In France, the Right Was Humiliated, but What’s Next Is Far From Clear

One month ago, following the far-right National Rally’s stunning victory in the June 7 European Parliament elections, French President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the National Assembly in the hope of “clarifying” the country’s political situation. He wagered that new elections would strengthen his centrist coalition and weaken both the left and the extreme right.

The results are now in, and it’s an understatement to say that they come as a surprise. The New Popular Front, or NPF, a hastily assembled coalition of four parties—La France Insoumise, the Socialists, the Communists, and the Greens—stunned all observers by winning the most seats (182). The National Rally, or R.N., Marine Le Pen’s extreme-right party, came away with only 143, up from 96 in the previous Parliament but still a crushing disappointment to the party, which had expected to win a plurality if not an absolute majority of seats. Macron’s centrist Ensemble coalition, which held 244 seats in the outgoing National Assembly, finished in second place with 168—a significant loss but still more than double the preelection forecasts.

So what happened? In a nutshell, the “republican front” held. The front was organized in two stages. First, the parties of the left set aside their differences to form the NPF. This surprised everyone, not least Macron, because the same four parties had formed another coalition, known as the NUPES, in advance of the 2022 parliamentary election, and that coalition had only recently fallen apart over significant disagreements on many issues and persistent clashes of personality. Yet when faced with the threat of a far-right government actually coming to power in France for the first time since World War II, the leaders of the four left-wing parties agreed within 24 hours of Macron’s decision to dissolve Parliament that it was time to put the old band back together.

The second stage of building the republican front began after the first round of voting on June 30 resulted in a large number of three-way races (in the first round, any number of candidates compete, but only those gaining the votes of at least 12.5 percent of registered voters continue to the second round). The NPF and Ensemble agreed that in races where they divided the anti-R.N. vote, the trailing candidate would drop out and urge supporters to vote for the candidate who remained. Voters alarmed by the prospect of an R.N. victory by and large heeded the call.

So what now? Under the French constitution, the president may appoint a prime minister of his choosing, who need not be among those elected to Parliament. The prime minister designate then appoints, in consultation with the president, the ministers who will constitute the government, which must survive a confidence vote in the National Assembly.

Therein lies the rub. Did Macron achieve the clarity he was seeking? In one respect, yes: He demonstrated convincingly that France remains a country that does not wish to be governed by a party of the far right, a party that seeks to enforce discriminatory laws against immigrants and children of immigrants, that is skeptical of the European Union, and that is friendly to autocrats such as Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán.

Le Pen had sought to give her party a new and more respectable image, embodied in its clean-shaven, well-spoken, impeccably dressed young leader, Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old mastermind of the party’s “necktie strategy.” To some extent, the ruse succeeded: As Bardella noted on election night, the R.N. now holds more seats in Parliament than ever before. It has expanded its influence beyond its traditional strongholds to most of the country. Yet just when it seemed on the verge of achieving real power, it failed spectacularly. In an election with massive turnout (67.1 percent), two-thirds of French voters clearly rejected even the supposedly de-demonized version of the party founded back in 1972 by the antisemitic, racist xenophobe Jean-Marie Le Pen. This is good news.

The less good news is that there is no clear path forward for Macron or the victorious parties of the left and center. The National Assembly is divided into three main blocs. No party or group has anywhere near an absolute majority of 289 seats. It will therefore be necessary to form a coalition government, and the only feasible coalition in sight would bring the NPF together with Macron’s Ensemble. Together, they would have more than enough seats to govern. But they aren’t really compatible, and dissension within the NPF, as within its predecessor NUPES, is already apparent. No sooner were the preliminary results announced than Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the crotchety ex-Trotskyist who leads the far-left La France Insoumise, or LFI, was out claiming total victory—not only over the R.N. but also over Macron. There could be no combinaisons (backdoor deals) with the president’s defeated and discredited Ensemble, he pronounced, while making no mention at all of lacking a majority of his own, as if oblivious of the political equation that anyone who aspires to form a government will need to solve.

Could the less intransigent elements of the NFP, such as the Socialists and Greens, join with Ensemble? Yes, and various leaders of these groups have indicated that this could be a possibility. But by my count neither a Socialist such as Olivier Faure, a Green such as Marine Tondelier (one of the revelations of this campaign), or a political organizer such as Raphaël Glucksmann can muster enough votes, unless they can somehow entice some LFI deputies to abandon Mélenchon. An LFI dissident such as François Ruffin or Clémentine Autain might have an outside chance, but the odds of failure would be high, and it is doubtful that Macron would turn in this direction.

Meanwhile, some of the more conservative members of Macron’s Ensemble are signaling that they are reluctant to enter into a coalition with any part of the left, even if LFI is excluded. For example, former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe hinted that he would require significant changes to the NPF program before he could even consider a coalition. He no doubt speaks for much of Ensemble. A coalition broad enough to include parts of Les Républicains, which stands to the right of Ensemble, would face even more formidable obstacles.

So no coalition is immediately in sight. What then? Outgoing Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced that he will submit his resignation on Monday morning. Macron could refuse to accept it, in which case the current government would remain in place, but under the constitution, it can introduce no new policies and can only dispatch current affairs. Such an interim government might serve to get France through the upcoming Paris Olympics, for which the government will be expected to coordinate security, transportation, and housing for hundreds of thousands of visitors. But it could not do much more than that.

It may thus be possible to postpone a serious government crisis until the fall, when a new budget must be submitted and approved. A caretaker government cannot perform this function. If a coalition of the parties proves to be impossible, Macron has yet another option: He can invite a technocrat (or other politically unaffiliated figure such as an academic, soldier, or diplomat) to form a new government. When Italy found itself in a similar impasse in 2011, for example, it turned to economist and Eurocrat Mario Monti, who governed for nearly three years; in 2021, it opted for economist and central banker Mario Draghi. But France has never before confronted such a situation. Even assuming that a technocratic government could muster enough votes to be installed in office, it would nevertheless be subject to the ever-present threat of a no-confidence vote.

Furthermore, the constitution of the Fifth Republic has never been tested under these conditions, with a seriously weakened president and a National Assembly in which no party commands an absolute majority. The constitution was designed for a strong president backed by a supportive parliamentary majority. It twice survived “cohabitations,” in which an opposition party won a majority of seats, forcing the president to share the considerable powers otherwise concentrated in the office. But the current situation of a “hung Parliament” and weak president has never been tried. Unprecedented challenges lie ahead. Not to mention the potential for violent protests.

The president retains certain prerogatives. For instance, the constitution specifies that he remains in charge of national defense and diplomacy. Yet Marine Le Pen said last week that Macron’s role as “commander in chief of the armed forces” was merely “honorific” and noted that the legislature controls the purse strings. France has been transformed overnight from a presidential to a parliamentary regime.

The president will be forced to do what he should have done in 2022, when he failed to win an absolute majority in the National Assembly: namely, consult with politicians, business and union leaders, and other representatives of civil society, including those fundamentally hostile to his program, in the hope of finding workable compromises on key issues. To put it gently, Macron has not to date demonstrated much of a gift for consultation and compromise. The maneuver he chose to block the R.N.’s march to power proved successful, but he cannot dissolve Parliament again for another year, even though the absence of a clear majority now poses a more acute problem than it did before. And this will remain true even if Macron chooses the nuclear option—resignation—and there is a new presidential election. For now, France must somehow make do with the motley and very likely ungovernable National Assembly it has just elected.

How has Macron—the president once so proud of his omnipotence that he referred to himself as Jupiter—been reduced to such straits? It’s tempting to say that he hurled one too many thunderbolts and was knocked off his perch by the backblast. He was not obliged to dissolve the National Assembly after the European parliamentary election. Through seven years of power, he has committed many unforced errors, from abolishing the wealth tax at the very beginning of his tenure, incurring the epithet of “president of the rich,” to ramming through a very unpopular pension reform by using a provision of the constitution that allows a bill to become law in certain circumstances without a majority vote. His often abrasive and haughty manner has also turned off many voters.

Did the president, despite all these flaws, make good on his wager? For Édouard Philippe, “Macron sought clarity but achieved only uncertainty,” while former President François Hollande glimpses a “hopeful path.” But the clearest characterization of the election’s outcome may belong to the night’s biggest loser, Jordan Bardella, who condensed his bitterness into one parting shot at Macron: “He has succeeded only in paralyzing the country’s institutions.” Unfortunately, he may be right.