For many, France felt like a very different place on Monday.
Results from the first round of legislative elections on Sunday showed a country deeply divided, with the rise of the far right winning a record number of votes and the near collapse of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party.
“The far right is on the doorstep of power,” read the cover of Le Parisien the morning after the first half of a snap election called for by Mr. Macron.
“Twelve million of our compatriots voted for a far-right party that is clearly racist and anti-Republican,” declared the left-leaning Libération newspaper in an editorial, referring to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. party. “The head of state threw France under the bus, which continued without slowing down and now stops in front of the gates of Matignon” – Office of the Prime Minister.
If the National Assembly wins an outright majority in Sunday’s runoff, Macron will be forced to name the prime minister from the National Assembly, who will then form his cabinet.
There is shock and disbelief at the political turnaround for Macron’s party, which and its allies hold the most seats in the National Assembly but not an outright majority. The centrist coalition finished a distant third in the first of two electoral rounds. Only two of his candidates – not a minister running for the seat – received enough votes to be re-elected without a runoff, compared with 37 members of the far-right National Rally , while the far-right National Rally has 32 members.
The results of the first round of voting generally do not reliably predict the number of parliamentary seats each party will receive. But the National Assembly now looks likely to become the biggest force in the powerful National Assembly. The question is whether it can gain enough seats to achieve an outright majority.
Failing that, the National Assembly is likely to spiral out of control, leaving Macron’s centrist party and its allies caught between the left and the right, with much less power.
“The end of an era,” declared the front page of the leading business daily Les Echos.
“When historians look back on this dissolution, they will have only one word left: disaster!” said an editorial in the conservative newspaper Le Figaro.
“Emmanuel Macron has it all, or almost everything,” it continued. “He lost everything.”
On the ground, reaction to the vote reflected the country’s divisions. There was jubilation in the north, seen as a stronghold of far-right national rallies.
“I’m going to party all night long,” said contractor Manuel Queco, 42, at a local hall in the town of Beaumont, Herning. Round after round of congratulations. Mr Quico raised a champagne glass as supporters rallied across the country to sing the national anthem. “I’ve been waiting for them to win since I was 18.”
In Paris, first-round results were released on an electoral map that almost entirely excluded national rallies but was split between the New Popular Front and the president’s party. Yet on Sunday night, as thousands of left-wing supporters gathered in Place de la Repubblica, the dominant emotion was sadness and sympathy.
Camille Hemard, 50, a professor of Latin, Greek and French at a senior preparatory university, said: “I never thought I would see something like this in my life – extreme The right-wing leader leads the country. She took her 16-year-old daughter with her and found comfort among the crowds who danced and chanted “Everyone hates fascism”.
She added, “I hope my children don’t know about this.”
Official results released by the interior ministry showed that the National Rally and its allies won around 33% of the vote. Macron’s centrist Ennahda party and its allies received about 20% of the vote, with the New Popular Front winning about 28%.
Pollsters are taking to radio, television and news websites to remind people that not everything has been decided. Only 76 of the country’s 577 legislative seats were outright victors. Competition for the remaining 501 seats will begin this week, leading up to the final vote on Sunday. The question many are asking is how many candidates will drop out of the three-way race in a strategic move to prevent the far right from winning.
In French politics, this is known as forming a “republican front” or dam, although this strategy has suffered serious wear and tear over the past few years.
The editorial headline of the far-left newspaper L’Humanité was “Dam”. “Disaster has never been closer,” editor Sebastian Kreiper wrote. “There’s still time to stop this.”
The euro and French stocks rose on Monday on optimism that a national rally of eurosceptics may not secure an outright majority in runoff elections despite a landslide victory. Investors are now betting that the most likely outcome on Sunday is a deadlock in parliament, with neither the far right nor the left able to secure a majority.
But this optimism may be short-lived. Economists warn that France risks a debt crisis if the paralyzed government fails to rein in France’s finances or if the National Assembly wins an outright majority and continues a spending spree to deliver on expensive economic promises made to voters.
While Syriza leaders vowed that their third candidate would withdraw to prevent national assembly candidates from winning seats, messaging from the presidential camp was mixed.
The young Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, whose term is likely to be numbered, declared it a “moral imperative” to “prevent the national assembly from obtaining an absolute majority”. However, other leading members of Macron’s centrist coalition were more speculative, with one saying the decision on which candidates would step down would be based on region. Former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe has called for stopping not just the far-right but also the far-left party France Unbowed, a member of the left-wing coalition.
“On Sunday, Macron’s party once again lacked clarity and was unable to give clear instructions,” wrote Soren de Royer, a columnist for Le Monde, the country’s main newspaper.
For the far right, the first round was a resounding call to redouble their efforts to promote their view that the country is overrun with immigrants and riddled with crime.
National Rally president Jordan Bardella announced in an open letter to the French that the country now has a choice between his party and the left-wing coalition, which he said would restore order and respect, while the left The alliance he formed “posed an existential threat to the country.”
“The fate of France cannot be entrusted to these arsonists, who are adopting a strategy of perpetual conflict,” he wrote.
An editorial in Le Figaro presented readers with a similar choice, calling the national rally agenda “certainly worrying in many ways, but to confront: anti-Semitism, Islamic leftism, class hatred, tax hysteria” .
The existential threat to the left is clearly that the far right has come to power for the first time since the Vichy regime in World War II.
“Everyone like me who is in the middle has to choose one extreme,” said 25-year-old Hawa Diop. The trio, whose parents are immigrants from North and West Africa, feel threatened by far-right anti-immigration politics and a long-standing plan to ban Muslim women from wearing headscarves in public.
“We still hope it doesn’t happen,” she said. “Let’s pray.”
Segolena Lestradic Reporting by Hénin-Beaumont, France, and Liz Oldman From Paris.
