The anti-immigration National Rally headed by Marine Le Pen won 33 percent of the vote in the first round of parliamentary elections.
France’s Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, has warned that the far right was at the “gates of power” after the first round of parliamentary elections, but whether they can enter them depends on political deal making and a crucial second-round ballot.
The gamble by President Emmanuel Macron to call a snap parliamentary election has seen the National Rally (RN), headed by Marine Le Pen, get a third (33.4 percent) of the national popular vote, ahead of the leftist alliance New Popular Front (NFP) which received 27.9 percent.
Macron’s “Together” coalition won just over a fifth (20.7 percent) of the votes, which Célia Belin, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), said showed that the president had committed an act of “self-sabotage.”Why Did Macron Call an Election?
Experts have been speculating over why Macron decided to unexpectedly call for the snap ballot on June 9, becoming the first French president to dissolve the 577-seat National Assembly since 1997. Macron had been elected in 2022 for a second presidential term, but his centrist coalition has struggled to pass some bills without opposition support.
In June, his coalition had just been crushed in the European Parliament elections by the party of Le Pen and her protégé, Jordan Bardella, with the RN getting around 31.4 percent, more than twice the 14.6 percent of Macron’s group.
The president’s decision may have been because conservative lawmakers had been threatening to topple his government in the autumn, or a way to stop the opposition from organizing.
The European parliamentary elections, however, are more prone to a protest vote. Macron may have counted on the greater checks and balances in the two-round French system, calculating they would show how Le Pen’s party might fail the test of daily politics, making them less of a force in 2027 presidential election.
However, such a tactic could backfire, said Itay Lotem, senior lecturer in French studies at London’s University of Westminster.
