Far right wins first round of French legislative elections, putting Macron in trouble

The extreme right yesterday won the first round of a crucial legislative election in France, in which the centre-right forces of President Emmanuel Macron came in third place behind the left, according to initial estimates.

The far-right National Rally party (RN), led by Marine Le Pen and her allies, achieved more than 34 percent of the vote, but will have to wait for the second round on July 7 to find out if it reaches an absolute majority in the National Assembly. (Low camera).

“We need an absolute majority,” Le Pen said before her supporters in her fiefdom of Hénin-Beaumont, in northern France, where she celebrated that the “Macronist bloc” had “practically” disappeared.

Macron’s alliance would achieve between 20.5 and 21.5 percent, behind the left-wing coalition New Popular Front (NFP), which would obtain between 28.5 percent and 29.1 percent of votes , according to the first estimates from the Ifop and Ipsos polling institutes.

The rise to power of the far right, for the first time since France was liberated from Nazi occupation in 1945, would add a new country to the European Union (EU) governed by this tendency, like Italy. And it could weaken Macron’s policy of supporting Ukraine.

Although Le Pen’s party, whose detractors consider her close to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, assures that it supports kyiv, it emphasizes that it wants to avoid an escalation with Moscow.

Sample of a vote perceived as historic, at 5 pm, three hours before the closing of the polling stations, participation reached 59.39 percent of voters, 20 points more than at the same time in 2022, according to the Ministry of Inside.

The left acts to prevent the extreme right from coming to power

The electoral system itself makes the final result of a National Assembly where the three blocs that emerged from the 2022 elections will continue, but with a new balance of forces, uncertain.

Its 577 deputies are elected in single-member constituencies, with a two-round majority system.

According to the results of each constituency, two, three or more candidates may enter the second round. The first three projections for this Sunday range between a simple or an absolute majority of the extreme right in the Lower House.

To avoid an absolute majority of RN and its allies, leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon assured in a press conference that the NFP will withdraw its candidates who come in third place in the runoff, to give more options for a defeat of its far-right rivals. .

The French president called, for his part, for a “broad” alliance against the extreme right, “clearly democratic and republican,” during the second round, but without specifying whether his candidates should withdraw to benefit their NFP rivals against the extreme right. .

A similar call was made by the leader of the Green Party, Marine Tondelier, as well as by the Socialist leader Raphael Glucksman. Macron welcomed the turnout in the legislative elections, which at more than 65 percent is a record.

The Bardella letter

Macron, whose mandate ends in 2027, caused the electoral advance on June 9 following the resounding victory of RN in the European elections in France and now risks sharing power with a government of a different political color, less than a month of the Paris Olympic Games.

RN has already announced that if it achieves an absolute majority with its allies in the legislative elections, it will nominate its young emerging leader Jordan Bardella as prime minister, who at 28 years old already led his party to victory in the European elections.

The far-right party defends a program that seeks to limit immigration, impose “authority” in schools and reduce household electricity bills, among other measures.

RN’s rivals have tried in the final stretch to raise the alarm about the risk of the far right coming to power, after the party has worked hard in the last decade to tone down the image inherited from its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, known for his racist and anti-Semitic comments.

“Giving him any power means nothing less than running the risk of seeing everything that has been built and achieved over more than two and a half centuries gradually fall apart,” warned the daily Le Monde.