, Greens, Communists and centre-right Republicans. But he will face a tough time peeling the moderate left away from Mélenchon’s LFI, which holds the key to their control of town halls in municipal elections due in 2026. Their best hope may be that growing discontent at his authoritarian leadership within LFI eventually leads to Mélenchon being sidelined.
One glimmer amid the political chaos is that faced with the choice between the radical right and the radical left, French voters may have rediscovered a taste for moderate social democracy, the same brand that has just won a landslide in the UK.
It’s too early to tell whether the French are about to finally discover the virtues of parliamentarianism. It’s not in the DNA of the Fifth Republic fashioned by and for General Charles de Gaulle. The parliamentary system of the 1946-1958 Fourth Republic, with its revolving-door governments, remains widely discredited in the public mind, even though it presided over a successful period of postwar reconstruction, rapid growth led by wise economic planning, as well as the start of decolonisation and of France’s independent nuclear programme.
When Macron failed to secure a parliamentary majority after being re-elected as president in 2022, he refused to seek a coalition with other political forces and chose instead to push through legislation mostly by decree or by defying the divided opposition to bring his government down. Now he is no longer in sole charge. Attal and the next generation of centrist politicians, such as former prime minister Édouard Philippe, may well see their own interest in seeking a German-style coalition.
At least they have a strong interest in trying to forge compromises, if only to blame their opponents (and perhaps Macron) if that effort fails.
Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre
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