“Le Pen has been defeated by the left, but who will govern France? Our panel responds”, The Guardian

Rym Momtaz, Shahin Vallée, Marion Van Renterghem, Mujtaba Rahman, Françoise Boucek and Nathalie Tocci. 8 July 2024.

Tactical voting kept the far right from election victory – but with gridlock in parliament the future is unclear

Rym Momtaz: Macron wanted ‘clarification’. What France got was more uncertainty

France’s snap elections have produced the most fragmented parliamentsince Charles de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic. The two-round majority electoral system was designed to avoid political instability and contain the extremes. The system failed to achieve the first, with a new hung parliament divided into three comparable groups that will keep any government that is formed under constant threat of no-confidence votes. It only partially succeeded on the second; stopping the far-right National Rally (RN) from taking power, but not preventing its exponential growth in parliamentary seats from eight to more than 120 between 2017 and 2024.

The leftist New Popular Front (NFP) coalition that came together a few days before the first round of voting was the gamechanger. Together with the strong second place for Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble, despite the loss of half of its seats, and a historically high turnout (66.6%), its performance was a significant demonstration that the RN does not have the support of the majority of the population. Nevertheless, the far right has become a normalised part of French politics, its ideas and terminology widely echoed even by mainstream cable news channels and papers, and its historic number of seats barely making waves.Skip in 1s

Bucking expectations, tactical voting by leftwing and centrist voters in what is known as the front républican, a firewall to prevent the RN from being elected, carried the day. This held, despite Macron’s initial attempt to first vilify and then split the NFP. His own camp split over the issue of calling for tactical voting, marking a new rift within Ensemble, and a notable weakening of his influence over his own parliamentary group.

The most optimistic scenario is now one in which the NFP preserves its unity, despite internal tensions, and manages to get the support of the left wing of Ensemble, and is thereby able to form a government. If Ensemble keeps its unity and finds an agreement with the conservative Les Républicains (LR) and independent centrists, it too could form a government. But both options would be a significant challenge for the French political system, which lacks the culture of political compromise and coalitions. They would be vulnerable to no-confidence votes. France is hence at high risk of political deadlock with a rudderless parliament and a weakened, isolated president.

Macron called elections to force what he termed a “clarification” of the political landscape, deeming the parliament “ungovernable” with only a relative majority and 245 seats. As his former prime minister Édouard Philippe put it on Sunday evening, what “was supposed to be a moment of clarification, has instead led to uncertainty”.

• Rym Momtaz is a consultant research fellow for European foreign policy and security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)

Shahin Vallée: Macron behaved as if he could bulldoze the system. That’s over

When Emmanuel Macron was re-elected president in 2022, it was largely thanks to leftwing voters who were prepared to choose him against Marine Le Pen, despite their profound disappointment with his first term in office. Despite lacking a majority in parliament, he nonetheless behaved as if he could bulldoze through his programme. He used and abused presidential prerogatives to the point of neglecting even his own members of parliament.

Sunday’s election result has brought this style of government to an end. Indeed, Macron’s gambit – expand his coalition or to allow the far right to govern and undermine Marine Le Pen’s chances of sweeping to victory in 2027 – has failed miserably.

Macron will have to allow the New Popular Front (NFP) to try to form a government. But this raises fundamental questions.

First, the left was hardly prepared to govern and doesn’t yet have a credible prime minister. While Jean Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France Unbowed (LFI) and former presidential candidate, leads the biggest cohort in the NFP, he is also the least-favoured candidate among his coalition partners. And even if the NFP can choose a prime minister and form a government, it will be short of a majority by more than 100 seats. It will have to work with Macron’s party and learn coalition politics, something that the French political system is largely ignorant about. Finally, the left’s economic programme will have to meet the reality of new European fiscal rules on the one hand and the scepticism of capital markets on the other. This will require a reality check that may prove difficult to accept for parts of the NFP.

French voters, via a historic mobilisation, may have successfully pushed back the threat of the far right and have undermined its momentum for 2027. But the president, the political system and potentially a new leftwing government will all have to learn the ropes of parliamentary democracy, create the conditions for compromise and find a policy path that is sufficiently ambitious and transformative to keep the far right at bay but consistent with France’s limited fiscal room for manoeuvre.

• Shahin Vallée is a French economist and a senior research fellow at the German Council for Foreign Relations

Marion Van Renterghem: This result will feed the National Rally’s narrative of victimhood

At least one thing is clear: the French people do not want the extreme right in government. The National Rally (RN) had never been so close to the gates of power. After the first round of elections a week ago, Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen’s 28-year-old protege, was being talked about as Emmanuel Macron’s future prime minister. To everyone’s surprise, everything was reversed between the two rounds.

While Marine Le Pen has succeeded in “de-demonising” the party founded by her father, the rebranding is clearly not enough to make voters forget that the RN is not an ordinary political party, that it has never rejected its history or broken with a xenophobic ideology rooted in the extreme right through supporters of the Vichy regime and French Algeria.

But the relief felt by a majority of French people is a delusion. The national assembly is ungovernable, divided into three almost equal blocs that are more hostile to each other than ever before, and none of which is in a position to impose itself.

Emmanuel Macron will no doubt argue that he won his election gamble. But he has not won – he has lost his political power. The centre of gravity has shifted from the Élysée palace to the national assembly, which is now in gridlock and can no longer be reelected for a year.

There are no winners. The RN may have doubled its seats; it did not win the majority that was within its grasp. The president’s centrist alliance may not have disappeared, but it has lost the relative majority it had. The New Popular Front, made up of a motley alliance of leftwing parties, certainly came out on top, but it has no leader, no majority and no common objectives. The radicalism of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his party, France Unbowed (LFI), is a repellent for many others.

France is on borrowed time. The barrage (wall) against the far right by a cobbled-together opposition will feed the resentment of RN voters who feel like victims of deals done between friends. If the “republican front” parties fail to build constructive coalitions, they will be proving Le Pen right. She declared on Sunday evening: “The tide continues to rise” and “Our victory is only postponed”. France avoided the worst, but the price is chaos and a time bomb.

• Marion Van Renterghem is a French journalist

Mujtaba Rahman: The anti-Le Pen coalition succeeded beyond its wildest dreams

The so-called republican front – a tactical alliance of the left and the Macronist centre to block the far right in round two of the French elections –succeeded beyond its wildest dreams.

Voters turned out in their highest numbers for 27 years to defeat scores of far-right candidates who had topped the polls in the first round a week earlier. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) was not only denied a governing majority, it was pushed into third place.

The new national assembly will have three large blocs – none of which comes near the 289 seats needed for an overall majority. Although the success of the four-party left alliance, which becomes the biggest parliamentary group with 182 seats, may alarm markets, it has no chance of forming a government and may rapidly split between its most radical component, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed (LFI), and the more moderate Socialists, Greens and Communists.

It will take many days, and maybe several weeks, before France has a new government.

Macron is likely to make an attempt to now form a so-called “rainbow coalition” of Socialists, Communists, Greens, centre and centre right. The numbers exist for such an alliance to achieve a majority (289 seats) but it is uncertain whether such an un-French coalition of long-standing political enemies can get off the ground.

Agreement between the left (without LFI) and centre right on even a minimal policy programme will be difficult and possibly doomed to failure. Much will depend on whether left, right and centre can agree on a possible prime minister – or, initially, someone to lead talks on forming a coalition government.

Macron may have to turn instead to a technocratic government of academics, business leaders, senior officials and trade unionists. This has never been attempted in France since the immediate aftermath of the second world war. It could work in theory, but would build resentment on both the right and left that the country’s future had been confiscated by the establishment.

• Mujtaba Rahman is the managing director for Europe at Eurasia Group

Françoise Boucek: Marine Le Pen can still aspire to a third shot at the presidency

Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) didn’t win the election, but it has increased its seats in the national assembly by 60% since 2022. The far righthasn’t gone away.

France’s Fifth Republic is gradually losing its singularity and is having to learn the art of coalition building, just like most European parliamentary democracies. Today, Emmanuel Macron’s prime minister Gabriel Attal will be offering the president his resignation, although he is likely to remain in post until a new government is formed, which may take a few weeks.

It’s unclear what kind of coalition Macron will be able to cobble together. The New Popular Front (NFP) is a broad and fragile electoral alliance of four parties with no agreed leader and no common programme. It will struggle to work with Macron.

But one thing is for sure. The new government will have to last for at least 12 months, since the constitution prevents another parliamentary election from being called within a year. Will it be a temporary government of technocrats like the ones seen regularly in Italy. Or will there be a long period of paralysis like in the Netherlands, Belgium or Northern Ireland?

Ironically, Macron is responsible for creating this situation. He defected from the Socialist party in 2016 and launched a new centrist movement (now called Renaissance). This transformed the traditional bipolarised party system, decimated the centre-right Les Républicains and created more space on the extreme right for Marine Le Pen’s party to grow – which it has clearly done in this election, increasing its number of MPs from 89 to 143. Le Pen’s aspirations for a third shot at the presidency in 2027 remain on track.

• Françoise Boucek is a visiting research fellow and associate of the Centre for European Research at Queen Mary University of London

Nathalie Tocci: A renewal in French politics – and a bad day for Vladimir Putin

There are two possible readings of the French election and its spillover for the rest of Europe. The pessimistic one is that of the boiled frog, which dies unknowingly in the pot as the water gradually heats up.

On the French chessboard, the widespread view after the first round a week ago was that Emmanuel Macron’s shock gamble in dissolving parliament following the far right’s victory in European elections had tragically failed. Many likened his call for snap parliamentary elections to David Cameron’s 2016 decision to rashly call for a referendum on the UK’s EU membership, assuming remain would win, only to usher in Brexit.

The threat of a far-right government triggered the mobilisation of a “republican front” to prevent the National Rally (RN) from gaining a majority.

But for pessimists, even if this succeeded in keeping the RN out of power, the fact that other parties “ganged up” to stop it and the chaos that will ensue from a fractured parliamentwill only bolster Marine Le Pen’s bid for the Élysée in 2027.

The frog reading is that after every election the far right is strengthened, as it is normalised in the political system (especially by the centre right’s willingness to work with it) while retaining its “anti-system” character. The mainstream’s success in blocking it from power is precisely what enables the latter.

At European level, the far right also made inroads on 9 June, and its weight is set to increase with the formation this week by Viktor Órban of Patriots for Europe, a third far-right grouping in the Brussels parliament. There is a growing number, albeit still a minority, of Eurosceptic governments in the lawmaking EU council of ministers, including Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands and Slovakia, with Austria probably to follow later in the year. And so the temperature rises gradually, and eventually the liberal democratic, pro-European frog will die.

A far more optimistic reading could be summed up as keep calm and carry on. Macron has turned out to be more of a Pedro Sánchez than a David Cameron. The Spanish PM successfully cobbled together a diverse coalition with the shared aim of keeping the far right out of power – unlike the centre-right in Italy and the Netherlands, which had shown its readiness to work with the far right.

France’s tactical voting pact has not only fended off a catastrophic “cohabitation” between Macron, a liberal pro-European president, and a Eurosceptic far-right government. It may also have ushered in a renewal in French politics.

Incredibly, hundreds of third-placed candidates dropped out of three-way races to avoid splitting the anti-Le Pen vote. Even more spectacular was the fact that the electorate followed suit. French voters heeded the call to vote for the republican front even if this meant going against their political beliefs.

Millions of liberals voted for leftists and vice versa, united by the conviction that the French Republic and its postwar values were in mortal danger. The attachment to those values still resonates with the majority of citizens.

The far right’s threat to liberal democracy and European integration remains real, and with it the EU’s support for Ukraine, climate action and for a liberal world order. Yet the damage is contained, and may eventually be deflated if not defeated. Last night was not a good night for Vladimir Putin.

• Nathalie Tocci is a Guardian Europe columnist