Left-wing alliance performs strongly in French election

French president Emmanuel Macron’s coalition is likely to obtain a plurality of seats in the second round of parliamentary elections next Sunday, but the results of the first round have nonetheless been widely interpreted as a setback for the French leader.

Projections by polling firms credit Macron’s Ensemble coalition with between 255 and 295 of 577 seats in the National Assembly — a substantial diminution compared to the 345 seats held by Macron loyalists in the outgoing assembly.

Abstentionists constituted the only clear majority in the first round on June 12th, when a record 52.49 per cent of French voters stayed home.

The French, “who are so quick to invade traffic circles and social media are strangely silent on the day when they are given the right to weigh in”, said the economic daily Les Échos. “But can one blame them? The French parliament has so little influence that it is difficult to interest anyone in its renewal.”

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The main question of the second round is whether Ensemble will reach the threshold of 289 seats, giving it an absolute majority that would perpetuate the Assembly’s role as a rubber stamp for presidential initiatives.

Macron will have to rely on unwieldy allies regardless. If Ensemble obtains the magical 289 seats, he will have to accommodate the egos of his former prime minister, Edouard Philippe, and François Bayrou, a political old-timer and leader of the centrist Modem party.

If Ensemble obtains less than 289 seats, Macron will have to go outside his own coalition to seek votes from the conservative party, Les Républicains, to vote for changes, including overhaul of the pension system.

Political parties are bound to lose support after five years in power, but the results on Sunday night were particularly damning for Macron.

Ensemble candidates received an overall score of just under 26 per cent, a drop of more than 7 percentage points compared to five years ago, when Macron’s La République en Marche and Bayrou’s Modem scored 32.33 per cent.

Ensemble lost more than two percentage points on Sunday night compared to Macron’s first-round presidential score on April 10th.

And Ensemble’s first-round score is a record low for a presidential party when legislative elections have followed immediately on presidential elections. The parties of his predecessors, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, all won more than 30 per cent of the first-round vote.

Most analysts say Macron has only himself to blame. Following the pattern of the presidential campaign in March and April, Macron tried to stay above the fray and campaigned very little until the final days before the vote. Several commentators accused him of “anaesthetising” or “chloroforming” political debate.

Macron gave the impression of immobility by waiting nearly one month after his re-election to appoint a new government. He talked in the vaguest of terms about his plans, in particular the unpopular pension reform. His proposal for a “national council for refoundation” to breathe new life into French democracy was seen as a way of further weakening the National Assembly.

If there was a winner on Sunday night, it was the extreme left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, founder of La France Insoumise party who came third in April’s presidential poll. Mélenchon achieved the extraordinary feat of uniting LFI, the moribund Communists and Socialists and the Green party EELV under the banner of the Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale, known as Nupes.

Nupes virtually tied with Ensemble in the first round. The ministry of the interior saved Macron the humiliation of defeat at the hands of the leftist coalition by announcing that Macron’s group won 21,000 more votes, out of 23.3 million votes cast.

But when Le Monde attributed the scores of several small left-wing parties to Nupes, Mélenchon’s coalition appeared to have defeated Macron’s.

Based on first-round scores, Nupes is projected to win between 180 and 210 seats in the next assembly, displacing Les Républicains as the principal opposition party. Mélenchon is unlikely to fulfil his boast that the French will “elect [him] as prime minister”, but that was really a public relations ploy all along.

The component parties of Nupes won nearly the same cumulative score — 25.49 per cent — as five years ago. But because the French electoral system favours big parties, they held only 60 seats in the last assembly. By uniting behind Mélenchon, they may triple their representation.

Les Républicains will obtain between 40 and 60 seats in the new assembly, compared to 100 in the last legislature.

The Rassemblement National, Marine Le Pen’s extreme right-wing party, may reach the threshold of 15 seats required for a parliamentary group for the first time since the 1986-1988 legislature. Le Pen refused to unite with her challenger, the extreme right-wing polemicist Eric Zemmour, who was defeated in the first round.