France’s National Rally party has won a landslide victory in the first round of voting for the National Assembly, according to early projections, bringing its long-taboo brand of nationalist and anti-immigrant politics to the threshold of power for the first time.
Pollsters’ projections, which are typically reliable and based on preliminary results, suggested the party would win about 34 percent of the vote, well ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance party and his allies, which won about 21 percent.
The results of a two-round election to be completed by a run-off on 7 July between the leading parties in each constituency do not offer a reliable projection of the number of parliamentary seats each party will win. But it now seems highly likely that the National Rally will be the largest force in the lower house, although not necessarily with an absolute majority.
According to projections, a coalition of left-wing parties, called the New Popular Front and spanning from moderate Socialists to the far-left party Unbreakable France, won around 29 percent of the vote. Turnout was very high, reflecting the importance voters attach to early elections: more than 65 percent, compared with 47.51 percent in the first round of the last parliamentary elections in 2022.
For Macron, now in his seventh year as president, the result represented a severe setback after he had bet that his party’s painful defeat to the National Rally in the recent European Parliament elections would not be repeated.
In a statement released immediately after the projections were announced, Macron said that “in the face of the National Rally, it is time for a large, clearly democratic and republican alliance for the second round.”
It is unclear whether that was still possible at a time when the National Rally is clearly going strong.
Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally party, said France had voted “unambiguously, turning the page after seven years of corrosive power” and urged her supporters to ensure her protégé, Jordan Bardella, 28, becomes the next prime minister.
Macron’s decision to hold the election now, just weeks before the Paris Olympics, surprised many in France, including his own prime minister, who was kept in the dark. That decision reflected a top-down style of government that has left the president more isolated.
There was no obligation to plunge France into summer chaos with a hasty vote, but Macron was convinced that it was his democratic duty to test French sentiment in a national election.
He was also convinced that the dissolution of the National Assembly and the holding of elections would be inevitable in October, because it was expected that his deficit-reducing budget proposal would meet insurmountable opposition.
“It was better to hold the elections now,” said an official close to Macron who requested anonymity in line with French political protocol. “In October, an absolute majority for the National Group was inevitable, according to our polls.”
Of course, the National Rally could end up with an absolute majority of 289 seats in the 577-seat parliament when the second round of voting is held in a week. Macron, whose party and its allies have held about 250 seats since the last parliamentary vote in 2022, has been frustrated in his attempts to achieve his agenda by his lack of an absolute majority and his inability to form stable coalitions.
In the run-up to the election, Macron used every threatening spectre, including a possible “civil war”, to warn people not to vote for what he called “the extremes”: the National Rally, with its view of immigrants as a second class, and the far-left France Unbreakable with its anti-Semitic outbursts.
He told pensioners they would be left penniless. He said the nationwide demonstration represented “the abandonment of everything that makes our country attractive and holds back investors.” He said the left would tax the vitality of the French economy and close nuclear power stations that supply about 70 percent of the country’s electricity.
“Extremes are the impoverishment of France,” Macron said.
But those appeals fell on deaf ears because, for all his achievements, including reducing unemployment, Macron had lost touch with the people to whom the National Rally appealed. His once-dominant centrist movement has suffered a heavy defeat.
These people, across the country, felt slighted by the president. They felt he didn’t understand their struggles. They felt he pretended to listen, but nothing more. Searching for a way to express their anger, they latched onto the party that said immigrants were the problem, despite an aging France’s need for them. They chose the National Rally party, whose leaders did not attend elite schools.
The rise of the National Group has been constant and inexorable. Founded just over half a century ago as the National Front by Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and by Pierre Bosquet, who was a member of a French division of the Waffen-SS during World War II, for decades it faced to a railway barrier that prevented his entry into the government.
This had its roots in French shame. The collaborationist Vichy government during World War II had deported more than 72,000 Jews to their deaths and France was determined never to experiment with a far-right nationalist government again.
In 2015, Le Pen expelled her father from the party after he insisted that the Nazi gas chambers were a “detail of history.” Le Pen changed the name of the party and adopted Bardella, a man of soft words and hard to intimidate, as his protégé. He also abandoned some of his most extreme positions, including leaving the European Union.
It worked, although certain principles remained unchanged, including the party’s Eurosceptic nationalism. Also unchanged was his willingness to discriminate between foreign residents and French citizens, and his insistence that the country’s level of crime and other ills are due to too many immigrants, a claim that some studies have called into question.
Macron, whose term is limited and must leave office in 2027, has three difficult years ahead. Until the second electoral round passes, it will not be known to what extent. It seems that he will be remembered as the president who allowed the far right to access the highest positions in government.
It is unclear how he would govern with a party that represents everything he has resisted and deplored throughout his political career. If the National Rally wins the premiership, for which it has aligned Bardella, it will be in a position to set much of the domestic agenda.
Macron has promised not to resign under any circumstances, and the president of the Fifth Republic has generally exercised extensive control over foreign and military policy. But the National Rally has already indicated that it would like to limit Macron’s power. There is no doubt that the party will try to do so if it wins an absolute majority.
Macron took an enormous and discretionary risk. “No to defeat, yes to awakening, to the leap forward of the Republic!” He declared shortly after making his decision. But, as the second round of elections approaches, the republic seems wounded and its divisions lacerating.
