John Jefferson
France’s Fifth Republic is “impervious” to political extremes—or such has been the contention of generations of political scientists. The regime’s institutional design has indeed hampered outsiders. France’s president and lower house of parliament are chosen in two-round contests that are usually held within months of each other. The provision for a run-off and the near-simultaneous election of the executive and legislature act as a firewall against upstarts.
But on Sunday night, for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic, the firewall crumbled: The Rassemblement National trounced both President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling coalition (Ensemble) and a left-wing alliance (the Nouveau Front Populaire) in the first round of elections for the National Assembly. The RN–the perennial bete noire of French politics–scored a third of votes at the national level. In more than three dozen constituencies, the party attained an absolute majority in the initial ballot, removing the need for a run-off. The best-laid plans of Charles de Gaulle had come to naught amid the burgeoning popularity of the “far right.”
Macron called these snap elections in the aftermath of a crushing defeat in the European elections, in which the RN doubled the vote share of his party. He cast the race for the National Assembly’s 577 seats as a “Who Governs?” election, believing the RN’s checkered past and inexperience would dissuade enough voters. Macron has now decisively lost that gambit: his Ensemble coalition stands to receive fewer than 100 mandates once the lower house of parliament is selected. After last night’s verdict, only two forces can govern: the RN or chaos.
The RN is unlikely to win an outright majority in the Assembly. The first question facing the party, the first test of rule versus chaos, is whether they will be able to form a governing coalition. Doing so challenges long-held norms of French political culture; yet the prospects are not so hopeless as they once seemed.
The RN’s ascent has been at once gradual and vertiginous. Back in 2002, the party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, attracted a mere 20 percent of the vote in the second round of the presidential race. The French public consigned Le Pen père to the fever swamp as a Holocaust denier and an inveterate bigot.
Marine Le Pen, who inherited the party from her father, has cared more about capturing power than lobbing antisemitic innuendos over the airwaves. Since taking the reins of the Front National (which she rechristened the RN, in a Gaullist flourish), she has pursued a strategy of dédiabolisation, or detoxification. Le Pen père—in the the tradition of the French right—vociferated against the Fifth Republic, deplored the French Revolution, defended the country’s wartime Vichy Regime, and held Catholic Mass at his rallies. Le Pen fille ends her rallies with chants of Vive la république, promotes herself as a defender of the country’s Jewish community, and recently voted to enshrine the right to abortion in the French constitution. Marine Le Pen’s personal convictions aside, she has proven unwavering in this politics of respectability–so much so that she purged her own father from the party’s ranks.
Marine Le Pen’s RN, freed of paternal encumbrances, can federate many Frenchmen behind its central message: opposition to mass migration and emphasis on the need to restore the authority of the state. The RN’s social profile is no longer restricted to the rogues’ gallery of old: the veterans of Algerie francaise, the nostalgics of Philippe Pétain, the flotsam and jetsam of the Legitimist movement. Le Pen fille’s faction in large measure resembles French society, attracting growing numbers of professionals and elites. The party’s candidate for the premiership is the TikTok star and gendre idéal Jordan Bardella. The party’s new facade has convinced some of the FN’s most determined opponents: Serge Klarsfeld, the famed Nazi-hunter, has appealed to French Jews to back the RN against the left-wing France Insoumise party.
In the course of Marine Le Pen’s three presidential runs, the RN has expanded its electorate steadily. Le Pen fille failed to qualify for the run-off in 2012; Macron left her with 33 percent of the vote in 2017; she finally crossed the 40 percent mark in 2022. Macron has pursued divisive policies in his second term that have only aided the RN’s rise, notably a pension reform raising the age of retirement from 62 to 64. Last summer’s race riots further convinced many that mass migration represents an existential threat for the country. The RN’s ascent in the polls has accelerated due to these developments.
Despite the RN’s historic breakthrough, the party’s securing of a majority in parliament is far from a fait accompli. Macron’s Ensemble and the left’s Nouveau Front Populaire have already begun to unite in a front republicain. France’s run-offs can feature three—and even four—candidates in the case of high turnout. The first round results could have produced triangulaires-races between Ensemble, the NFP, and RN in about half of the constituencies. But the NFP and Ensemble have vowed to withdraw third-place finishers in these districts. This accord, announced on live television the night of the election, reduced the RN’s chance of clinching a majority in real time: The networks BFM-TV and CNews revised down their prediction for the RN’s performance in the second round, from 260–320 seats to 240–270 seats (the party needs 289 seats for a majority). As of press time, Philippe Lemoine, a philosopher and number-cruncher, predicts 265–285 seats for the RN and 16–23 seats for the moderate-right Républicains.
The most probable outcome of the second round is a hung parliament. Macron, according to news reports, hopes to assemble a technocratic coalition from among the non-RN parties. But the idea that such disparate factions, running from communists to moderate conservatives, could come to terms seems far-fetched. The French constitution dictates that the new parliament cannot be dissolved for a year. French presidents dispose of broad executive powers, but require a docile parliament to exercise them. Macron’s “arc républicain” might soon descend into chaos and produce a full-blown constitutional crisis.
France’s Républicains could save the country from a stalemate. The right-wing party, the much-diminished heirs of De Gaulle, splintered in the run-up to these elections. Eric Ciotti, LR’s erstwhile chief, led several dozen candidates into an alliance with the RN. Ciotti’s move, a break with the republican right’s time-honored cordon sanitaire, precipitated a schism in the party. The LR’s civil war has descended into melodrama—Ciotti at one point locked his opponents out of the party’s headquarters to prevent them from expelling him.
LR’s brass could still follow the same path as their maverick. François-Xavier Bellamy, the party’s standard-bearer in the European elections, has opined that “the far left represents the greater danger” for France. He has refused in private conversations to dismiss the possibility of participating in a coalition with the RN. LR’s other bigwigs have declined to endorse a front républicain, advising adherents to vote their conscience.
On the morrow of the run-off, LR could hold the position of kingmaker, and will have to make a fateful choice: tain the cordon sanitaire in the name of republican probity or discard it to form a working majority with the RN. LR, which shares much of the RN’s program on migration and security, could advance an ambitious legislative program. LR’s presence in the coalition might also blunt the RN’s latent authoritarian tendencies, ensuring respect for the rule of law and the Fifth Republic’s institutions. The party’s cooperation with the far-right might, on the other hand, deprive it of a raison d’étre and send many of its voters into the arms of Macron’s center. LR’s chiefs ought to pray for the discernment of the late and lamented De Gaulle.
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