France’s far-right won big in the first round of elections, according to polls

The National Rally Party has won a landslide victory in the first round of voting for the French National Assembly, according to initial predictions, bringing its long-taboo brand of nationalist and anti-immigration politics to the fore for the first time. their rise to power.

Polls, which are usually reliable and based on preliminary results, predict the party will win around 34 percent of the vote, far ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance Party and its allies, which will win around 21 percent.

The scores, in a two-round election that will be completed with a second round of voting on July 7 between the leading parties in each constituency, do not provide a reliable forecast of how many parliamentary seats each party will win. But the National Rally Party now looks very likely to become the largest force in the lower house, although not necessarily an absolute majority.

A coalition of left-wing parties known as the New Popular Front, ranging from moderate socialists to the far-left France Unbowed, was expected to win around 29% of the vote. Turnout was high, reflecting the importance voters attach to the early election, at more than 65%, compared with 47.51% in the first round of the last parliamentary election in 2022.

For Mr Macron, now in his seventh year as president, the result represents a serious setback after he bet on his party’s stinging defeat to the National Rally in the parliamentary election. The recent European institute will not be repeated.

In a statement released shortly after the predictions were made, Mr Macron said that “in the face of the National Rally, the time has come for a grand coalition, clearly democratic and republican, to enter the second round”.

Whether that is still possible at a time when National Rally clearly has the wind in its sails remains unclear.

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the national protests, declared that France had voted “without ambiguity, turning the page after seven years of eroded power”. She called on her supporters to ensure that her protégé, Jordan Bardella, 28, would become the next prime minister.

Mr Macron’s decision to hold elections now, just weeks before the Paris Olympics, has surprised many in France, especially his prime minister, who has been kept in the dark. It reflects a top-down style of governance that has left the president more isolated.

There is no obligation to plunge France into summer chaos with a hasty vote, but Mr Macron believes it is his democratic duty to test the sentiments of the French people in a nationwide vote. .

He also believes that the dissolution of Parliament and elections will be inevitable in October, as his proposal to cut the budget deficit is expected to face fierce opposition.

“It is better to hold elections now,” said an official close to Mr Macron, who asked not to be named. “According to our polls, an absolute majority for the National Rally is inevitable by October.”

The National Rally is on course to win an absolute majority of 289 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly when the second round of voting is held in a week. Mr Macron, whose party and its allies held around 250 seats in the last parliamentary vote in 2022, has been frustrated in his efforts to push through his agenda due to a lack of an absolute majority and an inability to form a stable coalition.

In the run-up to the election, Mr Macron tried all sorts of threats, including a potential “civil war”, to warn people not to vote for what he called “extremists” – the National Rally with its second-class views on immigrants and the far-left Unconquerable France with its anti-Semitic rhetoric.

He told retirees they would be left penniless. He said the National Congress represents “the abandonment of everything that makes our country attractive and keeps investors.” He said the left would tax the vitality of the French economy and close nuclear power plants that provide about 70 percent of the country’s electricity.

“The most extreme things are the poverty of France,” Mr. Macron said.

But those calls have fallen on deaf ears because, for all his achievements including reducing unemployment, Mr. Macron has lost touch with the people to whom the National Rally appealed. His centrist movement, once dominant, suffered a crushing defeat.

Those people, all over the country, feel demeaned by the president. They feel he doesn’t understand their problems. They feel he pretends to listen, but doesn’t do much more than that. Looking for a way to express their anger, they cling to a party that thinks immigrants are the problem, even though France is aging and needs them. They choose a party, the National Rally, whose leaders did not attend elite schools.

The rise of the National Rally has been steady and inevitable. Founded more than half a century ago as the National Front by Ms Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and Pierre Bosquet, a member of a French Waffen-SS division during World War II, the group has faced an iron bar to government for decades.

This was rooted in French shame. The collaborationist Vichy government during World War II had deported more than 72,000 Jews to their deaths, and France was determined never to experiment with a far-right nationalist government again.

Ms Le Pen kicked her father out of the party in 2015 after he insisted that Nazi gas chambers were “a detail of history”. She changed the party’s name and accepted the soft-spoken and unsociable Mr. Bardella as her student. She also abandoned some of her most extreme positions, including her push to leave the European Union.

It has worked, even if certain tenets remain unchanged, including the party’s euro-skeptical nationalism. Also unchanged is its willingness to discriminate between foreign residents and French citizens, and its insistence that the country’s crime and other ills stem from too many immigrants, a claim that some studies have challenged.

For Mr Macron, who is term-limited and must leave office in 2027, three difficult years appear to lie ahead. How difficult will not be clear until the second round of voting is over. It looks as though he may be remembered as the president who allowed the far right into the highest offices of government.

How he will govern with a party that represents all that he has opposed and condemned throughout his political career remains unclear. If the National Party wins the prime ministership, which Mr. Bardella is already lined up for, it will be in a position to set much of the domestic agenda.

Mr Macron has vowed not to resign under any circumstances, and the president in the Fifth Republic typically exercises broad control over foreign and military policy. But the National Party has indicated that it wants to limit Mr Macron’s power. It will undoubtedly try if it wins an absolute majority.

Mr. Macron took an enormous, arbitrary risk. “Don’t accept failure. Accept the awakening, accept the leap for the Republic!” he announced shortly after his decision was made. But as the second round of elections approaches, the republic looks vulnerable, its divisions deepening.

Aurelien Breeden contribution report