France’s political establishment is in shock after June 2022 legislative elections. The results were unexpected for two reasons. First, no one expected such a defeat for French President Emmanuel Macron. Most polls suggested that Macron’s Ensemble electoral alliance would win 265 to 270 seats and that it might even get another absolute parliamentary majority, allowing Macron to push through legislation easily.
But Ensemble got nowhere near that number of seats. And second, Marine Le Pen’s radical right National Rally party scored a much bigger political breakthrough than anyone expected. Here is what it means.
The election results weaken Macron — and strengthen Le Pen
In April, Macron was reelected as president. Some believed that this victory would be reflected in June’s legislative elections, ushering in a phase of relative stability for France and signaling a period of reconsolidation for the European Union. That’s now unlikely.
Instead, France’s newly elected National Assembly, the legislative body that plays a decisive role in supporting the executive and passing legislation, will be divided between four large groups. The pro-Macron alliance, Ensemble, polled 246 seats (42.6 percent), well short of the 289 seats needed for a majority. The left-wing alliance NUPES, led by the leader of the radical-left party La France Insoumise (LFI), Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and including Communists, Socialists and Greens, elected 142 MPs (24.6 percent). The moderate right Les Republicains (LR) obtained 64 seats (11 percent), and the radical right National Rally (RN) got 89 (15.4 percent).
This was an unexpected defeat for Macron. Nor did pollsters expect Le Pen’s RN would do so well — predicting the party would win 30 to 50 seats. Although Le Pen has competed for the presidency over the past few elections, her party has fared badly in legislative elections, winning only two and eight MPs, respectively, in the last two elections. LR has run weak candidates and been hurt by France’s two-round electoral system. This election marks a historic success for the party.
France’s political system may be in for a period of chaos
France’s political system was designed to create a stable, president-led executive. However, it has adapted to periods of “cohabitation,” when the president represented one party and the National Assembly’s majority (and prime minister) a different coalition.
Sunday’s election, however, has created a potentially new set of questions. There isn’t any obvious National Assembly majority that might form a government of its own. Both the radical right and radical left have enough strength to destabilize the government, but neither is able to form a government of its own, and each has little in common with the other side to form an alliance.
That means that any government will have to include Macron’s center group, but it’s unclear how this might happen. France’s party system is aligned around three “poles” — center, right and left — that are roughly equal in size. Ensemble and NUPES each got about 26 percent of the first-round vote, while RN got about 19 percent. Radical parties dominate the left and right poles.
That is new. The two-round electoral system means that only candidates who have sufficient support get through to the second round and have a chance of being elected. In the past, people usually voted against their least liked (typically radical) option, providing an advantage to more moderate parties, so that moderate-left electors might support a moderate-right candidate (and vice versa) in the second round. This time, ideological differences greatly weakened this pattern.
Estimates by Harris Interactive, a polling organization, suggest that in the 280 districts where a centrist Ensemble candidate ran against NUPES, only about a quarter of RN supporters voted for Macron’s candidate. An equal number voted for the NUPES candidate, while half this group did not vote. Similarly, 45 percent of NUPES supporters abstained in the 107 districts where Ensemble ran against RN; only 31 percent voted for the centrist candidate, while 24 percent decided to support the extreme right.
Macron has limited options
In this situation, Macron has few options to get legislation through. The Assembly may become unmanageable. Institutional reforms have made it harder for a government with shaky parliamentary support to force through bills, while an opposition politician will be in charge of the powerful Finance Parliamentary Commission; RN has already made a bid for the job. Both RN and LFI will be able to refer bills to the Constitutional Council (a specialized judicial body) for scrutiny.
Macron could dissolve the Assembly and declare early elections, in the hope of a different electoral result. Doing so now, however, would probably make the situation worse, so he will have to wait to consider that option. In the meantime, a coalition between Ensemble and LR (with a combined 320 seats) could offer Macron a path forward. However, LR is internally divided, and its internal right wants to distance the party from Macron so that it can compete better on security, sovereignty and immigration and regain the votes of right-wing electors who drifted to support RN in recent years. That means that an Ensemble/LR government — to be politically possible — would have to move sharply to the right. That would force Macron to abandon most of his centrist policies, and leave room (and electors) to his opponents on the left.
The political instability emerging from these elections doesn’t affect just France, but the European Union, too. France’s radical right and radical left are Euroskeptical (as is part of LR). They will probably force Macron to moderate his plans for a stronger E.U. For a brief period, the E.U. seemed to find renewed unity in supporting Ukraine. That unity now seems increasingly in danger.
Macron will probably defend his foreign policy. International affairs is “reserved” for the president, which will probably allow him to protect the Western alliance from the “softer” approach to dealing with Vladimir Putin that Le Pen and Mélenchon champion. Both were explicit supporters of Putin before the war. Still, the political uncertainty following Sunday’s elections will probably be felt well beyond France’s borders.
Giovanni Capoccia (@gcapoccia1) is a professor of comparative politics at the University of Oxford. His research and teaching interests focus on democracy, political extremism, theories of political institutions, and European politics.