Emmanuel Macron has asked Gabriel Attal to stay on temporarily as France’s prime minister to maintain stability after a snap general election left the country facing a hung parliament and fraught negotiations to form a new government.
Parties on the left want to seize the moment after their shock win over the far right and on Monday met to discuss policy and potential prime minister candidates. The green-left alliance, the New Popular Front (NFP), surprised pollsters by coming first in the final round – a win that was considered highly unlikely, with pre-election polls predicting a far-right surge into the lead.
However, with no absolute majority, efforts to form a new French government may take weeks.
The snap election was called last month after a humiliating defeat to the far-right National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen in European parliamentary elections.
The NFP won 182 seats in the 577-seat national assembly, with Macron’s centrist Together coalition returning 168 deputies and the RN – which after the first round on 30 June had been eyeing a majority – finishing third on 143.
With no single group securing an absolute majority, the options include a technocratic government of experts, the NFP trying to form a minority government and seeking bill-by-bill support, or a broad coalition of the centre left and centre right.
Attal tendered his resignation on Monday morning after Macron’s camp lost more than a third of its MPs. The president asked Attal to remain in power in a caretaker capacity to see out the period of the Paris Olympics and to reassure the international community and markets that France still had a functioning government.
The unprecedented situation unfolded as Macron, who said he would wait until parliament was “structured” before making any decisions on a new government, was scheduled to leave the country on Wednesday for a Nato summit in Washington.
Attal had earlier said he would be willing to stay on in a caretaker role for as long as necessary to help oversee a smooth transition to a new government, if one could be found in a parliament split into opposing blocs. Macron asked him to remain “for the time being, to ensure the country’s stability”, the Élysée palace said.
Gaël Sliman, of the pollster Odoxa, asked: “Is this the biggest crisis of the Fifth Republic? Emmanuel Macron wanted clarification with the dissolution, now we are in total uncertainty. A very thick fog.” France’s Fifth Republic was established in 1958.
The Green leader, Marine Tondelier, one of a number of NFP figures seen as potential future prime ministers, said: “According to the logic of our institutions, Emmanuel Macron should today officially invite the NFP to nominate a prime minister.”
While the NFP’s leaders met again on Monday to try to agree a way forward, the leftist alliance appeared divided on how to proceed, with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the radical-left France Unbowed (LFI), ruling out any coalition deal with centrists.
Mélenchon’s lieutenant Manuel Bompard confirmed the party’s line on Monday. “The president must appoint as prime minister someone from the NFP, to implement the NFP’s programme, its whole programme and nothing but its programme,” he said.
Raphaël Glucksmann, a moderate who led the Socialist party list in the European elections, said on Sunday that the NFP must be open to dialogue and compromise with other parliamentary groups to govern, but Bompard refused to engage with that possibility.
Tondelier said the prime minister could be someone from any of the NFP’s four member parties or an outsider. Olivier Faure, the Socialist party leader, said a name would be presented this week but declined to speculate about coalitions.
Very little of the NFP’s radical economic programme, which includes raising the minimum wage, reversing Macron’s pension changes and capping the prices of key goods, would win parliamentary approval without coalition support.
Prominent centrists including the former prime minister Édouard Philippe and the long-term Macron ally François Bayrou have said they would be in favour of a coalition agreement stretching from the moderate left to the centre right, but excluding Mélenchon’s LFI.
“We can no longer have one bloc against another – it can’t work like that any more,” Bayrou said on Monday. “French voters have told us that we have to abandon, as far as we can, government ‘against the rest’ for government ‘with the rest’.”
Yaël Braun-Pivet, an MP from Macron’s camp and the outgoing speaker of the lower house, said voters were telling her: “No one has an absolute majority, so you have to work together to find solutions to our problems.”
The left’s surprise victory came after an anti-far-right “republican front” formed to avoid splitting the vote in three-way races in hundreds of constituencies. Le Pen denounced the strategy as unfair, but a senior RN member said the party had work to do.
“We cannot carry on like this,” Bruno Bilde, an RN deputy from northern France, told Le Monde, arguing that the party could “complain all it likes about the unfair system but when so many candidates lose you have to question the candidates’ credibility”.
Jordan Bardella, the RN party president who had led the campaign, said he accepted his part in the “defeat” of the parliamentary elections, as well as the success of the European elections in which his party topped the poll in France.
