Supporters of French far-left opposition party La France Insoumise (France Unbowed - LFI) react after partial results in the second round of the early French parliamentary elections at Place Stalingrad in Paris on July 7.Yara Nardi/Reuters
A coalition of left-wing parties in France was the unexpected winner in the final round of voting in the country’s parliamentary elections on Sunday, finishing with the most seats but falling short of an overall majority.
The alliance, known as the New Popular Front, consists of Socialists, Greens, Communists and France Insoumise, or Unbowed, a hard-left party led for years by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
It won 182 seats in the National Assembly, ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling centrist group called Ensemble, which took 168 seats, and the far-right National Rally, at 143.
The hung parliament means there will be weeks of political instability as Mr. Macron tries to appoint a prime minister who will have enough support to form a government.
Macron refuses French PM’s resignation after chaotic election results
The New Popular Front was cobbled together in the past couple of weeks to stop Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally, or RN, from winning the most seats. The RN had topped all other parties in the first round of voting on June 30 and many pundits and pollsters expected it to win the most seats after Sunday’s final balloting, and possibly eke out a majority.
In a further bid to stop the RN, the New Popular Front and Ensemble formed a tactical alliance last week and pulled candidates from more than 200 ridings to give the non-RN contender a better chance of winning.
The concerted effort succeeded and RN captured 143 seats, far lower than expected.
However, none of the parties came close to taking 289 seats, the threshold required to win a majority in the 577-seat assembly.
Despite the electoral alliances, the parties that make up the New Popular Front are uneasy bedfellows and none of them share much in common with Mr. Macron’s Ensemble, which has lost its working majority.
Mr. Mélenchon, the titular leader of the New Popular Front, campaigned on a platform of massive increases in government spending, public-sector pay hikes and a big rise in the minimum wage. He also wants to reverse corporate tax cuts introduced by Ensemble and scrap the outgoing government’s plan to raise the retirement age to 64 from 62.
Participants gesture towards a giant banner which reads "France is the fabric of migration" during an election night rally at Place de la Republique in Paris on July 7, 2024.EMMANUEL DUNAND/Getty Images
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The political brokering ahead didn’t matter on Sunday to the thousands of New Popular Front supporters who packed the Place de la Bataille-de-Stalingrad in central Paris to celebrate and breathe a sigh of relief at the results. Many of them danced, sang and hugged each other as the initial projections flashed on a giant television screen.
“I’m so happy,” said Camille Chazottes. She’d been afraid that RN might win, which she said would have been “a disaster for the country.”
Her friend Melina Dauer had been convinced of an RN victory and she was stunned when the vote projections were announced. The RN “would have been terrible for LGBT rights and there would be more racism,” she said.
A few others were still unsure what to make the forecast. “It’s not over yet,” said Darryl Campeau, as he checked his phone for election updates. The New Popular Front “hasn’t done as well as we would like,” he added.
Mr. Mélenchon told the crowd that they had pulled off a result “that everyone said was impossible.”
“Tonight, the RN is a long way from having a majority,” he said to a roar of cheers.
He immediately put pressure on Mr. Macron to appoint someone from the New Popular Front as prime minister. “The president has a duty to call on the New Popular Front to govern, and it is ready to do so,” he said.
RN’s president, Jordan Bardella, condemned what he called the “unnatural alliance” between the New Popular Front and Ensemble, and said they had “deprived France of a policy to recover.”
But he noted that the RN had still made an historic breakthrough by winning its highest seat total in history. “An old world has fallen, and nothing can stop a people who have begun to hope again,” he said.
Ms. Le Pen, the party’s long-time guiding light, vowed to press ahead with RN’s agenda that calls for steep reductions in immigration, loosening ties to the European Union and a crackdown on “Islamist ideologies.”
“The tide is rising. It did not rise high enough this time, but it continues to rise and, consequently, our victory has only been delayed,” she told supporters in Paris on Sunday.
The election result will be a mixed blessing for Mr. Macron, who will stay on as president until his term ends in 2027. He called the snap vote last month after his party was soundly beaten by RN in elections to the European Parliament. He hoped to catch the RN off-guard and rally public support against the far right. While he succeeded in stopping Ms. Le Pen from winning a majority, his own party has taken a political beating, and the country has been left without a government.
“It’s a totally new situation in France,” said Bruno Jeanbart, a vice-president at French polling firm OpinionWay. “We’ve never known a situation where there can’t be a majority.”
Mr. Jeanbart said the country’s system of two rounds of voting was designed to produce a majority for one party or coalition. Even though Mr. Macron’s party fell short of a majority in 2022, winning 245 seats, it had enough support from other legislators to govern.
French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said he would resign on Monday but that he was prepared to stay on through the Olympics, which begin July 26. But it’s unlikely Mr. Attal would win enough support in the assembly to last much longer.
The President could select someone else or turn to an outsider to run a caretaker administration until another election can be held, which can’t happen until next year. Selecting a non-politician as prime minister – Mr. Macron is free to name anyone – has happened elsewhere in Europe. Mario Draghi, the former head of the European Central Bank, was appointed Italy’s prime minister in 2021 and served in the post for just over a year.
Pierre Mathiot, a political science professor at Lille’s Sciences Po, expects Mr. Macron to keep Mr. Attal as a short-term solution. “After that he has to have a new prime minister and I don’t know what he could do.”
France faces a hung parliament and the prospect of taxing negotiations starting July 8 to form a government, after a surprise left-wing surge blocked Marine Le Pen's quest to bring the far right to power.
Reuters