French President Emmanuel Macron leaves by car after voting in the second round of France's legislative election at a polling station in Le Touquet, northern France, on July 7.MOHAMMED BADRA/Getty Images
Rue des Rosiers was bustling as usual on Sunday morning as local Parisians and tourists alike lined up at the street’s famed falafel joints or gathered for brunch at the countless cafés that dot the Marais neighbourhood, once the heart of the city’s Jewish community.
Yet, as French voters went to the polls Sunday in the second round of a parliamentary election that saw President Emmanuel Macon’s centrist party lose dozens of seats to both the far-right National Rally (RN) and leftist New Popular Front (NFP), the almost festive mood along rue des Rosiers belied France’s deep divisions.
Mr. Macron first won the presidency in 2017 by casting his centrist coalition as an alternative to the stale left-right dichotomy of the postwar era. But after seven years of le macronisme, as the shape-shifting President’s political doctrine is known, the extremes in French politics have grown stronger than ever as voters weary of Mr. Macron and the bitter debates over immigration and inequality split the country.
Though RN Leader Marine Le Pen has moved to purge her party’s antisemitic elements, several RN candidates were singled out for racist remarks during the campaign. Another RN candidate was dropped last week after a photo emerged of her wearing a Luftwaffe cap.
Meanwhile, the largest party in the four-party NFP coalition, La France Insoumise, or LFI, embraced a radically pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel discourse, in part to woo Muslim voters.
Mr. Macron’s Ensemble (Together) coalition averted the worst-case scenario that early campaign polls suggested it was headed toward after dozens of non-RN candidates from rival parties withdrew from the second-round ballot to avoid splitting the vote. This “Republican front” enabled Ensemble to cut its losses. Even so, it was projected to lose dozens of seats in the 577-seat National Assembly compared to the 250 it won in 2022.
The Republican front delivered in denying a victory to RN, which went into the campaign poised to win by far the largest number seats of any party or coalition.
But the RN’s failure to win a majority in no way vindicates Mr. Macron’s decision to call the election, three years ahead of schedule. He called the snap vote four weeks ago, fresh off the heels of a historic RN surge in the June 9 European elections, in the hopes of mobilizing anti-RN French voters behind him.
Instead, more anti-RN voters chose the NFP over Mr. Macron’s coalition. The NFP was set to emerge with the largest number of seats after Sunday’s vote, though not enough to govern on its own. And divisions within the leftist coalition itself will test its durability.
As a result, France could be headed for a hung parliament and political paralysis. Another legislative vote cannot be held for at least a year. Mr. Macron is likely to try to bypass the National Assembly as much as possible. But given his own unpopularity, he has even less political capital now than before the election, and he may become increasingly irrelevant.
Ms. Le Pen and protégé Jordan Bardella, whom she had planned to appoint as prime minister in the event of an RN victory, will attribute their party’s lower-than-expected seat count to a scare campaign waged against the RN by the Paris-based political and media establishment. Indeed, as the final campaign polls showed a slippage in RN support, right-wing commentators were already blaming the country’s elites.
The RN’s rise was “not presented as a rational political force, winning over voters by its diagnostics and its propositions, but as a demon emerging from hell to seize the minds of a suddenly possessed population, which [had to] be exorcised by constantly repeating the term “far right” to break the spell,” Mathieu Bock-Côté, a Quebec-born political analyst who hosts a show on CNews channel, France’s version of Fox News, wrote in a Saturday column in Le Figaro.
Despite the RN’s weaker-than-expected showing, its anti-immigration platform and France-first credo will likely dominate the political agenda between now and the 2027 presidential election. Some French pundits have suggested the polarization between the RN and LFI could even increase the pressure on Mr. Macron to step down before then.
After seven years in power, the President has never seemed more alone. His erratic decision to call this election angered his closest political allies, including Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, who moved to distance themselves from him during the campaign. They now want nothing to do with him as they plot their own political futures.
By choosing to call this election, Mr. Macron only ended up driving a nail in his own political coffin.