Macron gambled with the French election and the far-right – but there is still hope

“We are in uncharted territory”, was the most neutral assessment of the first-round results in France’s legislative elections. While it may be uncharted, however, the territory for the next week of campaigning is not quite as hostile as those – in France and around Europe – concerned about a far-right landslide had feared.

Yes, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally – the somewhat sanitised successor to her father’s National Front – came out on top, with around 34 per cent of the overall vote. This is the first time the far-right has led the poll in a post-Second World War election, a departure which sends justifiable shock waves around Europe.

But this was not the runaway victory some had forecast, on the basis that National Rally voters might be more inclined than others to disguise their intentions to pollsters.

If there was a surprise, it was the relatively strong performance of the New Popular Front – an alliance of the left, hastily cobbled together to fight this election, which took 28 per cent of the vote.

Ensemble (Together), the centrist formation supporting President Emmanuel Macron, took 22 per cent, which was 7 per cent more than in the recent EU elections. The political picture of France thus emerges as split three ways – veering to the right, but with determined resistance from the left, and Macron’s centre hanging on.

Judging how well or badly the parties fared depends on two comparisons. Compared with the EU elections last month, Le Pen’s National Rally did just 1.5 per cent better; and Ensemble, for Macron, did 7 per cent better.

Compared with the composition of the current French parliament, however, National Rally stands to more than double its seats – from 88 to more than 200, while the group supporting Macron could be reduced from 170 to fewer than half that.

Campaigning for next Sunday’s second round began within minutes of the polls closing, when Emmanuel Macron and the current prime minister, Gabriel Attal, called for a united effort against National Rally.

Marine Le Pen, for her part, congratulated her party’s supporters and – interestingly – went out of her way to insist that her party is not some extremist outlier, but a legitimate party that is part of France’s mainstream political landscape.

If nothing else, this pre-emptive defence pointed to a degree of vulnerability that could point the way for the party’s opponents over coming days. While the first-round results appear clear-cut, they do not allow for reliable predictions of the final result, and the composition of the new parliament.

All candidates who received more than 12 per cent of their constituency vote can go through to the next round, and the unusually high turn-out – at 65 per cent – means that there are likely to be more three-way and possibly four-way second-round contests than often in a French election.

This could favour the National Rally. But there was an immediate response from the left’s New Popular Front that could thwart this – and indeed prevent National Rally from gaining an overall majority.

The left has done a deal with Ensemble to the effect that their run-off candidates will stand down in constituencies where the other party’s candidate has a better chance of defeating the National Rally candidate. This stratagem to keep the far-right out of power is a well-worn technique from the past, when it was called a “Republican front” – designed to “save the Republic”.

Depending on the numbers (and everything depends on the numbers) this could deprive National Rally of the parliamentary majority it still hopes for, or even push it into second place behind the left. None of this bodes well for stability in French politics, at least not in the immediate future.

The likelihood is that President Macron will have to operate with, at best, a hung parliament, even if he is spared one with a far-right majority. The four-way alliance of the left will probably prove fragile, and National Rally – if Le Pen feels her party has been unfairly deprived of a majority by what she could see as establishment sleight of hand – could prove less amenable to cooperation than it might otherwise have been.

Macron could also face a sullen and frustrated electorate, if those who voted for National Rally feel that their votes have been unjustly discounted. The best that he can probably hope for is that the more centrist parties in the left alliance ally themselves with Ensemble to produce a functioning centrist majority in parliament.

But selecting a prime minister and agreeing a legislative programme – let alone getting it through – looks as though it could be very difficult, for as long as the new parliament lasts.

And the constitution dictates that there can be no new legislative elections within a year. To this extent, it can be argued that Macron has lost the gamble that he made three weeks ago, when he called these snap elections in response to the evisceration of his party by National Rally at the EU parliament elections.

Whether he did this out of petulance or calculation may only emerge when he comes to write his post-presidential memoirs. If it was calculation – calculation that a spell for the far-right in government could serve to inoculate French voters against electing a National Rally president next time around – he could still be vindicated, but that cannot be known until the next presidential election in 2027 at the earliest.

It would appear, though, that Macron has deprived himself of at least a year of the nearly three years that remain of his presidency – even if the results of the second round next week are not so bad that they convince him to call it a day. In his defence, it could be said that he already faced an effectively hung parliament, so his new situation might not be significantly worse.

Whatever happens, however, it is hard to see Macron’s position as being better than it was with the old parliament, which he must surely have hoped. With hindsight – although the French president rarely seems troubled by hindsight – Macron might have done better to stick with the parliament he had. For the next week he will be crunching the numbers, along with the rest of France, to gauge what can be salvaged from his presidency.

Here, the next week will be as crucial as any in recent French history in deciding not just the future of France, but the future of the European Union, given the centrality of France to the EU and the role of Macron as one of the few politicians contemplating its future. In national and international terms, this is a particularly bad time for France to have a demonstrably weak president.

With the backdrop of the Ukraine war, vital discussions at the Nato summit next week and the Paris Olympics in three weeks’ time, France needs to speak with a united voice. Its allies need to know where it stands.