Rym Momtaz: Macron wanted ‘clarification’. What France got was more uncertainty
France’s snap elections have produced the most fragmented parliament since Charles de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic. The two-round majority electoral system was designed to avoid political instability and contain the extremes. The system failed to achieve the first, with a new hung parliament divided into three comparable groups that will keep any government that is formed under constant threat of no-confidence votes. It only partially succeeded on the second; stopping the far-right National Rally (RN) from taking power, but not preventing its exponential growth in parliamentary seats from eight to more than 120 between 2017 and 2024.
