A crushing humiliation for Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance
A DRAMATIC NEW era began in France on Sunday June 30th when Marine Le Pen’s hard-right party took a massive lead in first-round voting for the lower house of parliament. Her National Rally (RN) has never been so close to governing France. Early results suggested that the party had secured 34% of the vote, according to Ipsos, a polling group. Ahead of a final run-off vote on July 7th, this puts it on course to win 230-280 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, up from 88, and become easily the biggest group in parliament. A result at the upper end of that range would put them in touching distance of an overall majority of 289.
The poll was marked by the highest first-round turnout since 1997. Candidates from the RN came top in hundreds of constituencies across the country: in its old geographical heartlands of the north-eastern rustbelt and the south of France, as well as places with little history of support, such as Brittany. In her own constituency around Hénin-Beaumont, in the mining basin of northern France, Ms Le Pen was elected outright in the first round.
Ms Le Pen looks set to reap the benefits of her decade-long project to sanitise her party, make its deputies look presentable, and convince voters that it is not just about raucous protest, but power. The RN, descended from the National Front co-founded by Ms Le Pen’s father and a former member of the Nazi Waffen-SS, still leans heavily on identity politics, with its signature pledge to end the automatic right to French citizenship for those born to foreign parents on French soil. It mixes this with popular promises to reduce VAT on energy bills from 20% to 5.5%, to lower the pension age and to bring back a wealth tax. After successive governments of the right, the left and the centre, voters, perennially disappointed by their rulers, now seem ready to take a punt on a big party that has never yet governed.
The four-party left-wing alliance, New Popular Front (NFP), had a good night too, coming second nationally with 28.1% of the vote, according to Ipsos. The alliance, made up of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France, Socialists, Greens and Communists, qualifies for the second round in many constituencies in big cities and multi-cultural banlieues (suburbs), where its backing for an independent Palestinian state is popular. Ipsos calculates that the NFP could win 125-165 seats, making it the second-biggest parliamentary bloc.
By contrast, the vote was a crushing humiliation for President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance, Ensemble. Many of his own deputies and closest allies, sensing an impending wipe-out, were aghast at his unexpected decision on June 9th to call a snap election. It backfired, spectacularly. Ensemble secured a dismal 20.3% of the national vote. It is now expected to lose more than half of its 250 seats; projections by Ipsos suggest it could hold on to as few as 70-100. One deputy called it a “total catastrophe”.
What is clear from the first-round vote is that Mr Macron’s centrist project, and the president’s political authority, will emerge severely damaged from these elections. Even where Mr Macron’s candidates have made it through to the second round, by securing 12.5% of registered voters, they face tough duels, and in some cases three-way contests in which they will be under pressure to step down in order to block the RN.
In some constituencies this could mean calling on centrist voters to back the NFP, an alliance that promises to bring back the wealth tax, raise the minimum wage by 14%, introduce a tax on “super profits”, increase inheritance tax and scrap the flat tax on investment income. An official from Mr Macron’s party says that it will decide constituency by constituency, depending on the individual NFP candidate in the line-up. Qualifiers have until the evening of July 2nd to confirm that they are staying in the race.
The drift of votes away from the centre and towards the extremes represents a painful paradox for the president. As a 39-year-old electoral debutant, Mr Macron was first elected in 2017 on a wave of pro-European optimism, youthful energy and a sense of political renewal. On election night that year, he vowed that he would “do everything” to make sure that there “was no longer any reason to vote for the extremes”. Yet despite a strong record on job creation and business success in France, the solitary Mr Macron has never managed to persuade voters that he is close to them, or understands them.
Moreover the very success of his broad centrist movement, which borrowed talent from the moderate left and right, ended up weakening reasonable alternatives to the centre. Inside the NFP alliance, the Socialists and Greens have now teamed up with Mr Mélenchon’s hard-left party. The centre-right Republicans’ president, Eric Ciotti, has split the party and jumped over the cordon sanitaire to join up with Ms Le Pen’s RN. The moderate remaining Republicans who reject his alliance scored 10.2%, and look set to be reduced to a small parliamentary rump.
What is still unclear after these first-round results, however, is whether Ms Le Pen will secure a majority on July 7th. Polls suggest that this is within reach, but no certainty. Jordan Bardella, her 28-year-old candidate to become prime minister and a popular TikTok figure, insists that he will not take the job unless he commands such a majority in parliament. Without one, were he to be asked by Mr Macron to try to form a government it might be brought down by a no-confidence motion at the first hurdle. France would then undergo a quest for a prime minister able to form a stable government, which could lead to a period that resembles the chronic instability of the country’s fourth republic, in 1946-1958.
If the RN-led alliance does manage to win a majority, or can scrape one together with new defectors, the country will be heading for a form of uncomfortable “cohabitation” between the president and the government, in which they each hold a diametrically opposite view on almost everything, from fiscal policy to Europe, Ukraine and NATO. The fifth-republic constitution, devised by Charles de Gaulle in 1958 precisely to bring about much-needed stability, could be sorely tested. This week Ms Le Pen challenged the separation of powers, by suggesting that the head of state’s constitutional role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces was only “honorary”. Either way, markets are worried. On June 28th the yield spread between French and German ten-year sovereign bonds moved to its widest level since 2012. France seems to be heading at full speed, in a state of anger and apprehension, into the political unknown.■