Can Macron’s final gambit checkmate the far-right in French elections?

When France’s far-right candidates swept up 33 percent of the votes in the first round of the snap parliamentary election last week, the country – and the world – practically braced for the long-anticipated ascension to power for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party.

As the country readies for crucial second-round voting on Sunday, the unfolding scenario indicates that Pen’s party—Rassemblement National, or RN in French—will face an even stiffer challenge from the far left and President Emmanual Macron’s centrists.

The final outcome could swing either way, analysts say, as France heads to what has been described as one of the most crucial elections in recent times.

Many analysts faulted Macron for calling snap elections, which saw his centrist party lose crucial numbers in parliament—the National Assembly.

Besides the RN, the New Popular Front (NFP)—a largely leftist alliance of far-left to moderate Socialists—made substantial gains to place second with 28 percent of the vote share, while the French president’s centrists fell to a dismal third place with nearly 21 percent.

The first round elected only 72 members out of the total 577 seats in the parliament, with 39 seats for the RN and 31 seats for the NFP. The majority mark is 289 seats.

This means that the second round will determine the shape of the National Assembly and the newly-formed election alliances between the leftist bloc and centrists can wreck the far-right’s calculations for clinching a long-awaited victory.

At least 221 candidates from both leftists and centrists pulled out from Sunday’s election to avoid three-way contests that would help split anti-far-right votes.

This last roll of the dice might yet save the day for Macron and save his party from certain defeat.

“Initially, Macron’s centrists had the idea of going for nini, that is neither/nor in English….which means neither (with) the extreme right nor (with) the left,” says Francois Gemenne, a political scientist at Sciences Po in Paris and the University of Liege in Belgium.

In the past, many centrists under Macron’s leadership had used a political strategy of "assimilating the whole left", including the moderate Greens and the Socialists to the extreme left France Unbowed party, to create a perception that they are standing against two dangerous political ideologies, the far-right and far-left, says Gemenne.

But when the three leftist parties formed a pre-poll alliance and came second, many observers, as well as voters, thought that the centrist strategy had backfired as both the far-right and leftist bloc increased their share of votes at the cost of against Macron’s Together alliance in the first round.

Shifting alliances

After the first round, many thought that “it was silly of Macron to assimilate the whole bloc to the extreme left” because they began considering that “the extreme right was indeed far more dangerous” than the leftist bloc, Gemenne tells TRT World.

The first round saw the highest turnout rate of nearly 60 percent ever since France’s 1986 legislative election.

As a result, Macron’s centrists finally decided to join “the so-called Republican front that is a kind of alliance to block the way to the extreme right and to make sure that they don't have the majority in parliament,” says the professor.

Through this week, 132 candidates from the leftist NPF and 83 centrists withdrew from the second round to support each other in the final stage of the parliamentary election against RN competitors. This has also altered the results of surveys’ initial estimates that the RN could claim as many as 300 seats well beyond the 289 threshold of the parliamentary majority.

“A relative majority” is possible for the RN, says Jean-Sylvestre Mongrenier, a French professor of history-geography and a researcher in geopolitics at the Thomas More Institute.

“But it would be much more difficult to get an absolute majority. The leadership would have to establish a platform with some Les Républicains (LR) MPs and ‘divers droite’ MPs,” he tells TRT World.

Divers droite, a French term meaning miscellaneous right, refers to independent centre-right or right-wing candidates who are not affiliated with any big party.

The Les Républicains (LR), a mainstream conservative party, is now in tatters as its leader Eric Ciotti has joined the RN despite fierce opposition from other leading members.

The RN already declared that it will not form a government if they do not have an absolute majority.

A recent poll suggested that the new leftist-centrist partnership in the second round can result in the RN ending up between 190 and 220 seats, while the NPF might claim between 159 and 183 members, and Macron’s centrist allies may get between 110 and 135.

“We can avoid an absolute majority for the far-right,” said Gabriel Attal, the centrist French prime minister, referring to centrist and leftist withdrawals in different constituencies to increase their deputies being elected.

“It is unlikely that the extreme right will get a majority because of the so-called Republican front,” says Gemenne.

He also draws attention to Macron’s political manoeuvring. “One cannot rule out the possibility that Macron decides to put them in charge, asking his centrist MPs to support an extreme right government.”

“That is unlikely but still a possibility. To be honest, nobody really knows what could happen next. Macron's intentions are extremely difficult to read, so I would say that anything can happen at this stage,” he adds.

Yasser Louati, a French political analyst and the head of the Committee for Justice & Liberties (CJL), does not trust Macron’s political direction, finding similarities with France’s WWII political tensions when some conservative factions found Hitler “better” than the then-popular Front, a leftist alliance, which inspired current leftists groups to form the NPF.

A centrist mess

While this Republican front will benefit Macron’s centrists to get “a bit more seats than they expected” in the second round, possibly allowing them to play “a pivotal role” in the parliament, they have entered a state of “collapse in terms of political force”, says Gemenne adding that the president also “seems reisolated at the moment”.

Louati also describes the first-round results as the collapse of Macron’s centrism. But he goes further, saying that the first round also confirms the collapse of the LR after years of “emulating and copying far-right political stances in terms of identity politics and authoritarianism.”

Mongrenier also sees increasing disagreements at the centre of the French political spectrum. It’s not all clear that the so-called "majorité présidentielle", a term of the Fifth Republic, which designates a parliamentary majority supporting the president, will continue to function as a useful tool after the second round, he says.

While the LR has played a crucial role in ensuring "majorité présidentielle" for decades, it will be difficult to keep their political unity further with “no real leadership, no ideological set and no shared view,” says Mongrenier, as moderate leftists, who have also become part of mainstream politics, recently joined a far-left-led alliance.

“The French president would like to choose the left-wing in order to weaken the ‘Rassemblement National’, but he no longer commands his ‘troops’. He is a defeated general. Anyway, the voters are free and less and less receptive to the political headquarter's advice,” Mongrenier tells TRT World.

While Mongrenier assesses that centrist support in the new parliament will still be “critical”, he also thinks that they don’t exist as a united political body anymore as several ministers and political friends of Macron are standing away. “They think that the president is the cause of this defeat. And they are not wrong. This decision (the "dissolution") was madness,” he says.

“Calling for the snap elections has marked the end of the Macron parenthesis and the myth that you could do politics without political parties, at least in France,” Louati tells TRT World.

“This is the end of the Macron era, and this is like Nero watching Rome burn to the ground while playing music,” he says.

Can the left come to power?

The second round might also mark a turning point for the left, according to Gemenne. “They've managed to look more or less united, even though there are some divisions locally,” he says.

As a result, they expect to fare better, which will also provide an important signal for the presidential election in 2027, he adds.

During the latest presidential election, which saw Macron’s victory over Le Pen, the leftist factions debated whether they should have come out with just one candidate or more, the professor notes. Since then, they have become more convinced that they do better when they are united, pushing the idea of one candidate in the 2027 election, he says.

But their chances of having a parliamentary majority is a distant possibility, according to Gemenne. “Very weak chances even with Emmanuel Macron's help,” says Mongrenier. Louati does not think that the leftist alliance can come first in the second round, but they can have a sufficient number of deputies “to keep the far-right from being an absolute majority position,” minimising RN’s win.

“Still, they might enter a government. One of the possibilities would be for Macron to either appoint a minority government from the left or to try and form a coalition government, including members from the left,” Gemenne says.

He predicts no blocks will be able to have the majority after the second round, making France deal with a hung parliament.