Elections in France: Anatomy of a historical moment

On June 9, 2024, a strange air of discomfort, laced for many with a sense of doom, was looming over France. The results from the EU elections were clear, and Marine Le Pen’s party, the National Rally (RN), had scored more than 31% of the votes on the ballot – six points above their previous best score in 2014.

Just a few hours later, as the country was absorbing the news, president Emmanuel Macron announced in an address to the nation that he was dissolving the National Assembly and calling a snap legislative election – a decision which has since been equated to a “political earthquake.”

At the time of writing, that is less than three weeks ago. The intervening period has been among the most tumultuous, and in many ways disconcerting, in decades of French politics. So why is this moment so significant?

What does dissolving the National Assembly mean?

In the French democratic system, parliamentary elections are normally held every five years. The next ones were due in 2027, a few months after the next Presidential election.

The 577 MPs in the Assembly are locally elected by universal suffrage, with a two-round majority system.

After the first round, the two leading candidates, as well as any additional candidate who collected votes equal to or more than 12.5% of the total electorate in the area (estimated as a probable 20% of the turnout), are allowed to advance to a second round of voting the following week. The candidate who obtains the most votes is then elected, in a winner-takes-all, first-past-the-post style.

Much like the Dáil in Ireland, the role of the National Assembly is to pass – or reject – laws. When President and parliamentary majority are politically aligned, things tend to run smoothly. Until now, during the second Presidency of Macron, the Assembly was under what we would call a ‘relative majority’. Renaissance (Macron’s party) held only 250 seats, with the rest divided between ten other political groups, including RN. But legislation could proceed with the support of different temporary ‘coalitions of interest’.

By dissolving the National Assembly, Macron has effectively dismissed all MPs, meaning that their seats, as well as the role of Prime Minister, are now up for grabs. To say that the decision took the political world in France by surprise would be the understatement of the century: with Macron’s popularity plummeting over the past few years, and the historically high scores clocked up by the far right in the elections to the European Parliament, many estimate that the President of France is in the process of handing the assembly to Marine Le Pen.

This is not, of course, the first time for a dissolution of the National Assembly in France. But this one nonetheless feels unique. Véronique Champeil-Desplats, public law professor at Université Paris Nanterre, explains.

“Most of the time, a snap election is called in response to a crisis,” she says, “but here, there really isn’t one. The circumstances are quite different from dissolutions we’ve seen in the past. It follows a defeat of the Presidential party in European parliamentary elections – but, in principle, that doesn't have anything to do with the balance of power on a national level.

"The situation might have involved difficulties,” she acknowledges, "with a relative majority in the Assembly, but you couldn’t go as far as calling it a crisis. We’d gotten over the retirement protests last year, the immigration crisis in the past few months, and everybody was getting ready to go on holiday.”

With the President’s announcement made on June 9, and the first round being organised for June 30, political parties in France were forced to organise at an unprecedented pace. Candidates had to put together a campaign in just a few days. Valérie Pécresse, a senior figure in the conservative Les Républicains (LR) party, was clearly upset.

“Dissolving,” she said in a statement on X, "without giving anyone time to organise and without any campaign is playing Russian roulette with the country’s destiny.”

Dissoudre sans donner à personne le temps de s’organiser et sans campagne, c’est jouer à la roulette russe avec le destin du pays. #Macron

— Valérie Pécresse (@vpecresse) June 9, 2024

Hadrien Clouet, MP – a sitting member of the National Assembly and a candidate for the leftist party La France Insoumise (LFI) in the Haute-Garonne county – agrees that the short time available to candidates and the public alike has caused practical and logistical issues. He adds that voters were immediately shaken with a feeling of urgency.

“In most electoral contexts,” he observes, “people can sit for days, or even weeks, to think about who they are going to vote for. They go to public meetings, try to form an opinion – but here, this opportunity doesn’t exist. With this short amount of time, people are left a lot closer to their immediate feelings – there’s no way to compare electoral programmes.”

The far right “at the doors of power”

This sense of urgency cuts two ways. The reality is that the RN party has never been so close to gaining access to a significant amount of power within French institutions. For those opposed to their new version of the fascism of the National Front, the battle for the soul of France is on, in earnest. The perspective is different for the RN – in a sense, they can’t believe their luck that Macron has handed them this opportunity.

It has always been harder for parties to the extreme of the political spectrum, left or right, to be elected through the two-round majority system. But as Elsa Aurange, journalist for Le Bulletin Quotidien, says, these elections are not, by any means, normal.

“For years, the RN would score 30% in the first round,” she says, "but would never make it past the second. But after the EU scores we know there is a possibility they can win – so the question then is whether or not they can achieve a majority in the Assembly.”

Achieving a majority – that is over 50% of the seats – would allow the RN to designate France’s next Prime Minister. Marine Le Pen’s party currently possesses 89 seats in the Assembly. To win this election outright, they would need 200 more. While that is not impossible, it does seem like an enormous leap.

Marine Le Pen / Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen

This leads us to another historical turning point: in the days following the announcement of a snap election, the president – or leader – of the conservative party The Republicans (LR), Éric Ciotti, made a number of calculations. First, he feared that his party’s seats were – much like the Conservatives in England seeing the spectre of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party to their right – most vulnerable to losses to the RN. Second, he also feared a drift from the centre to the left, reasoning that if the political right remained divided, it might cost them dearly – and hand potential victory to a coalition of parties of the left.

Without consultation with fellow party members, he stated publicly that he would consider an alliance with the RN.

By any standards, it was an announcement designed to shock – and it did. Ciotti was quickly kicked out of his party. However, a pool of conservatives open to a coalition with the far right had been stirred, leading to the creation of what they are calling the Union des Droites – or Union of the Rights – an electoral coalition in which 62 LR candidates have chosen to campaign alongside the RN.

Although the conservatives close to Ciotti represent a small minority of the party overall, the ones who are still running could offer a vital bonus to the RN.

“If the RN doesn’t win the election,” Elsa Aurange says, "Ciotti could bring in 20 or 30 seats, and that might well allow the far right to reach a majority.”

Symbolically, the alliance also holds a heavy weight: the LR party stems from the tradition of Gaullism, based on the thoughts and actions of World War II French Resistance leader Charles De Gaulle. Many see the pact with National Rally as a betrayal of the French Resistance.

“An alliance between the far right and LR,” Aurange acknowledges, “is, historically, completely unnatural. The barrier is now broken, however. They’re getting together very openly. ”

Marine Le Pen has made the second rounds of the past two Presidential elections – but the opposition to her coalesced. Now, however, the rise of toxic politics seems to have shifted other conservatives over what had been a hard dividing line.

“A vote for the RN,” Aurange offers, “is a protest vote. It’s not that the whole country is suddenly far right, it’s more that people are widely unhappy.

“The message that voters tried to send during the EU elections, is that the current state of politics is failing. There’s a good chance that if they’re asked to give their opinion again, they’ll say the same thing, but even louder.”

Macron’s strategy: what is it?

So why did Emmanuel Macron take such a risk?

To put it simply, the President is hoping to use the same strategy he applied during the past two Presidential elections: to depict himself as the only shield against the rise of what he portrays as extremist parties, whether of the right or the left.

With this in mind, Macron presents himself as the candidate of stability.

“But it’s him who created this chaos,” Aurange counters. “He created this disorder that he says he’s the solution to.”

Hadrien Clouet is also sceptical.

“The only hope for Macron,” he says, "is that, if the far right scores 45% in the first round, he can win during the second round – but the starting point of his political reasoning is unacceptable.”

Hadrien Clouet / Photo: G. Garitan

Macron had assumed that both the far right and the left were – and would remain – similarly divided, making his party the only viable option. But even those assumptions have been proven incorrect.

On June 10, another major turn of events massively disrupted Macron’s strategy. It took just one day for the historically divided left to come together to negotiate a new electoral alliance under the banner of the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) – a nod to the 1936 leftist alliance that rose against Nazism in France. For the first time since 1997, fifteen leftist organisations, including parties, unions and associations, have joined forces in advance of an election.

How successfully they can remain united remains to be seen – but for now it is a cause for celebration on the left.

“It’s historical,” Aurange explains, "because for years, the leftist parties have been ripping each other apart. They couldn’t agree on a lot of ideological stances, to the point where the ex-socialist prime minister Manuel Valls had spoken of an ‘irreconcilable left’.”

No more, it seems.

"There were two choices,” Clouet summarises. “Either we all went on our separate routes, and we organised the collective suicide of the left, or we acted intelligently by putting all of our similarities at the centre of the table, and put everything we could agree on in a shared programme.”

The nature and strength of this coalition, while indeed historical, deserves some nuance. The disagreements among the participants are still real.

“In truth,” Aurange says of the parties of the left, “their divergences haven’t been solved. They’ve just decided to put them under the rug for this campaign, because they understand that to survive, they must unite. They’ve decided to focus on the things they agree on – and to be fair, there’s a lot of them – enough to make a programme (for Government) out of it.”

Perversely, this large-scale alliance risks alienating a certain number of leftist voters – in particular those who voted for the Socialist Party during the EU elections, taking its main candidate, Raphaël Glucksmann, to a score of 14.2%. While Glucksman has declared his support for Nouveau Front Populaire, the question remains: will voters in this particular pool be open to voting for the NFP, which includes more radical leftist parties such as LFI?

That remains to be seen. Since its launch, the NFP has already been hit by a number of scandals, not least the apparent purge of less radical, more centrist candidates by the populist left-wing party LFI, launched in 2016 by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. No matter. The coalition managed to hit the spot with the element of surprise – and the hope is that they can continue in that vein.

“Macron hadn’t planned on the fact that the left would unite so fast,” Aurange reflects. “That is precisely why he tried to call the snap elections so quickly. So far, the left has really managed to rise to the occasion.”

Leaving an indelible mark on French politics

So where is all of this heading? Right now, we are in that liminal state of not knowing, but one thing feels certain: the French political landscape has been transformed forever.

The belief that some kind of dark momentum is in their favour has emboldened the far right. Over the past few weeks, doubtless egged on via social media and its culture of nastiness and aggression, there has been a clear rise of street-level anti-immigrant violence, with nationalist supremacists taking to the streets and chanting “We’re nazis, putain!”, “Islam, out of Europe”, or “Blue, white, red, France to the French!”

Speaking on Radio France International, political scientist Xavier Crettiez tried to nutshell the way in which the RN have tried – with some success – to make migration the issue of the election.

"This dominant framing, held up by the RN,” he said, "spreads a message based on the migratory threat, the danger of immigrants, a refusal of otherness – and a drive to national withdrawal.”

Can a united left be the decisive factor in halting what some have been inclined to see as the unstoppable rise of that inward-looking, self-centred, xenophobic France?

“It’s a new atmosphere because the world is looking at us,” Hardien Clouet says. “Usually, people look at Austria or Hungary in the way they’re looking at France now. When you have the whole world asking you if your country is becoming like the far right Poland or Orban’s Hungary, it encourages political mobilisation.”

Let us hope it is enough. The world awaits...