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ELECTIONS

Will the far-right get a majority in the French parliament?

With the far-right in the lead after the first round of the snap French elections the big question now is whether they can win a majority in parliament - which gives them the right to nominate the prime minister.

Published: 30 June 2024 22:38 CEST

Will the far-right get a majority in the French parliament?

French far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party leader Marine Le Pen followed by party President Jordan Bardella. Photo by JULIEN DE ROSA / AFP

The final results for round one of voting, released early on Monday morning, showed the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party well in the lead with 33.4 percent of the votes.

They were followed by the alliance of leftist parties, called the Nouveau Front Populaire on 28 percent, Macron’s centrist group Ensemble on 20.8 percent, and the right-wing Les Republicains party on 10.2 percent.

Follow the latest on the results HERE.

We now move on to round two – which will give the final results in each of France’s 577 constituencies.

The big question is whether any party or group can reach the magic number of 289 seats, which would give them a majority in the Assemblée nationale (the French parliament).

A party or group that gets 289 seats not only gets to exercise control over votes on legislation, but can also nominate a member of the party to be prime minister.

If a party other than the president’s party has a majority then the prime minister and the president are forced to work together in an easy alliance known as a cohabitiation.

So will the far-right RN win enough seats to get a majority?

First things first – this is all guesswork, we won’t know for certain whether Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s party will have enough seats for a majority until the results of the second round are in on the evening of Sunday, July 7th.

However the pollsters have been working their magic trying to predict the total seat share from the first round vote and it seems they RN are set to win a huge number of seats.

Various different polling agencies have different and very wide estimates, but all are saying that the final result for the RN could be close to that key number of 289.

A projection for the Elabe institute for BFMTV, RMC and La Tribune Dimanche put RN and its allies on between 255 and 295 seats.

Early projections from Ipsos suggest that RN and its allies could win between 230 and 280 seats in parliament.

It’s worth noting that given the unpredictability around the second round of voting (see below) France’s official polling watchdog does not endorse the seat projections by the polling companies.

Polls in the run up to the first round suggested the RN would not gain an absolute majority in parliament but wouldn’t be far off.

Second round votes

A big factor in the second round will be the ‘triangulaires’ or areas where the second round has three candidates.

In areas where this happens, it’s possible that some parties will agree to withdraw candidates in order to avoid splitting the vote – negotiations are ongoing in this area but it’s most likely to happen with leftist or centrist candidates.

The intention is to present a common front against the far-right – so if this happens in a significant number of areas it could affect the far-right’s overall seat numbers.

Follow the latest on those negotiations HERE.

Prime minister

If the far-right does gain an overall majority it has the right to nominate a candidate for prime minister and that person will be 28-year-old Jordan Bardella.

He has already said that he will only accept the PM role if his party wins an overall majority.

Although Macron will remain the president, having a parliamentary majority and a prime minister means the far-right will be in a much stronger position to implement some of their flagship policies including a drastic reduction in immigration and the imposing of ‘French preference’ to give precedence to French citizens in employment and housing.

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On Wednesday, Bardella was confronted on live television with a sound recording of RN MP Daniel Grenon saying that anybody of French-North African double nationality “has no place in high office”.

Bardella quickly condemned the remark, calling it “abject”, and announced the creation of a “conflict committee” within the party to deal with such cases.

“Anybody who says things that are not in line with my convictions will be excluded,” he said.

Earlier Laurent Gnaedig, a parliamentary candidate for the RN, caused uproar by saying that remarks by party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, who called Nazi gas chambers “a detail of history”, were not actually anti-Semitic.

Gnaedig later presented his “sincere apologies” and said he had never meant to question the reality of “the horror of the Holocaust”. He would accept any decision by the party’s conflict commission, he added.

In November, Bardella himself got into hot water on the same topic when he said he did “not believe that Jean-Marie Le Pen was an anti-Semite”. He later walked back the remark, saying Le Pen “obviously withdrew into a kind of anti-Semitism”.

Another candidate, Ludivine Daoudi, dropped out of the race for France’s parliament on Tuesday after a photo of her allegedly wearing a cap from Nazi Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe, sparked furore online.

And Brittany region candidate Francoise Billaud deleted her Facebook account after she was found to have shared a picture of the grave of French Vichy collaborationist leader Philippe Pétain with the caption “Marshal of France”.

RN deputy Roger Chudeau meanwhile got into trouble with the party leadership for saying that the 2014 appointment of Moroccan-born Najat Vallaud-Belkacem as the Socialist government’s education minister had been “an error”.

Marine Le Pen has over the past years moved to make the party a mainstream force and distance it from the legacy of Jean Marie Le Pen, her father and its co-founder, in a process widely dubbed “dédiabolisation” (un-demonization).

“What really matters is how a political party reacts”, she has said, adding that the party commission’s would be “harsh” in dealing with such cases of extremism.

She added there was a distinction to be made between “inadmissible” statements for which sanctions were “highly likely”, and cases of mere “clumsiness”.

The latter category, she said, included an attempt by candidate Paule Veyre de Soras to defend her party against racism charges by saying that: “I have a Jewish ophthalmologist and a Muslim dentist”.

Le Pen said most candidates “are decent people who are in the running because the National Assembly needs to reflect France and not reflect Sciences Po or ENA”, two elite universities.

The RN has acknowledged that President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call a snap election left little time to select candidates in the numbers needed to fill the seats it expects to win.

The far right has also noted that other parties have similar problems, citing the case of hard-left National Assembly candidate Raphael Arnault, who was found to be on a French police anti-extremist watchlist.

Arnault was suspected of terrorist sympathies and questioned after tweeting on October 7th that “the Palestinian resistance has launched an unprecedented attack on the colonialist state of Israel”.

A recent poll by Harris Interactive projected the RN and its allies would win 190 to 220 seats in the National Assembly, the leftist coalition NFP 159 to 183 seats and Macron’s Ensemble (Together) alliance 110 to 135.

You can follow all the latest election news HERE or sign up to receive by email our bi-weekly election breakdown