France elections: Far right seeks to ride momentum of 1st round success
With the ultimate outcome still up in the air, France’s fiercely anti-immigration National Rally and opponents of the long-taboo far-right party scrambled Monday to capitalize on an indecisive first round of voting in surprise legislative elections.
Round one on Sunday propelled the National Rally closer than ever to government but also left open the possibility that voters could yet block its path to power in the decisive round two. France now faces two likely scenarios in what promises to be a torrid last week of high-stakes campaigning.
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Some candidates announced of their own accord that they were stepping aside, making a defeat of the National Rally their top priority. In other cases, party leaders set the direction, saying they would withdraw candidates in some districts in hopes of blocking Le Pen’s path to power. She inherited her party, then called the National Front, from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has multiple convictions for racist and antisemitic hate speech.
Overall, the National Rally and its allies won a third of the nationwide vote Sunday, official results showed. The New Popular Front, a left-wing coalition of parties that joined together in the quick, three-week campaign to beat the far right, got 28% and was followed in third place by Macron’s centrist camp with 20%. But the 577 seats are elected by districts. So while nationwide results provide an overall picture of how each camp fared, they do not indicate exactly how many seats the groups will get in the end.
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Bardella urged voters to give him a majority, saying they face a choice between left-wing “incendiaries” who pose “an existential threat” to France and his party’s offer of a “responsible break” with Macron’s era.
Support for the National Rally and the New Popular Front was so strong that they both won more than 30 seats outright on Sunday by taking more than 50% of the vote in some districts. That means there will be no second round in those districts.
Turnout — at nearly 67% — was the highest since 1997, arresting nearly three decades of deepening voter apathy for legislative elections and, for a growing number of French people, politics in general.
Macron dissolved the National Assembly and called the snap election on June 9, after a stinging defeat at the hands of the National Rally in French voting for the European Parliament. The deeply unpopular and weakened president gambled that the far right would not repeat that success when the country’s own fate was in the balance.
But Macron’s plan backfired. He is now accused, even by members of his own camp, of having opened a door for the National Rally by calling voters back to the ballot box, especially when so many are angry over inflation, the cost of living, immigration and at Macron himself.
If the National Rally can form a government, it has promised to dismantle many of Macron’s key domestic and foreign policies, including his pension reform that raised the retirement age. It also says it would stop French deliveries of long-range missiles to Ukraine in the war against Russia.
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National Rally opponents fear for civil liberties if the party takes power. It plans to boost police powers and curtail the rights of French citizens with dual nationality to work in some defense, security and nuclear-industry jobs. Macron himself warned that the far right could set France on a path to civil war.
