French President Emmanuel Macron called snap legislative elections after his pro-European party was handed a chastening defeat and projected to garner less than half the support of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally
The far right’s surge in France in elections for the European Parliament was widely expected. What came next was not.
French President Emmanuel Macron called snap legislative elections, saying he could not ignore the new political reality after his pro-European party was handed a chastening defeat and projected to garner less than half the support of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.
He hopes that voters will band together to contain the far right in national elections in a way they didn’t in European ones.
But Sunday’s decision to dissolve parliament and send to the polls voters who just expressed their discontent with Macron’s politics was a risky move that could result in the French far right leading a government for the first time since World War II.
Macron, who has three years left on his second and final presidential term, would then have to find a way to work with a prime minister from a party that deeply opposes most of his policies.
Here is a look at the reasons behind the move.
The far-right National Rally, led by 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, is projected to win the most French seats in the European Parliament, potentially as many as 30 of France’s 81, with a provisional count showing them with more than 30% of France’s vote.
That would be the culmination of a rebranding campaign that sought to appeal to moderate voters following decades of racist, antisemitic statements by leaders of the party then known as the National Front.
Macron’s Renaissance party has less than 15%, according to the latest estimates — just ahead of the Socialists, whom the French president thought he had managed to obliterate from the political scene when he was first elected president in 2017.
The leftist France Unbowed party could finish in fourth place with around 10% of the vote, and the conservative Républicains about 7%.
