French election tracker: Marine Le Pen’s hard-right falters

National Rally ( RN), led by Marine Le Pen, is a hard-right party and the successor to the National Front, founded by Ms Le Pen’s father. RN is a nationalist and Eurosceptic party, with a tough line on immigration. At the European Parliament elections on June 9th the RN won 30 seats whereas Mr Macron’s coalition secured just 13. Before the election, it held 88 seats in France’s National Assembly, but polls suggest it could become the biggest party after this election. A Kremlin-linked Russian bank financed some of Ms Le Pen’s previous election campaigns. The RN is opposed to Ukraine joining NATO or the EU. Ms Le Pen says she would put forward Jordan Bardella, her 28-year-old party head, as a candidate for prime minister.

The New Popular Front ( NFP) is a newly formed alliance of left-wing parties. It is made up of Socialist, Green and Communist parties as well as Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France. A similar alliance in 2022 with Mr Mélenchon as its leader was named “New Popular, Environmental and Social Union”, or NUPES. The NFP has pledged to undo Mr Macron’s pension reform, and introduce a swatch of heavy new taxes on individuals and corporations. No single candidate for the position as prime minister has yet been announced by the coalition. The left-wing alliance is currently second in the polls.

Ensemble ( ENS) is a coalition of centrist parties, including Mr Macron’s Renaissance party; the pro-European MoDem; Horizons, a party founded by Edouard Philippe, a former prime minister; and others. It was previously the largest group in France’s National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, holding 250 seats—it fell short of winning an absolute majority of 289 seats in the elections in 2022. Since the previous election, Mr Macron’s alliance has needed to partner with other parties to pass laws. Gabriel Attal, Mr Macron’s 35-year-old Renaissance colleague, became France’s youngest ever prime minister in January.

Eric Ciotti, head of the centre-right Republicans, is putting up more than 60 candidates in an alliance with the RN. Republicans who do not want to work with Ms Le Pen’s party instead have to stand under the banner of “the republican right”. Republicans dismayed by Mr Ciotti's alliance have tried to oust him from the party, but that was provisionally overturned in the courts. Anti-Ciotti Republicans have said they are putting up nearly 400 candidates across the country.

Reconquest is a Catholic far-right party. It was founded in 2021 by Eric Zemmour, an anti-immigrant radical. In 2022 it came fifth in the first round of the parliamentary elections. On June 12th the party expelled Marion Maréchal, its former vice-president and Ms Le Pen’s niece, for telling people to support the RN in the upcoming election.