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Five maps to understand the French parliamentary election

From political deadlock to far-right gains, here are the essential maps you need to understand what happened in France's 2022 parliamentary elections.

Published: 20 June 2022 13:21 CEST
Five maps to understand the French parliamentary election
French far-right party Rassemblement National (RN) leader Marine Le Pen poses while campaigning (Photo by Pascal GUYOT / AFP)

Almost two months after Emmanuel Macron won his re-election campaign – the first French president to do so in France in almost twenty years – the French people have voted not to give him an absolute majority in parliament.

Instead, opposition groups like La Nupes (the leftist coalition) and Rassemblement National (the far-right party led by Marine Le Pen) consolidated large blocs in parliament, enough to make the next five years very complicated for Emmanuel Macron.

Here are the maps you need to visualise what happened in France’s parliamentary elections.

The big picture

This map shows an overall picture of which parties won which districts across France.

The president’s centrist coalition, Ensemble (in yellow), has a lot of the country’s west coast of the country to thank for its victories, with regions like Brittany, Pays de la Loire, and Nouvelle Aquitaine providing support for the president’s party. 

Elsewhere the picture is more fragmented with leftist alliance Nupes (in red), far-right Rassemblement National (dark blue) and centre-right Les Républicains (light blue) all picking up seats around the country, although the far right did well all along the Mediterranean coast. 

Macron misery

Nevertheless, the picture for the sitting president is considerably less cheery than it was in 2017.

Though the president’s centrist coalition will still be the largest group in parliament, it has lost 105 deputés (MPs) in the last five years.

A significant portion left the party or resigned from their positions in the early days of Macron’s first term, while a large chunk lost their seats to candidates from the Rassemblement Nationale and Nupes in Sunday’s election.

Health minister Brigitte Bourguignon, maritime minister Justine Benin and environment minister Amélie de Montchalin were among the victims in Sunday, as well as party faithful and current president of the National Assembly Richard Ferrand and former interior minister Christophe Castaner. Ex education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer had been knocked out in the first round.

Left alliance

Four leftist parties – the hard left La France Insoumise (LFI), the centre left Parti Socialiste (PS), the Greens (EELV) and the Communists  (PCF) – came together in this election to form a coalition known as La Nupes (Nouvelle Union populaire, écologique et sociale) and together they won 133 seats, making it the second largest group in the parliament.

In the previous government, the four parties of the left only occupied 60 seats between them, so this represents a significant gain when compared to 2017.

But this doesn’t represent a particular shift to the left – the percentage of people voting for La Nupes in the first round in 2022 was 25.78 percent – only a fraction higher (25.38 percent) than the combined result of the four parties of La Nupes in 2017. However, by forming the pre-election pact the leftist parties agreed not to stand candidates against each other, and therefore turned their vote share into a larger number of seats in parliament. 

This map shows which factions within the leftist coalition won parliamentary seats, and where they were successful. It remains to be seen how well the coalition will be maintained in the coming months, as the parties hold differing perspectives on key issues.

The rise of the far-right

Shocking pollsters and election experts alike, France’s far-right party, Le Rassemblement Nationale (RN), won 89 seats in parliament.

Previously, the party only won eight in 2017. It represents a historic record for the far-right in France, and an encroaching change for France’s traditional political geography, where the south of the country once represented a stronghold for the left.

The RN is now the largest single-party opposition bloc in France’s parliament.

The real winner: abstention

Over half of French people – about 54.77 percent – did not participate in the second round of the parliamentary elections.

Early analysis shows that age and household income played a role in who voted and who did not: only 29 percent of 18-24 year olds and 36 percent of people living in a household with a total income of less than €1,200 per month went to the polls. 

And finally . . . Zemmour

The below map shows the total number of seats gained by extreme right TV pundit-turned politician Eric Zemmour – a big, fat zero.

Zemmour’s Reconquête and his party did not gain a single seat and all its candidates – including Zemmour himself – were knocked out in the first round.

His total vote share was just four percent, falling from seven percent in the presidential elections in April.

Member comments

  1. Plurialism (le pluralisme) is absolutely essential for a prosperous, thriving democracy.

    Pluralism propels the principle that diversity is beneficial to society and that political power should be enjoyed by disparate functional or cultural groups within a society, including religious groups, trade unions, professional organizations, and ethnic minorities.

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For members

JOHN LICHFIELD

OPINION: Macron’s attempts to tame world leaders shows he’s more a thinker than a diplomat

French President Emmanuel Macron's flawed efforts to charm the world's autocratic and populist leaders have previously ended in failure or even humiliation. Taking the Chinese president to the Pyrenees won't change that record, writes John Lichfield.

Published: 7 May 2024 12:06 CEST
OPINION: Macron's attempts to tame world leaders shows he's more a thinker than a diplomat

Emmanuel Macron used to fancy himself as a lion-tamer.

There wasn’t a murderous dictator or mendacious populist that the French President would not try to charm: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Narendra Modi, Recep Tayip Erdogan, Victor Orban.

The results, overall, have been poor. Sometimes Macron has been eaten, diplomatically-speaking. Years of trying to smooth-talk Vladimir Putin – with invitations to Versailles and the presidential retreat at Fort Brégancon and the long-table talks in the Kremlin – ended in disillusion and humiliation.

Macron’s attempts to create a blokeish friendship with Boris Johnson ended in cross-Channel exchanges of insults and accusations. His mission to find a core, reasonable Donald Trump ended in the discovery that there was no reasonable Donald Trump, just a self-obsessed, shallow deal-maker or deal-breaker.

And now President Xi Jinping of China. The two presidents and their wives are on an away-day to the French Pyrenees (Tuesday), visiting a region dear to Macron since his childhood.

The first day of Xi’s French state visit in Paris yesterday seems to have produced very little. The Chinese president promised to send no arms to Russia but that is a long-standing promise that he has, technically-speaking, kept.

Xi is reported to have promised to restrict sales to Moscow of “secondary materials” which can be used to make arms. We will see.

The Chinese leader also agreed to support Macron’s call for an “Olympic truce” in Ukraine and elsewhere for the duration of the Paris games in late July and August. Good luck with that.

On the gathering menace of a trade war between the EU and China, no progress was made. As a minimal concession to his French hosts, Xi promised to drop threatened dumping duties on French Cognac and Armagnac sales to China.

Otherwise, Xi said that he could not see a problem. Cheap Chinese-built electric cars and solar panels and steel are swamping the EU market? All the better for the European fight against inflation and global warming.

READ MORE: How ‘Battery Valley’ is changing northern France

Maybe more will be achieved in shirt-sleeves in the Pyrenees today. The Chinese leadership is said to approve of Macron or at least believe that he is useful to them.

Beijing likes the French President’s arguments, renewed in a speech last month, that the EU should become a “strategic” commercial and military power in its own right and not a “vassal” of the United States. The Chinese leadership evidently has no fear of the EU becoming a rival power. It sees Macron’s ideas for a “Europe puissance” as a useful way of dividing the West and weakening the strength of Washington, the dollar and “western values”.

Macron has sometimes encouraged this way of thinking, perhaps accidentally. After his state visit to China last year, he gave a rambling media interview in which he seemed to say that the EU had no interest in being “followers of the US” or defending Taiwan from Chinese aggression. He had to amend his words later.

That was Macron at his worst, an ad-lib, stand-up diplomat who ignores advice from the professionals in the Quai d’Orsay. I would argue, however, that the wider Macron argument – the EU must become more powerful or die – is the French President at his best.

Few other politicians in the world think ahead so much as Macron does. Democratic politics is mired in short-termism. Only autocrats like Xi or Putin can afford to think in terms of decades or centuries.

Macron likes to look around corners. He is often a better thinker than he is a diplomat or practical, daily politician.

His core argument – made in his Sorbonne speech last month and an interview with The Economist – is that Europe faces an unprecedented triple threat to its values, its security and its future prosperity.  

The rise of intolerant populist-nationalism threatens the values and institutions implanted in Europe after World War Two. The aggression of Russia and the detachment of the US (not just Donald Trump) threatens Europe’s security. The abandonment of global rules on fair trade – by Joe Biden’s US as well as Xi’s China – threatens to destroy European industry and sources of prosperity.

READ MORE: OPINION – Macron must earn the role of ’21st-century Churchill’

Civilisations, like people, are mortal, Macron says. Unless the EU and the wider democratic Europe (yes, you post-Brexit Britain) address these problems there is a danger that European civilisation (not just the EU experiment) could die.

Exaggerated? Maybe. But the problems are all real. Macron’s solutions are a powerful European defence alliance within Nato and targeted European protectionism and investment for the industries of the future.

The chances of those things being agreed by in time to make a difference are non-existent to small. In France, as elsewhere, these big “strategic” questions scarcely figure in popular concerns in the European election campaign.

Emmanuel Macron has now been president for seven years. His remaining three years in office will be something between disjointed and paralysed.

It is too early to write his political obituary but the Xi visit and the Sorbonne speech offer the likely main components. Macron will, I fear, be remembered as a visionary thinker and flawed diplomat/politician.

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