Before the 2024 European Parliament Election, the French President Emmanuel Macron had said that this election was about the EU, not France. But after the disastrous result by his Renaissance party, Macron had one of his many disruptive moments: calling for early legislative elections in France.
In the European election, for the occasion united with the liberal MoDem and other, smaller centrist parties under the banner L’Europe Ensemble, Renaissance and its partners, led by the virtually unknown Valéry Hayer, ended up with only 14.6%. That was not even half of the result of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally, led by the young, unexperienced but popular Jordan Bardella: 31.4%.
Why President Macron ordered a snap election, even though his party was facing headwinds and the trend cannot be changed in such a short space of time, remains his secret. He shot himself in the foot.
One explanation is that Emmanuel Macron thought that the far-right National Rally of Marine Le Pen was not ready to govern and the left and far-left (LFI, PS, Greens, PC) would not be able to find common ground. But the opposite happened. In order to survive politically, an electoral alliance was formed in record time — despite profound ideological differences.
Another explanation is that President Macron called early elections in the hope that the National Rally (RN) would not be ready and falter in the first or second round.
A third explanation is that the National Rally would prove incompetent in power. After one year in office, the president would be allowed to dissolve the French parliament again. This would allow his forces to return to power still under his watch.
This was and is playing with fire. Why do this just before and not after the Olympic Games? Even if the RN government showed incompetence, they would have the excuse that the president would not let them govern as they intended. The RN could also have ended up governing in a prudent way, a bit like Giorgia Meloni so far in Italy, and therefore ended up with more credibility. Anyway, Marine Le Pen’s goal is the 2027 presidential election.
Macron’s 2024 gamble with early legislative elections ended badly, but not as badly as expected. The National Rally (Rassemblement National, RN) and its allies (center-right LR defectors around Eric Ciotti) only became the third largest force at the National Assembly (Assemblée nationale) with its 577 seats.
The fragmented political landscape with party affiliations and alliances in the flow leads to slightly different election result figures by various newspapers, TV stations, etc. The figures from the Ministry of the Interior don’t really help either. Therefore, the numbers you can find, may be slightly different from the ones presented here. However, the main, essential findings are the same.
If we have a look strictly at parties, not at electoral alliances, the populist, far-right RN led by Marine Le Pen has become France’s largest party with 126 seats, cleary ahead of Macron’s Renaissance with 102 seats (-67 seats!) and the far-left La France insoumise of the populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon with 74 seats.
The one positive result: Second round voter turnout reached 66.6%, a plus of 20.4 pp in comparison with the 2022 legislative election.
Three electoral alliances — none with an absolute majority
The left-wing election alliance Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) came in first with 182 seats (+51 in comparison with 2022), ahead of President Macron’s Ensemble alliance with 168 seats (-77!), followed by the Marine Le Pen’s and Jordan Bardella’s RN and partners (LR dissidents) with 143 seats (+54).
The heterogenous alliance NFP is made up of the populist, far-left La France insoumise with 74 seats, the Parti socialiste with 59 seats, the Greens with 28 seats, the Communists with 9 seats, the Génération.s with 5 seats, other left-wing candidates with 5 seats, regional parties with 2 seats.
The far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon
The strongest alliance, NFP (formerly NUPES alliance), has no clear leader, only a colletive leadership. The strongest NFP party, LFI, is led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. In recent years, this extreme left-winger has become France’s most unpopular politician. Therefore, the other NFP parties and even some within LFI did not want Mélenchon to lead NFP or to be its candidate for the job of prime minister. NFP was unable to present a PM candidate. Anywhy, Mélenchon’s dream is to become president, not prime minister.
After the first round, the egotistic, populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon was of course the first to speak. The other NFP members had forced LFI to acknowlege that the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel were terrorist attacks carried out by the terrorist organzation Hamas. After some initial hesitation and reluctance, LFI accepted this and some other requests to “proof” that they are not extremists. On June 30, after the 20:00 o’clock news published the first round election result forecast, Mélenchon said that all LFI candidates placed third would withdraw from the election in favor of better placed “republican” candidates (candidates in support of the French Republic, that is democracy). He did not say that LFI voters should vote for Macron’s Renaissance, LR or other center or center-right parties. In addition, next to Mélenchon stood Rima Hassan, the newly elected LFI member of the European Parliament and French-Palestinian human rights activist and Hamas apologist, who had qualified the October 7 Hamas pogroms as “legitimate”. In addition, LFI is like Marine Le Pen’s RN home to several pro-Russian, Putin-friendly politicians, including Mélenchon.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon has always been a master of double talk, sending messages to parts of the (partly radicalized) Muslim population in France, who make up a significant part of the LFI electorate. Critics say that, if he can’t be elected president, Mélenchon is ready to come to power through the pressure of the street. He and other LFI members have been accused of islamo-gauchisme, flirting with antisemitism, anti-EU and anti-German rhetoric, pro-Russian tendencies.
After the publication of the first estimations after the second round on July 7, Jean-Luc Mélenchon was of course once again the first to go public. In front of cameras, he said that President Macron should fire Prime Minister Attal and appoint a member of the NFP as the new PM. In addition, he said that the entire NFP program should be implemented, omitting that the NFP is far from an absolute majority in the National Assembly (182 out of 577 seats; absolute majority: 289 seats).
Jean-Luc Mélenchon admires Trotzky. He is a populist strongman who favors the permanent revolution, for whom the end justifies the means. His Trotzkyist DNA showed again just before the first round of the 2024 parliamentary election when he purged four critics within his party, exluding them at the last minute from standing in the early legislative contest. But three of them — Alexis Corbière, Hendrik Davi and Danielle Simonnet — won their reelection to the National Assembly even though they were not official LFI candidates in their constituencies. Only Raquel Garrido did not make it. Mélenchon’s grip on LFI is getting weaker.
Macron is part of the problem
The Ensemble pour la République alliance is made up of President Macron’s Renaissance with 102 seats, the centrist MoDem around François Bayrou with 33 seats, Horizons of former PM Edouard Philippe with 25 seats, several centrist candidates with 3 seats, UDI members (party founded by Jean-Louis Borloo) with 2 seats, Agir (an LR spin-off) with 1 seat, several center-right candidates with 1 seat and the Parti radical with 1 seat.
Macron’s party Renaissance lost 67 seats in comparison with 2022. The French president gets on the nerves of too many voters. Whenever he made a TV speech, Renaissance and Ensemble suffered in the polls. He has become almost as toxic as Mélenchon.
Emmanuel Macron has not only mobilized NFP and RN voters against him and his alliance, but even within Renaissance and Ensemble, many are fed up with the president and his erratic decisions.
It is true that the June 9 European Parliament elections were conducted by direct universal suffrage through a closed list proportional representation, whereas the French National Assembly election is a two-round system vote in single-member constituencies. The first round of the 2024 French legislative election took place on June 30. In each constituency, the leading candidate who receives an absolute majority of valid votes and a vote total greater than 25% of the registered electorate is elected in the first round. If no candidate reaches this threshold, a runoff election is held between the top two candidates plus any other candidate who receives more than 12.5% of the vote of all registered voters. The candidate who receives the most votes in the second round is elected.
Nevertheless, it was clear that the wind against Renaissance and Ensemble would not change within weeks. After the first round, polls predicted the possibility of an absolute majority for Marine Le Pen’s RN and their allies, but at least a relative majority of around 230 seats or more. It is a miracle that, in the last days before the second round, the wind changed to the point that the left ended up first, Macron’s Ensemble second and Le Pen’s RN and allies only third.
The famous front républicain of democratic parties worked once again — because, in the days leading up to the second round, journalists, NGOs and others made their job and showed that many National Rally candidates had made antisemitic, pro-Putin and other shady remarks and were unfit to lead. The RN came up with so many dubious candidates because the party itself remains profundly shady. In addition, the RN’s personnel pool is so thin that almost anyone who wants to stand for election is accepted.
In the end, the RN only managed to win 126 seats. Its allies, dissident LR candidates around Eric Ciotti, won 17 seats. That’s a total of 143 seats, a far cry from the initially predicted possible absolute majority of 289 seats.
Smaller parties in the National Assembly
In addition to these three big electoral alliances, other politicians made it into the National Assembly.
The center-right Les Républicains (LR), who had seen their party leader Eric Ciotti defect and form an alliance with the RN ended up with only 39 seats (-25). Le Monde counted 45, others up to 66. The LR leadership dispute around Eric Ciotti has not been resolved yet. It remains unclear who can be counted as a member of Les Républicains, and who defected with Eric Ciotti to RN. Although the leading LR figures with the exception of the the party leader did not join RN, Eric Ciotti’s defection showed that the LR party base is deeply divided.
LR is the party in the historical continuity of Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Jacques Chiras, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Fillon. Today, the party has no clear, charismatic leader.
Other center-right candidates ended up with a total of 15 seats, other center-left candidates with 13 seats, other centrist candidates with 6 seats, regional parties with 4 seats and one other candidate with 1 seat.
The front républicain held once again, but the instability has increased
Jordan Bardella (*1995) is not even 29 yet but he had chances to end up as France’s next prime minister. He is the party’s friendly face who managed to win over more younger and more female voters. After the first round of the National Assembly (Assemblée nationale), polls predicted a possible absolute majority or at least the relative majority for the RN. Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen became overconfident. French voters did not like that, based on polls, they openly claimed the job of PM before the election had taken place.
The far-right clearly missed the goal to become France’s leading force. But the second round of the National Assembly election on July 7, 2024 brought no clarification. Jordan Bardella is surely not (yet) fit to lead the country. Macron’s gamble to unmask the RN party leaders and candidates as incompetent partly worked. But Ensemble lost its relative majority. No other alliance emerged with an absolute majority. France’s political culture is not ready for coalition governments across the ideological divide. In addition, the relation between the president, his PM, his ministers, his election alliance and his party has been severly damaged. Others within Macron’s Ensemble alliance no longer trust the president. They may more openly pursue their own agendas now, notably regarding the 2027 presidential election. Macron may soon be home alone.
Let’s hope the Paris Olympics will not end in an organizational disaster. After the second round meltdown, the young Prime Minister Gabriel Attal (*1989), who had not been consulted by the president regarding the snap election, had announced his resignation. The president refused it and asked the PM to stay on for the time being. France needs stability.
Emmanuel Macron originally wanted to modernize France and make the extreme parties on the right and left — notably RN and LFI — smaller. Instead, he made them bigger.
Without any necessity, President Macron ordered early elections and, therefore, increased the political instability, with no party or party alliance able to govern.
President Macron and his governments managed to reduce the unemployment rate and to attract foreign direct investments. But the French deficit is around 5.5%, the French public debt around 110% of GDP.
The problems remain. The political leadership is missing. Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella hope to win in 2027. Jean-Luc Mélenchon has similar ideas. Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of Economics, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty Bruno Le Maire, former prime minister Edouard Philippe, former president François Hollande and several others are all hoping to end up at the Elysée in 2027. As we say in German, France has too many chiefs and too few Indians.
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Jordan Bardella photographed at the Strasbourg European Parliament in September 2022. Photo by BootExe via Wikipedia/Wikimedia.
Article added on July 9, 2024 at 00:45 Paris time. Detail added at 00:47. A few typing errors corrected at 08:00.
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