France’s 577 members of the National Assembly (Lower House) are elected in a two-round system with a run-off election if no candidate makes it over 50% in the first round. A single candidate is elected in each constituency.
Almost 49 million French voters had to chose their new parliament. In the first round, on June 12, 2022 only 47.51% of voters went to the polls. That was a decrease of -1,2% in comparison with 2017, and voter participation in 2017 was already weak: -8.5% in comparison with 2012.
In the second round of the legislative election 2022, voter participation fell to 46.23%. This was an increase of +3.6% in comparison with 2017, but 2017 was a terrible year with -12.8% in comparison with 2012.
In 2017, President Macron’s LREM had managed to win 347 seats, well over the 289 parliamentarians needed for an absolute majority in the National Assembly. In 2022, the presidential camp fell to 245 seats. This is a big defeat since, unlike in 2017, when LREM fought the parliamentary election alone, President Macron’s party was part of an electoral alliance called Ensemble (Together), which only managed to win 245 seats.
The left-wing election alliance NUPES with their hard-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a man critical of both the European Union and NATO, who himself was — unlike in the presidential election — not on the ballot, managed to win 131 seats (+73). This is far from his electoral goal to win a majority with NUPES and, therefore, force the president to make him prime minister — a fantasy all along because Macron would never have chosen him —, but it’s a success nevertheless. This was made possible because the left and hard-left were largely united despite some strong differences.
The even bigger surprise of the 2022 French parliamentary election was the far-right Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen; she won Pas-de-Calais’s 11th constituency with 54% of the vote in the second round. Her party ended up with 89 seats (+82!).
The traditional right of Les Républicains and UDI saw their number of seats roughly cut in half to 61 seats (-56). From their ranks once came presidents such as Chirac and Sarkozy, to name just their two last ones.
If we look at the electoral alliances in detail, on the presidential team Ensemble, the strongest party was Macron’s LREM with 168 seats (-140). The center-right MoDem ended up with 48 seats (+6) and the newly founded party of Macron’s former prime minister Edouard Philippe won 27 seats.
The left and far-left alliance NUPES saw Mélenchon’s LFI win 72 seats (+55), ahead of the Greens with 27 seats (+26), the once mighty Socialists with 26 seats (-4) and the French Communists with 12 seats (+2). As mentioned, the far-right RN of Marine Le Pen ended up with 89 seats (+81). The other far-right leader Eri Zemmour of Reconquête, who had won some 7% in the presidential election 2022, running for the first time, could not win a single seat in the parliamentary election. The once dominant center-right party LR ended up with 61 seats (-51) and the center-right UDI with 3 seats (-15).
A few astonishing results: with Jacques Chirac and Jean Tiberi, Les Républicains had once the Paris mayor elected from their ranks. In the 2022 legislative election, LR did not manage to win a single seat in the National Assembly (Assemblée nationale).
As for the Socialist Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, after the presidential election disaster in which she ended up with 1.7% (!), she suffered another débâcle in the législatives 2022: none of the four NUPES candidates she actively supported in Paris in the 2022 parliamentary election made it into the National Assembly.
The African cleaning lady Rachel Keke, born in 1974 in the Ivory Coast, managed to beat the French Minister delegate in charge of Sports, Roxana Maracineanu, herself an immigrant, born in 1975 in Bucarest, Romania.
When President Macron was first elected in 2017, he neglected his newly founded party LREM. He never seriously tried to implant the party in the regions, cities, villages. In 2022, he pays the price for his ignorance and arrogance, losing his parliamentary majority. The 2022 presidential election should have been a warning sign for him, but as virtually all president’s before him, he lost touch with reality. However, he got reelected and will probably be able to govern with the help of a coalition government including most likely the center-right LR. But he will have to compromise. Will it affect his reform agenda? Already the Yellow vests protets and then the covid-pandemic partly derailed his liberal reform élan.
France registered its worst trade deficit in history in 2021 with 84.7 billion euro. Public debt is around 113% of GDP. On the positive side, the unemployment rate has decreased under Macron to 7.4% and the country has become more attractive to foreign investors. Nevertheless, more reforms are needed.
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Photograph on top showing Emmanuel Macron in April 2015. Photo copyright © Claude Truong-Ngoc (via Wikipedia).
Article about the French parliamentary election 2022 added on June 20, 2022 at 15:41 Paris time. June 21, 2022 at 18:33 French time: entry about Marine Le Pen changed: she won Pas-de-Calais’s 11th constituency with 54%.
