Protesters hold a banner reading ‘Against the far right: Popular Front’ in Toulouse, France, on June 15, 2024. Credit – Alain Pitton – NurPhoto/Getty Images
WWhen the French voters cast their votes Marine Le PenThe far-right National Rally party won a landslide victory in this month’s European Parliament elections, President Emmanuel Macron took a risky and unexpected gamble. He called early elections, due to start this Sunday, in which the French people would be given a choice: repeat the decision of the European elections and hand the far right the keys to national governance, or help thwart them by supporting its centrist leaders. Renaissance Party, which has served in a minority government since 2022.
But Macron did not expect voters to have a third option. Just days after the battle was announced, the country’s main left-wing parties – including the centre-left Socialists, the Greens, the Communists and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard-left France Unbowed – announced a new electoral pact. The ‘New Popular Front’, which takes its name from a short-lived political coalition between socialists and communists that emerged in response to the threat of fascism in the 1930s, has committed to campaigning on a common platform with a joint list of candidates. “The National Rally’s rise to power is no longer inevitable,” the parties said in a joint statement, adding: “There is hope!”
While Macron’s apparent failure to foresee the formation of this left-wing alliance could be disastrous for his party’s prospects, it was not without reason. Until recently, the French left was widely seen as a spent force, divided between a series of parties with fierce differences over issues such as support for Ukraine, the ongoing war in Gaza and their stance on the EU. Previous attempts to unite – most recently for the 2022 parliamentary elections – have largely failed.
“It’s a sloppy coalition,” Mujtaba Rahman, director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, said of the alliance, whose platform includes a pledge to reverse the unpopular pension reforms introduced by Macron last year, and to implement French pension reforms to give back. age to 60 (was 64). But there is strength in numbers. By forming this alliance, the left-wing parties ensure that the left’s share of the vote – which in total has been more or less the same in every election since 2017 – is no longer divided between different parties. “They are very opportunistic,” says Rahman. “It’s very tactical.”
But whether this coalition will be able to overcome its divisions long enough to survive until July 7, let alone deliver on these promises in government, remains to be seen. “If they come into contact with reality, it is quite conceivable that they will fall apart, because they are incredibly incoherent,” Rahman adds. “But for now, the creation of this bloc has created an alternative for moderate, centrist, left-wing voters who would otherwise have felt compelled to support Macron and slow down Le Pen.”
Read more: How the far-right parties in Europe are winning over young voters
Individually, these left-wing parties had little say in the European elections. But together they are expected to capture as much as 29.5% of the national vote, according to a recent poll, leaving them six points behind Le Pen’s National Rally but, crucially, 10 points ahead of Macron’s centrist alliance, which is currently being polled. only 19.5%. This does not bode well for Macron’s candidates, who will have to be among the top two candidates in the first round of voting on June 30 to advance to the decisive second round on July 7.
“In many constituencies it is very likely that Macronist candidates will not be selected for the second round,” said Mathieu Gallard, research director at French polling firm Ipsos. However, he notes that a third-place candidate could pull through if he can secure the support of at least 12.5% of registered voters in the constituency. “The higher the turnout will be in the first round,” he adds, “the higher the number of three-way matches will be in the second round.”
Historically speaking, turnout in parliamentary elections has not been high. During the last election, in 2022, only 47.5% of the French electorate cast a vote for the National Assembly, compared to the 73.6% who did so during the presidential election. Still, Gallard says turnout is expected to be higher than previous National Assembly votes, which have historically been overshadowed by the presidential elections that preceded them. (Macron, whose term ends in 2027, will not be on the ballot.)
Should Macron’s candidates be pushed out of the second round, his centrist supporters could become the deciding factor – if they choose to vote at all. In such a scenario, “I don’t expect much that … the macronist candidate will receive massive support from the left,” Gallard says. “I expect they will more or less split their vote between the two candidates, with many abstaining.”
The stakes of this election – which will determine who will be the next Prime Minister and, consequently, who will determine domestic policy in the future – could not be higher for all involved. “National Rally voters think they have a chance to win power for the first time,” Gallard says. “Left-wing voters are very afraid of this possibility and also think that they might win power. And macronist voters are very afraid of both possibilities.”
While Macron’s centrist alliance has tried to convince voters that his far-right and left-wing rivals cannot be trusted on key issues such as the economy, recent opinion polls suggest this argument is not taking hold. In fact, a recent Ipsos poll found that more voters trust Le Pen’s party on the economy (25%) than either the left-wing alliance (22%) or Macron’s centrist alliance (20%) – despite the lack of governance experience or warnings that a far-right government could herald a Liz Truss-style economic collapse, such as occurred when Britain’s short-lived prime minister introduced billions of pounds of unfunded tax cuts before eventually resigning in disgrace.
Although Macron has called on rival parties on both sides of the political spectrum to join his own electoral alliance to defeat Le Pen, the prospects of anyone heeding that call are unlikely. Macron, who was already deeply unpopular before the elections were held, “has irritated everyone by calling early elections,” Rahman says. “I find it hard to believe that the left or the right will please Macron and allow him to govern.”
Should these elections end in defeat for the Renaissance, and in victory for the New Popular Front or the National Rally, Macron will be forced to serve out the remainder of his presidential term in a power-sharing arrangement – an outcome that would almost certainly demote him . to the status of canard boiteuxor lame duck.
As some observers see, he may already be one. Having secured just 15% of the vote in the European elections, Macron would have been unable to continue governing without extreme resistance from rival parties – a reality that would invariably be reflected as the government attempts to pass its next budget into the European Parliament. to approve European elections. fall. Should left or right win after July 7, the next Assembly could be “even more dysfunctional, even more fragmented, even more paralyzed and even less able to do anything than the last one,” Rahman predicts. “I think there’s a risk that he’ll be even more of a lame duck than he already was.”
Write to Yasmeen Serhan at yasmeen.serhan@time.com.
