Far-right party projected to get strong lead in first-round legislative elections in France
French polling agencies projected that the National Rally and its allies got about one-third of the national vote on Sunday
The far-right National Rally leaped into a strong lead Sunday in France's first round of legislative elections, polling agencies projected, bringing the party closer to being able to form a government in round two and dealing a major slap to centrist President Emmanuel Macron and his risky decision to call the surprise ballot.
When he dissolved the National Assembly on June 9, after a stinging defeat at the hands of the National Rally in French voting for the European Parliament, Macron gambled that the anti-immigration party with historical links to antisemitism wouldn't repeat that success when France's own fate was in the balance.
But it didn't work out that way. With French polling agencies projecting that the National Rally and its allies got about one-third of the national vote on Sunday, Macron's prime minister warned that France could end up with its first far-right government since World War II if voters don't come together to thwart that scenario in round two next Sunday.
“The extreme right is at the doors of power,” Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said. He twice described National Rally policy pledges as “disastrous” and said that in the second-round ballot, “not one vote should go to the National Rally.”
French polling agencies' projections put Macron’s grouping of centrist parties a distant third in the first-round ballot, behind both the National Rally and a new left-wing coalition of parties that joined forces to keep it from winning power.
Winning a parliamentary majority would enable National Rally leader Marine Le Pen to install her 28-year-old protege, Jordan Bardella, as prime minister and would crown her yearslong rebranding effort to make her party less repellent to mainstream voters. She inherited the party, then called the National Front, from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has multiple convictions for racist and antisemitic hate speech.
Still, the National Rally isn’t there yet. With another torrid week of campaigning to come before the decisive final voting next Sunday, the election’s ultimate outcome remains uncertain.
Speaking to a cheering crowd waving the French tricolour (blue, white and red), Le Pen called on her supporters and voters who did not support the party in the first round to help her push through the finish line and secure victory. A decisive majority in parliament. In this scenario, Bardella and Macron would be forced into an awkward power-sharing arrangement. Macron has said he will not step down until his term ends in 2027.
Only the second round will tell whether Le Pen and her allies can secure the absolute majority needed to comfortably form a government and begin to implement their promises to dismantle many of Macron's key policies and foreign policy programme. This includes halting France's deliveries of long-range missiles to Ukraine in the war against Russian all-out aggression. The Rassembly National has historical ties to Russia.
The far-right's more confrontational approach to the European Union, plans to roll back Macron's pension reforms, and the Rassembly National's pledge to increase voters' purchasing power without clearly indicating how this pledge will be paid for could also destabilize European financial markets.
Some polling agencies' forecasts suggest that in a best-case scenario for the far-right, the National Party and its allies could work together to clear the hurdle of 289 seats needed to secure a majority in the 577-seat National Assembly.
Depending on the outcome of the second round, polling agencies predicted that the far-right could also miss the required target and not be left with a single bloc with a clear majority. The two-stage electoral system makes predictions difficult. The first official results from the first round are due to be announced later on Sunday.
Already on Sunday evening, far-right rivals were planning to drop some of their candidates from the race in the second round in order to concentrate votes against Las Vegas.
Opinion polls suggest turnout was at least 66 percent, the highest turnout for the first round of parliamentary elections in 27 years.
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