France faces a hung parliament and deep political uncertainty after the three main political groups on the left, centre and right emerged from Sunday’s snap legislative elections with large shares of the vote but nothing close to an absolute majority.
The preliminary results upended widespread predictions of a clear victory for the National Rally, Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigrant party that dominated the first round a week ago. Instead, the left-wing New Popular Front won 178 votes. seats.
The centrist coalition President Emmanuel Macron, who plunged the country into turmoil a month ago by calling elections, was in second place with 150 seats. Behind him is the National Rally and its allies, who won 142 seats.
The results were compiled by The New York Times using Interior Ministry data and confirmed earlier projections that no party or bloc would win a majority.
The details of the result may yet change, but it is clear that the struggle by centrists and the left to form a “republican front” against the National Rally in the second round has borne fruit. Across France, candidates have abandoned three-way ballots and called for unity against Ms Le Pen’s party.
“The president now has the duty to call on the New Popular Front to govern,” said Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left leader who is the charismatic but polarizing voice of the left-wing alliance. “We are ready.”
But France seemed almost ungovernable, with the Paris Olympics opening in less than three weeks. The left surged ahead, the National Rally gained dozens of seats in the National Assembly, and Mr. Macron’s party suffered a crushing defeat, with the 250 seats held by his party and its allies in the National Assembly reduced by about a third.
The result was that in the lower house of parliament, where most legislative power resides, no coalition government seemed immediately possible, with Mr Macron’s centrists squeezed between far-right and far-left groups who hate each other and hate him.
Jordan Bardella, the Marine Le Pen protégé who led the National Rally to victory in the European Parliament elections and the first round of legislative elections last month, called the deals that derailed his quest for an absolute majority a “dishonorable alliance” and said Mr. Macron had condemned France to “uncertainty and instability.”
Even with fewer seats than expected, the National Rally now occupies a place in French politics that erases a postwar political landscape built around the idea that the far right’s history of racism and overt anti-Semitism made it unworthy of positions of power.
Ms. Le Pen has repudiated that past. But even in its new guise, the party’s core message remains that immigrants dilute a glorified French national identity and that tighter borders and stricter regulations are needed to keep them out or prevent them from benefiting from France’s social safety net.
France rejected that vision, but voted overwhelmingly for change. It did not want more of the same. It sent a scathing message to the pro-business elites gathered around Mr Macron, who is term-limited and due to leave office in 2027.
“France is more divided than ever,” said Alain Duhamel, a prominent political scientist and author. “We have learned that it was a very bad idea for Mr. Macron to dissolve Parliament and call these elections.”
As President Biden struggles to counter Donald Trump’s nationalist message, a prolonged ruckus in French politics could add to the volatility of the international situation. Long close to Russia, Marine Le Pen has tried to present herself as a cautious supporter of Ukraine, but there is no doubt that Moscow will welcome the growing influence of the National Rally.
The New Popular Front campaigned on a platform that included raising the monthly minimum wage, lowering the legal retirement age from 64 to 60, reintroducing a wealth tax and freezing energy and gas prices. Instead of cutting immigration, as the National Rally had promised, the alliance said it would make the asylum process more generous and smoother.
The platform said the alliance supported Ukraine’s struggle for freedom against Russia and called on President Vladimir V. Putin to “answer for his crimes before international justice.”
It is unclear how the alliance’s economic program will be financed at a time when France is facing a growing budget deficit, or how a pro-immigration policy will be implemented in a country where it is perhaps the most sensitive issue.
The New Popular Front, which is very divided between moderate socialists and the far left, obtained very good results among young people in the first round, and in the cities heavily populated by North African immigrants around the big cities, including Paris.
Mr. Mélenchon’s ardent pro-Palestinian stance has been a hit in these regions, though it provoked outrage when he appeared to cross the line into anti-Semitism, accusing Yaël Braun-Pivet, the Jewish speaker of the National Assembly, of “camping in Tel Aviv to encourage the massacre.” He said of a large demonstration against anti-Semitism last November that “the friends of unconditional support for the massacre have a rendezvous.”
Macron had not been forced to call early elections, but he was willing to bet that he could still be a unifying figure against the extremes. In fact, he had lost the appeal of doing so during his seven years in power. He had declared left and right obsolete labels when he came to power in 2017. They are no longer obsolete.
Yet Mr Macron’s centrist alliance did better than expected in the last election and he lived to fight another day.
Mr Macron now appears to have two options, short of resignation, which he has vowed not to consider.
The first is to try to build a broad coalition that could extend from the left to what remains of the moderate Gaullist conservatives, some of whom broke a taboo during the campaign by aligning themselves with the National Rally.
This possibility seems unlikely. Mr Macron has never hidden his deep aversion to Mr Mélenchon; the feeling is mutual.
The second, less ambitious option would be for Mr Macron to try to form some sort of interim government to handle day-to-day affairs.
Mr Macron could, for example, ask former prime ministers from parties in a centrist bloc – his own, the Socialists, the centre-right Republicans – to propose a government of technocrats or leading figures who could run a narrow agenda over the next year.
Under the constitution, at least one year must elapse before the next parliamentary elections.
One area where Mr Macron could still exert considerable influence, more than if he had been forced into “cohabitation” with Mr Bardella as prime minister, is international and military affairs, the traditional preserve of the president under the Fifth Republic.
An ardent supporter of the 27-member European Union, which the National Rally wants to weaken, he will undoubtedly continue his approach in favour of a “powerful Europe” with more integrated armies, defence industries and technological research, but his influence could be diminished by internal weakness.
Mr Macron, once tempted by a rapprochement with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has also become a staunch supporter of Ukraine’s fight for freedom. With the US presidential election just four months away, doubts are growing about the West’s willingness to continue arming and financing Ukraine.
Russia is convinced that France will falter. “The French people aspire to a sovereign foreign policy that serves their national interests and to a break with the dictates of Washington and Brussels,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement a few days ago. “French officials will not be able to ignore these profound changes in the attitudes of the vast majority of citizens.”
France is therefore facing great uncertainty, both internally and externally. It seems that a constitutional crisis cannot be ruled out in the coming months. Gabriel Attal, the outgoing centrist Prime Minister who presented his resignation on Sunday, declared that “tonight, no absolute majority will be able to be controlled by the extremes thanks to our determination and our values.”
He claimed a small victory, but of course the centre does not have such a majority either.
Unlike many other European countries, including Belgium, Italy and Germany, France does not have a tradition of months-long negotiations to form convoluted coalition governments between parties with divergent views, or of creating interim alliances. In fact, Charles de Gaulle conceived the Fifth Republic in 1958 to end the parliamentary turmoil and short-lived governments of the Fourth Republic.
One theory put forward to explain Mr Macron’s mysterious decision to call an election was that, with the National Rally in power and Mr Bardella as prime minister, the far-right party would have lost its luster before the 2027 presidential election.
It is a new gamble based on the idea that it is easier to criticize from the sidelines than to make difficult government decisions. Mr. Macron does not want to hand over the keys to the Élysée, the seat of the presidency, to Ms. Le Pen in three years.
In this sense, the election result could destabilize Mr. Macron and benefit Ms. Le Pen. She has demonstrated her growing popularity without her party assuming the burdens of power. On the other hand, a deep-rooted resistance among the French to the idea of a transfer of power to the extreme right has been illustrated once again.
