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ELECTIONS

French parties in final push for votes ahead of snap elections

France's political forces are making a final bid on Friday for votes in crunch legislative elections that could see the far right take control of the government in a historic first.

Published: 28 June 2024 12:40 CEST

French parties in final push for votes ahead of snap elections

A demonstrator during an anti far-right rally ahead of the French elections. Photo by Frederick FLORIN / AFP

The official campaigning period ends at midnight on Friday, followed by a day off on Saturday, during which political activity is forbidden ahead of voting on Sunday. Another week of campaigning will then lead up to the decisive second round on July 7th.

The far-right Rassemblement National (RN) is tipped to win the election, potentially giving the party the post of prime minister for the first time in its history in a tense “cohabitation” with centrist President Emmanuel Macron.

What’s at stake for foreigners in France if far-right Jordan Bardella becomes prime minister?

“Of course, I want to avoid the extremes, especially the far right, being able to win” the ballot, Macron’s Prime Minister Gabriel Attal told broadcaster BFMTV on Friday.

Opinion polls suggest his centrist alliance will come only third behind the RN and a broad but fragile left-wing coalition, the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP).

The RN party chief, Jordan Bardella, 28, would have a chance to lead a government as prime minister.

But he has insisted he would do so only if his party wins an absolute majority – 289 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly – after the second round.

His party’s path to victory could be blocked if the left and centre-right join forces against the RN in the second round of voting.

Macron has caused controversy in the past two weeks by placing the left and the far-right on the same footing, labelling both “extremes”.

Speaking in Brussels on Thursday, however, he suggested that he would support moderate leftists against the far-right in the second round.

Macron also blasted the “arrogance” of the far right, which had “already allocated all the (government) jobs” before the election and questioned the president’s constitutional role as military commander in chief.

“Who are they to explain what the constitution should say?” he asked.

The RN’s three-time presidential candidate Marine Le Pen had ratcheted up tensions by saying that the president’s commander-in-chief title was purely “honorific”.

In the event of Macron having to share power with an RN-led government, “it’s the prime minister who holds the purse strings”, she warned.

In a televised debate on Thursday night, Attal said that Le Pen’s remarks sent a “very serious message for the security of France.”

Bardella sought to reassure voters about his party’s foreign policy, saying in the debate he would “not let Russian imperialism absorb an allied state like Ukraine”.

He said he was also opposed to sending longer range missiles to Ukraine that could hit Russian territory “and place France and the French in a situation of co-belligerence”.

“My compass is the interest of France and the French,” said Bardella.

Macron has insisted he will serve out the remainder of his second term until it expires in 2027, no matter which party emerges on top in the coming legislative contest.

Le Pen, whom opponents have long accused of having too cosy a relationship with the Kremlin, senses that this could be her best-ever chance to win the Elysée Palace after three previous attempts.

When he called the snap vote after a June 9th European Parliament election drubbing by the RN, Macron had hoped to present voters with a stark choice about whether to hand France to the far right.

An Opinionway poll of 1,058 people published Friday in business daily Les Echos predicted the RN would win 37 percent of the vote, the NFP 28 percent and Macron’s alliance just 20 percent.

In the second round, the RN “can not only envisage a relative majority, but we cannot exclude, far from it, an absolute majority,” Brice Teinturier, deputy director of competing pollster Ipsos, told AFP.

The televised debate, where Attal and Bardella were joined by Socialist leader Olivier Faure, was as ill-tempered as the first such session on Tuesday.

Attal charged that 100 RN candidates standing in the election had made “racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic comments.”

“Everything is false, utterly false,” responded Bardella, who also defended a controversial proposal to bar dual nationals from sensitive state posts.

Underscoring the stakes felt by many in France from ethnic minority backgrounds, French basketball superstar Victor Wembanyama said “for me it is important to take a distance from extremes, which are not the direction to take for a country like ours”.

He joins a host of other French sports, music and acting stars who have spoken out against the far right.

How to follow all the latest French election news in English this weekend

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OPINION: The best France can hope for now is 12 months of turmoil

Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National will narrowly fail to achieve an overall majority in the National Assembly. France will be plunged into a year of confusion and immobility with a lower house of parliament dominated by two angry, mutually-detesting blocs of Far Right and Left.

President Emmanuel Macron called the early election to restore “clarity”. Instead, he has created perilous uncertainty.

He has reduced his own parliamentary camp by up to two thirds. He has shown that the great majority of the country does NOT want a Far Right government. But he has left France perilously close to rule by an anti-European, pro-Russian party which seeks to return the country to a divisive and fake vision of a contented past.

It is evident that Le Pen COULD win a majority in the second round; but I believe that she will fail and that she will also fail to attract enough centre-right quislings to install her scary de facto Number Two Jordan Bardella as Prime Minister.

Here are my reasons for cautious optimism – if wishing at least 12 months of drift and turmoil on France is optimism.

Sunday’s voting numbers suggest that the country looked into the abyss of a Far Right government and drew back. Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella vastly increased their support compared to the 2022 parliamentary election. But final opinion polls which projected a combined 36 percent or 37 percent for the Far Right and their centre-right collaborator Eric Ciotti proved exaggerated.

The RN alone won just under 30 percent of the vote – bad enough but less than its score in the European elections last month. Ciotti candidates added another 3 percent. Since Eric Zemmour’s alternative far right party, Reconquete!, was all but wiped out, this is NOT quite the populist-nationalist tsunami that some feared or forecast.

The vote for one iteration or another of the anti-European, anti-migrant, pro-Moscow nationalist Right has been around 30 percent for some time. Marine Le Pen took 13,208 686 votes in Round 2 of the Presidential election in 2022. Her party took 9,337,185 votes on Sunday.

All the same, the RN looks certain to expand its parliamentary party by 200 percent from 88 to at least 250 and maybe as many as 270. The new Assembly will be packed with Putin-fanciers, climate-change-deniers, anti-Semites, Islamophobes and conspiracy-theorists. Pauvre France.

Why do I believe that the RN will fail to achieve the 289 seats it needs for an overall majority?

After the first round results, there are potentially over 300 “triangular” or three-candidate second rounds out of 577. There are even four constituencies where four candidates have qualified for round two.

This is an all-time record for the present, convoluted parliamentary election system in which the first two candidates plus anyone who takes 12.5 percent of the registered first round vote qualify for a second round run-off. The high number of three-way second rounds has two explanations: the high turn-out 66.7 percent and the relatively small number of minor candidates in a surprise election.

The mass of three-way races offers an opportunity to the Left alliance and Macron centre to combine to support single anti-Far Right candidates in Round Two.

You can listen to John discuss the first round and what will happen next in the latest episode of our Talking France podcast.

Will they? In many cases, yes. Even the Far Left La France Insoumise – ambivalent in 2022 – has called on its third place candidates to withdraw in favour of better-placed Macron candidates.

The Presidential camp is foolishly divided on this question but its position is changing all the time and may become clearer soon. Macron’s party is up for a broad deal for mutual withdrawal of Centre and Left candidates. The other centrist parties, Modem and Edouard Philippe’s Horizons are saying that they will not withdraw for the more extreme or allegedly anti-Semitic candidates of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s LFI.

Could this ruin the so-called Republican Front against the Far Right next Sunday? It will weaken it, I believe, but not ruin it. The final decision, in any case, is that of individual voters, not party leaders.

There are many other variables. It will be a new election on Sunday. The turnout may be lower. Or it might be higher. A different cast of electors might turn out.

There is also the question of the non-quisling centre-right – the great majority of Les Républicains deputies who refused to betray their party’s Gaullist past and follow Eric Ciotti last month into the ample arms of Le Pen. They did pretty well on Sunday and can hope to retain around 50 of their 61 deputies.

Will some be tempted to ally with Le Pen and Bardella if they are just short of a majority? Very few, I think. They will see their battered party’s resilience as a sign that they could still recover their past glories and could yet produce a serious presidential player in 2027. That will be impossible if they ally with the Far Right.

Centre-right voters are a different question. Some will go to Le Pen, others to the Centre or even moderate Left to block the Far Right. It was shameful but not surprising to see the once moderate-conservative-Gaullist but increasingly Lepennist newspaper Le Figaro suggest to its readers that they should support the Far Right in Round Two to avoid the confusion of a blocked parliament.

Much will shift and swirl in the next week. I may prove to be foolish rather than brave. But my gut feeling is that Le Pen and Bardella will be stranded on 260 or so seats and will be unwilling or unable to form a government.

President Macron might try to carve a new ad hoc majority out of the centre-left, centre-right and centre. He will also fail. The most he can realistically hope for is for a working minority to support some kind of technocratic, caretaker government until new elections are legally possible in 12 months’ time.

Is it inevitable that Le Pen and Bardella will then claim the outright victory that I think they will be denied on Sunday? Maybe.

But let’s be optimistic. The country has looked into the abyss and recoiled once. It could well do so again.

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