France on the brink

Whatever other problems France has (and there are a lot of them), its opinion polling is pretty good. Sunday’s first round of its legislative election came out very much the way the polls said: the far right in the lead but well short of a majority, the left a fairly close second, the centre a poor but still respectable third.

The far right’s vote did indeed drop from what it was in the European parliament election, but much less than usual. National Rally’s vote fell from 31.4% to 29.2%, and the far-right total fell from 37.9% to 34.4%. The left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) has 28.0%, and other assorted left groups add another three or four points to that. President Emmanuel Macron’s ticket, Ensemble, managed 20.0%, plus a couple of points worth of other centrists. (Official results are here; Le Monde’s coverage is particularly good. Figures often vary slightly depending on just how candidates are allocated to parties.)

The real carnage was on the centre-right. The death of the Republicans has been announced before, as when their candidate, Valérie Pécresse, won only 4.8% of the vote in the 2022 presidential election. The party recovered modestly from there to score 11.3% in the legislative election, but this time it is in deep trouble: the mainstream Republicans have just 6.6%, and their right-wing faction, co-operating with National Rally, another 3.9% (included in the far-right total above). Non-aligned right candidates have about another three or four points, with a couple of points left over for regionalists and independents.

Previewing the election on Saturday I remarked that there were only eight seats in 2022 where the third-placegetter qualified for the runoff, but that “with higher turnout this year there are expected to be a lot more of them.” As you’ve probably heard, with turnout up to 66.7% there were in fact enormously more: 311, including five in which the fourth-placegetter also scraped in. But that doesn’t mean there’ll be that many actual triangular contests next Sunday – and this is the bit that really matters.

Nothing in either the first round vote totals or their geographic distribution was much of a surprise; it’s scary, but we knew it was coming. What will determine the shape of the legislature and therefore France’s future is what voters do in the second round, and that in turn will depend a lot on what the parties do: will the different republican parties, from centre-right to far left, manage to sink their differences and combine to resist the enemies of the republic?

So far, the signs are pretty good. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the largest and most left-wing component of the NFP, has risen to the occasion and announced that the alliance will withdraw all of its third-place candidates in seats where the far right is leading. Ensemble has been more equivocal, since from its point of view Mélenchon’s LFI is also anti-republican, but is also withdrawing candidates on a large scale: some centrists who withdraw are declining to endorse either National Rally or the NFP, but the point of withdrawing is clearly to help the latter.

Withdrawals have to be made today (by 2am Wednesday, eastern Australian time); so far, according to Le Monde’s table, the number of three-(or four-)cornered contests is down to 130, and only a handful of those are seats where National Rally led in the first round. So most voters will be faced with a straight choice between a far-right candidate and one who more or less represents a broad front of republican values.

On that basis, there’s not much chance that the far right will be able to win a majority. Yet the media adulation of it continues. Here’s yesterday’s BBC report, for example:

What Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella want is an absolute majority of 289 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly.
Seat projections for next Sunday’s second round run-off votes suggest they may fall short.

But their own chart then shows projections for National Rally ranging from 230 to 280 seats. There’s no “may” about it: the projections might be wrong, but what they say is that they will fall short.

Given a legislature where National Rally is the largest party, Macron will have a number of options. He could appoint some sort of non-party technocratic government and dare the parties to combine against it. He could negotiate with the NFP and the Republicans for a coalition government, difficult as that might be. Or he could hand the mandate to National Front leader Jordan Bardella and say “Here, you’ve got the most seats, you have a try at forming government.”

The prospects of a coalition government would depend in part on the balance of forces between Ensemble and the NFP, as well as within the NFP itself. Although Ensemble leads in a lot fewer seats than the NFP (75 against 172), in seats where the far right leads Ensemble is second in 107 and the NFP in 113. And other things being equal, an Ensemble candidate will have a better chance of winning from behind: they did it in 48 seats in 2022, as against only ten for the left.

Of those 285 potentially winnable seats for the NFP, its candidate is from LFI in 114, the Socialists 91, Greens 39, Communists 15 and 26 others. As in 2022, the Socialists are doing a little better than their allocation of seats within the alliance would suggest, and may do better still in the second round. Even so, a chamber in which neither far right nor LFI is required for a majority is only barely within the realm of possibility.

And assuming that National Rally can be kept out of power this time, what of 2027? In a straight fight for the presidency between Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen, there’s not much doubt that Le Pen would win comfortably. Somehow the mainstream has to reinvent itself, and it’s not at all clear whether Macron’s surprise election has made that task easier or harder.