A left-wing alliance has landed a surprise victory in the second round of France’s parliamentary elections, with Marine Le Pen’s far-right party suffering an unexpected defeat.
As of Monday morning, the New Popular Front (NFP) alliance is projected to win up to 192 seats, beating Marine Le Pen‘s National Rally (RN) which had been expected to win, and president Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance.
As a result, Macron now must engineer an unprecedented hung parliament, which could take weeks — leaving the parliament divided between the left, centrists, and the far right.
The New Popular Front (NFP) alliance of parties includes the former ruling Socialist party, the hard-leftwing La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), the Greens and Communists.
No party gained the 289-seat absolute majority needed in the 577-seat National Assembly to form a government.
La France Insoumise’s Clémence Guetté said the RN’s surprisingly low score indicated that “this is not a racist country and France does not want to be divided.”
Last week, centrists and the left formed a tactical voting pact to build a unified anti-RN vote. They negotiated a strategic alliance to ensure the far right didn’t win majority — an exclusionary tactic colloquially known as the “cordon sanitaire”. Historically, the tactic has been used by several countries in the EU to keep extreme parties out of the government.
More than 200 candidates from the traditionally opposed blocs of the left and centre dropped out of the race days before the final run-off vote on Sunday, calling on voters to choose any candidate against the RN to avoid splitting the vote against the right-wing party.
The withdrawing candidates included allies of French President Emmanuel Macron and politicians from left-wing parties, centre-left social democrats and far-left anti-capitalists.
One of them includes 27-year old pro-Macron Renaissance candidate Albane Branlant, who withdrew her candidacy in order to help leftwinger François Ruffin defeat the RN candidate in the northern French city of Amiens.
Branlant withdrew her candidacy before the second round of the legislative elections after coming in third place with 24 per cent of the votes in the first round.
“I would like to thank the voters who trusted [me],” she told reporters last week. “Twenty-four per cent is a score that honours me. But faced with the risk of the National Rally, which could have an absolute majority, I withdraw my candidacy tonight. I make a difference between political opponents and enemies of the Republic.”
The NFP’s tactic also ensured that former prime minister Elisabeth Borne won her constituency in Normandy against the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party candidate Nicolas Calbrix.
Another anti-RN leader who has been making headlines is 37-year old Marine Tondelier— leader of the French Greens party, and among the few female leaders of the left-wing bloc.
Raised in a region of France known for its support of the RN, Tondelier was elected as an opposition member of the town’s municipal council in 2014 and has since vocally opposed the RN.
In 2017, she penned a book Nouvelles du Front (“News from the Front”) which detailed the intimidation, humiliation and bullying she experienced working under Steeve Briois, an interim RN mayor and the former Hénin-Beaumont mayor — and what she recounted as an repressive atmosphere created by the far-right administration.
In 2021, she was elected to the Regional Council of Hauts-de-France and became leader of France’s most popular ecologist party, the Greens, in 2022.
Last week, she told France 24, “The far-right could reach the Prime Minster’s office tomorrow, and that means a lot of things for the fifty per cent of women, the 3.3 million bi-nationals, public servants, minorities, LGBT who are scared — every day they come to speak to us.”
Meanwhile, prime minister Gabriel Attal has announced plans to offer his resignation later today. “Our country is facing an unprecedented political situation and is preparing to welcome the world in a few weeks,” he told reporters.