French Parliamentary Election – Marine Le Pen’s far-right party gets most votes

The French parliamentary election on Sunday turned out as feared, or hoped, depending on your perspective.

The far-right Rassemblement National [National Rally, NR] made historic progress in the first round of France's snap legislative elections on Sunday, June 30, in a vote marked by a high increase in turnout. With 33.1% of the vote together with its allies, according to the Interior Ministry, the party led by Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella almost doubled its score from the 2022 elections, as it hopes to conquer power for the first time.

President Emmanuel Macron, who called the snap elections on June 9 after his side's defeat in the European elections, sees his coalition rank third, with 20%, as the alliance of left-wing parties, the Nouveau Front Populaire, reached 28%.¹ [my emphasis] (1)

Deutsche Welle reports on the result²:

One result of the June 30 election was that Fabien Roussel, the chief of what’s left of France’s Communist Party, was unseated in his own district by a far-right RN candidate.³ Go figure.

The French vote was the first in a two-stage process. Parliamentary systems don’t all have the same precise procedures. In France’s case, the first vote does not determine the seats the parties win in Parliament. That happens in a second round of voting, which takes place next Sunday, July 7. But if a candidate wins a majority in his or her district in the first round, that counts as a final choice on them, so they don’t have to stand for election in the second round.

One American parallel that comes to mind is California’s “jungle primary” system. But the main parallel is that it’s convoluted to think through. In California’s case, the jungle primary narrows down the number of candidates for an office to two.

There will be parties and electoral alliances of parties in the July 7 round. But the two-round voting system does create an incentive for parties to form multi-party alliances for the second round.

President Macron’s party (Renaissance/Renew) came in third behind NR and a left coalition (Nouveau Front Populaire/New Popular Front) that includes Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The right/center-right Gaullist party, the Republican Party (Les Républicains, LR), came in fourth with 10%.

We’ll have a much better idea of where things stand after the smoke clear from next Sunday’s second-round election. A big factor will be whether Macron steers his voters toward an alliance with the left to prevent the RN from having a majority in the new Parliament.

This July 7 runoff will largely be a contest between Marine LePen’s National Rally (LR) and the New Popular Front (NPF). It appears at the moment that it will take a coalition of the NPF Macron’s Renew party to block the NR from forming the new government, assuming that the NR fails to win an outright majority.

In a written statement, Macron did not admit his party was defeated but instead called for “a broad, clearly democratic and republican rally for the second round.”

Macron and his allies have called on their supporters to prevent the far-right from taking office in the next round of the legislative elections scheduled for 7 July.

Gabriel Attal, Macron’s outgoing Prime Minister urged voters to prevent the National Rally from winning but also said that Jean-Luc Melenchon’s party, the France Unbowed is not a credible choice. [A case of mixed messaging, I would say!]

But the effectiveness of this "republican front" against the far-right has weakened over the years.⁴

France has a strong Presidential system, which means that the Prime Minister has somewhat more limited powers than in most EU countries. The President, for instance, largely determines foreign policy. But the new French government (other than the President) will be determined by the majority of Parliament.

Over the last 20 years, the party systems in France, Italy, and England have undergone upheavals. In all three countries, a key reason has been that the center-right parties tried to stave off the far right by adapting some of their positions, especially on the refugee/immigration issue, which lends itself to ethnonationalist demagoguery. If their goal was to strengthen a conservative right that was committed to liberal democracy and the rule of law, it has been a failure in all three cases.⁵

If we think of Biden’s gaffe in Thursday’s night’s debate with Trump where he ramblingly pivoted from one of his strongest issues - defending abortion rights - to Trump’s signature xenophobic issue of murderous immigrants - was a brief version of what happened in Britain, France, and Italy on a grand scale.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, head of the “post”-fascist Brothers of Italy (FdI) party, is busily at work on Orbanizing Italy, which has the EU’s third largest economy:

The far-right leader’s central reform, called the “premierato,” is designed to grant more power to the prime minister’s office. If it passes, the head of government will be directly elected, but at the cost of weakening other democratic institutions including parliament. Critics call it a “vendetta” against the anti-fascist constitution written after World War II, which sought to avoid such a concentration of powers.⁶ (5)

Britain has a parliamentary election this week on American Independence Day, July 4. The British system, as well as the US one, operates with winner-take-all electoral districts. To skip over the geeky poli-sci details, winner-take-all districts create heavy pressure tending toward a two-party system. But in Britain, the Conservative (Tory) Party’s embrace of the far right’s xenophobic Brexit position has left the party in a shambles:

The Conservative government has clearly struggled to demonstrate an ability to govern either effectively or responsibly. Since the 2019 election, Labour has faced three Prime Ministers, including Liz Truss whose forty-nine-day administration has been widely denounced as an egregious episode of economic mismanagement. Moreover, a range of revelations relating to the personal conduct of senior government figures, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown restrictions, has been seen as heralding a new era of Tory sleaze.⁷

Their bizarre, populist-xenophobic, and cruel public-relations scam of deporting asylum-seeking refugees to Ruanda is a good example of the pit into which the Conservatives have thrown themselves:

The Labour Party headed by Keir Starmer is going into the July 4 election looking very strong. The Labour Party is currently dominated by the neoliberal trend that Tony Blair successfully made dominant in “New Labour.” But how much Labour’s seeming advantage at the moment is based on the completely frazzled state of the Tory Party and how much on communicating a positive and forward-looking - not to say “progressive,” which is not Starmer’s thing - remains to be seen.⁸

1. French elections: Far right surges in first round, left comes second ahead of Macron's camp. Le Monde 06/30/2024. <https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2024/06/30/french-elections-far-right-surges-in-first-round-left-comes-second-ahead-of-macron-s-camp_6676225_7.html> (Accessed: 2024-01-07).

2. France elections: Scenarios for the second round of voting. DW News YouTube channel 07/01/2024. (Accessed: 2024-01-07).

3. French elections: Communist leader unseated by far right. Le Monde 06/30/2024. <https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2024/06/30/french-elections-communist-leader-unseated-by-far-right_6676230_5.html> (Accessed: 2024-01-07).

4. French elections: Communist leader unseated by far right. Le Monde 06/30/2024. <https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2024/06/30/french-elections-communist-leader-unseated-by-far-right_6676230_5.html> (Accessed: 2024-01-07).

5. Bierbacher, Thomas (2023): Mitte/Rechts. Die Internationale Krise des Konservatismus. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag.

6. Di Donfrancesco, Gabriele (2024): Italy’s Far-Right Government Is Rewriting the Constitution. Jacobin 06/30/2024. <https://jacobin.com/2024/06/italy-meloni-constitution-reforms> (Accessed: 2024-01-07).

7. Johnson, J.M. & Thomas O.D &Basham, V.M. (2024): ‘Mr Rules’: Keir Starmer and the juridification of politics. British Politics 05/03/2024. <https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-024-00258-1> (Accessed: 2024-01-07).

8. For a thoroughly unadmiring take on Starmer, see: The UK's Election Candidates are REALLY BAD-Hasanabi Reacts. Hasan Reactions YouTube channel 06/28/2024.