(France24) Three weeks after trouncing its rivals in low-turnout European polls, Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) confirmed its status as France’s leading political force in a first round of legislative elections marked by the highest turnout in three decades.
Le Pen’s camp secured a clear victory, albeit not a decisive one, meaning the vote’s ultimate outcome remains uncertain ahead of a second round of voting on July 7. Macron, whose decision to call the snap election had stunned friends and foes alike, has urged voters to rally against the far right next Sunday.
RN and its allies on the right took 33.2% of the first-round vote, ahead of the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) on 28.1%, according to projections by pollsters Ipsos-Talan. Macron’s Ensemble alliance trailed in third place with 21%, followed by the conservative Les Républicains and their partners on 10%.
Based on those figures, the far-right camp would go on to win between 230 and 280 seats in the National Assembly, the pollsters added, leaving it short of the 289 seats required to win an absolute majority.
Such predictions are extremely difficult, owing to the two rounds of voting and a record number of three-way runoff races. The final result will depend on days of frantic horse-trading as parties work to make alliances in some constituencies or pull out of others.
Addressing jubilant supporters in her northern constituency, where she won an outright victory in the first round, Le Pen called on voters to push her party over the line and give it an “absolute majority” of seats in the National Assembly, France’s lower house of parliament, which wields greater powers than the Senate.
In such a scenario, Macron would be expected to name the party’s 28-year-old poster boy Jordan Bardella as prime minister in an awkward power-sharing system, known as “cohabitation”, that would weaken him both at home and on the world stage.
Victory for RN would lead to France’s first far-right government since the Nazi-allied Vichy Regime – capping an extraordinary turnaround for an extremist party that was co-founded by Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie, a Vichy supporter and convicted anti-Semite.
A more likely outcome would be a hung parliament in which no coalition is able to muster a majority, bringing gridlock to the European Union’s second-largest economy and its leading military power.
Boomerang
Sunday’s vote follows a chaotic and volatile three-week campaign – the shortest in modern French history – that saw Macron warn voters of a threat of “civil war” should they choose either of his main rivals.
