President Emmanuel Macron threw French politics into disarray on Sunday when he unexpectedly called early elections.
The surprise move came after his party was battered by the far right in the European Parliament elections. Macron dissolved the lower house of the French Parliament and said the first round of legislative elections would be held on June 30.
France now finds itself in unpredictable territory, with the future of Macron’s second term potentially at stake. With less than a month until the election, parties are now scrambling to field candidates, refine their messages and, in some cases, forge alliances.
Here’s what you need to know about early elections.
What happened?
France’s far-right, anti-immigrant National Rally party, led by Marine Le Pen and her wildly popular protégé, Jordan Bardella, jumped to first place in the European Parliament elections on Sunday with around 31.4 percent of the vote. Macron’s centrist Renaissance party came in a distant second, with around 14.6 percent.
Macron acknowledged the crushing defeat in a televised broadcast to the nation that night.
“France needs a clear majority to move forward with serenity and harmony,” Macron said, explaining why he had decided to call legislative elections.
That involved taking the extremely rare step of dissolving the 577-seat National Assembly, a presidential prerogative in France. Macron is the first president to do so since 1997.
Why did he do it?
When Macron was elected for a second term in 2022, his party failed to win an absolute majority. The centrist coalition he formed has since governed with a slim majority, but had difficulty passing certain bills without opposition support.
Macron was under no obligation to dissolve Parliament, even if the European vote left him with a reduced number with three years left in his presidential term. Analysts are still analyzing his motivations, although many suspect that he believed a dissolution had become inevitable: Conservative lawmakers were threatening to overthrow his government in the fall. Shocking the country with a snap election could also be a way for Macron to prevent his opposition from organizing and present voters with a stark choice between him or the far right.
The move is seen as a gamble: if the National Rally repeats its performance in the national elections, France could become almost ungovernable, and Macron would face a Parliament hostile to everything he believes in.
Le Pen welcomed the election announcement and expressed confidence that her party could muster a majority. “We are ready to change the country,” he told his supporters in Paris on Sunday night.
What is at stake?
The presidency is the most powerful political office in France, with broad capabilities to govern by decree. But approval from Parliament, and especially the National Assembly, is required for most major domestic policy changes and key pieces of legislation, such as spending bills or amendments to the Constitution.
Unlike the Senate, the other chamber of the French Parliament, the National Assembly is directly elected by the people and can overthrow a French cabinet with a vote of no confidence. It also has more room to legislate and challenge the executive, and typically has the final say if the two chambers disagree on a bill.
Macron’s party and its centrist allies currently hold 250 seats in the National Assembly, fewer than the 289 needed for an absolute majority. The National Rally party has 88 seats, while the main conservative Republicans have 61. A tenuous alliance of far-left, socialist and Green lawmakers has 149 seats. The rest is in the hands of smaller groups or legislators not affiliated with any party.
How will voting work?
Elections for the 577 seats in the National Assembly will be held in two rounds: the first on June 30 and the second on July 7.
France’s 577 electoral districts (one for each seat) cover the mainland, overseas departments and territories, as well as French citizens living abroad. Unlike many of its European neighbors, France awards seats to candidates who win the most votes in each district, not based on a proportion of the total vote nationwide.
That means there will be 577 separate contests, with local dynamics and peculiarities, unlike the European parliamentary elections, where each party presented a single list of candidates at the national level.
Any number of candidates can compete in the first round in each district, but there are specific thresholds to reach the second round. While in most cases the second round will feature the two candidates with the highest number of votes, on rare occasions it may feature three or even four candidates. Whoever gets the most votes in that runoff will win the race. (Under some conditions, a candidate who receives more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round wins outright.)
What happens next?
As the elections have just been announced, there are no reliable opinion polls yet.
Despite its victory in the European elections, it is not clear whether the National Rally will be able to win a significantly larger number of seats in the lower house of the French Parliament.
“It is difficult to project the results of the European elections onto the legislative elections,” said Luc Rouban, senior researcher at the Sciences Po Political Research Center in Paris. “It is not certain that the national demonstration will have the same success.”
With little time to campaign, left-wing parties are struggling to unite as they did in 2022, avoiding competitive candidacies in each district. But unity on the French left may prove elusive and it is unclear whether the parties will be able to reach such an agreement.
If Macron fails to assemble a strong parliamentary majority, he could find himself in a rare “cohabitation” scenario, where the presidency and the National Assembly are on opposite political sides.
In that scenario, Macron would be forced to choose a prime minister from a different political party, potentially blocking much of his domestic agenda. Foreign policy, which is a presidential prerogative, would in theory remain practically intact.