France goes to the polls tomorrow for the first round of its snap legislative election, called unexpectedly by president Emmanuel Macron three weeks earlier. Macron’s term has almost another three years to run, but the results of this election could potentially reduce him to an embattled figurehead.
If you rely on the media headlines, you might think that a majority for Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally is in the bag. The first sentence of today’s BBC report says “voters appear ready to hand” it “a historic victory,” and that’s entirely typical; I haven’t bothered to make notes, but there have been similar remarks in numerous outlets all week. Yet the opinion polls persistently have National Rally stuck in the mid-30s, and projections of seat totals from that show it mostly (although not invariably) finishing well short of the 289 seats needed for a majority.
Why does this media foolishness keep happening? (Read Nate Silver’s lovely account of it in the 2017 presidential election.) Partly it’s the perverse habit of describing the leader in a multi-party race as the “winner” even when the others will obviously combine against it. Partly it’s the well-established masochism of the left-wing intelligentsia. But it’s also about the way that we have lost historical memory of what fascism is really like, and at some level have started seeing it as something trendy and fashionable rather than dark and dangerous. Six and a half years ago I remarked that “Where once Tom Wolfe warned us about radical chic, News Corp and its fan club are now promoting fascist chic.”
Anyway, back to the election. Two years ago, Macron’s centrist coalition, Ensemble (“Together”), and the alliance of left and centre-left parties called NUPES roughly tied for first place,* each with a vote in the high 20s. National Rally and its allies were in the low 20s, the centre-right had 11.3%, and regionalists, independents and assorted extremists collected the remaining few points. That ultimately produced a legislature with 255 centrists, 152 left, 91 far right, 72 centre-right and seven others.
That might make the relationship between votes and seats look very arbitrary. In fact it’s something that should be more familiar to Australians: the two-round system approximates the effect of preferential voting. But in a multi-party system the results become very hard to predict, and it throws up all sorts of opportunities for tactical voting.
If no candidate wins a majority in the first round (NUPES did in four seats last time and Ensemble in one; this time National Rally will probably get quite a few), the top two will contest the runoff on 7 July. Any other candidate who reaches 12.5% of the total enrolment (not the total vote) can also stay in for the runoff, although if they prefer they can withdraw and endorse one of the others. Last time, only eight third-placegetters reached that mark, but that was a very low-turnout election; with higher turnout this year there are expected to be a lot more of them.
So a lot will turn on what parties do in between the two rounds, and whether their voters follow their advice. Where Macron’s candidates are eliminated, will they endorse candidates from the left (now called the New Popular Front) against the far right? Officially, Macron’s party regards the main far-left party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s LFI, as an equal evil to the National Rally, but whether that attitude will hold up next week is anyone’s guess.
Regardless of your view about the relative dangers of far left and far right (and I’ve made mine clear in the past), there’s an important asymmetry here. Mélenchon is not going to have a majority in his own right – LFI is not running enough candidates for that (only 229), and even for the New Popular Front as a whole its chance is negligible. The choice is not between the two extremes in the abstract, it’s between a National Rally majority and a legislature where centre, centre-left and left (plus perhaps a few sensible survivors from the centre-right) can combine to block it.
There’s also the question of what LFI will do: in the (no doubt fewer) seats where the runoff is between centre and far right, will Mélenchon overcome his hostility to the president and endorse the Macronist candidate? And what about after the election – assuming the far right fails to win a majority, will LFI co-operate in supporting some sort of national unity government, or will it tolerate a minority government led by Jordan Bardella, National Rally’s 28-year-old party president?
As I said last week, Macron evidently calculates that if the National Rally is going to one day form government, best for it to happen now while he is still there to limit the harm it can do and while it has nearly three years to discredit itself before the next presidential election. In a situation where the far right has, say, somewhere around 250 seats he may well choose to give it its chance rather than try to negotiate with Mélenchon and the rest for some alternative.
Nor should we assume that this will necessarily be the last election before May 2027. If the result bursts some of the far right’s bubble – either at the polls or in their aftermath – it’s not impossible that Macron will try again in a year or two.
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* Exact figures depend on how you classify a variety of doubtful candidates, especially those from the overseas possessions; this was a source of some controversy at the time. The interior ministry’s figures put Ensemble slightly in the lead, but there were considerably more unattached left than centre candidates.
The World is Not Enough 