French parliamentary elections: Far-right vs far-left

France, an EU heavyweight and a country that inspired a global revolution against autocracies in 1789, is on the edge of electing a far-right government in the upcoming parliamentary election.

The first round of the parliamentary election will be held on Sunday and the second round will be held on July 7 to allocate 577 seats to newly formed far-right and far-left alliances as well as President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance party-led allies located across the country’s increasingly polarised political spectrum.

Macron gambled to call the snap election after his governing centrist allies received less than 15 percent vote share in EU parliament elections while far-right Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) doubled her tally compared to the president’s centrist alliance.

Many surveys predict that Le Pen has a lot of chances to win the next presidential election in 2027 as centrist Macron is deprived of running for a third term according to the constitution.

Both Macron and Le Pen have young proteges. Macron’s government has been led by Gabriel Attal, 34, Europe’s youngest prime minister while Jordan Bardella, 28, became the head of the RN thanks to Le Pen’s support.

Seeing centrist Macron is no longer a barrier to the rise of the far-right, leftist groups have also joined forces with a far-left leadership to block Le Pen’s young protege Bardella, the grandson of Italian immigrants, to lead an extreme anti-migrant government ever in the country’s history since the end of WWII.

Why Macron called snap elections

Analysts have been puzzled by Macron’s call for the snap election, which can give the French far-right a lifelong dream of governance promised by the Le Pen family, the founding dynasty of the current RN. The Le Pen family ruled the far-right party for more than five decades until Bardella became its leader.

Some analysts believe that Macron, who will continue to run the country as president until 2027, is “gambling” on the hope that “he can defeat extremist parties by exposing them” to an early governance led by a prime minister from one of two political ends under his own presidential scrutiny.

Now both RN-led far-right alliance, which has been expanded with the support of the mainstream conservative Republicans party leadership, and the newly formed leftist alliance, which has been led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a politician with some far-left political views, have emerged as leading opponents to Macron’s leadership.

Both alliances have fiercely criticised Macron’s centrist leadership as a failure, making generous pledges to French voters ranging from angry farmers on EU policies to laborers living in working-class neighbourhoods, which see globalisation for their declining incomes.

Macron might bet that whichever side - far-right or far-left - wins will be short on delivering their promises leading to a disappointment in French voters, which will again return to Macron’s so-called politically correct centrism in 2027.

But this strategy appears to depend on the EU’s pending budget constraints on Paris, which runs one of the biggest Eurozone deficits. As a result, it could potentially hurt the president and his allies as the possible eurosceptic far-right government would argue that they could not deliver what they promised because of Macron and his EU partners.

“The electorate may conclude that ultimately the far right wasn’t able to implement their program because Macron was a constraint – and that the way to get over the chaos is to ultimately give the far right a majority in 2027,” Mujtaba Rahman, the managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, told CNN.

Other analysts think that Macron’s government has been already paralyzed by the opposition majority in the National Assembly as the president can not implement many of his political initiatives subject to a parliamentary approval in the country’s tricky semi-presidential system.

As a result, Macron has been increasingly forced to apply his presidential decrees to pass laws in line with the Article 49 of the French constitution which allows the president to enact “a law without a vote, unless the parliament passes a motion of no confidence.”

But this practice also exposes the French president to a possible vote of confidence in his government, which would be called by the opposition in the parliament, leading to the probable collapse of the Macron administration. Seeing that this probability might have become a reality at some point, Macron might have decided to face it earlier to rein in the French opposition, say experts.

In this snap election, something unusual also happened as both far-right and far-left parties formed alliances to defeat each other as well as Macron’s centrism. Let’s look at them closely:

Far-right alliance

Le Pen’s RN expanded its reach in the centre-right by forming a controversial alliance with Eric Ciotti, the head of the Republicans, a liberal conservative party, which has long been one of the two mainstream leading political blocs in French politics.

Until Macron’s emergence, the Republicans played a critical role shaping French politics and counted on blocking the far-right's rise, but in recent presidential and parliamentary elections, the conservative party lost significant seats at the expense of centrist and far-right gains.

Some argue that those losses might force Ciotti to form an alliance with the RN. But other powerful figures in the conservative party opposed his decision to form an alliance with Le Pen’s party, attempting to oust him from the leadership. A Paris court rejected his ousting from the leadership, allowing him to rule the Republicans.

Despite recent losses, the Republicans are still the largest party in the French Senate, which can favour a possible RN-led government to rule the state alongside Macron after the elections. The party also continues to have a sizable presence in the local level called regions of France.

Like the Republicans, another far-right party, Reconquête, also appeared to be paralysed by whether to support the RN or not. Marion Marechal, a popular member of the party, who also happens to be the niece of Marine Le Pen, “calls for supporting the alliance between RN and Ciotti, instead of Reconquête,” wrote Gesine Weber, an expert on European politics, on X. But Eric Zemmour, the party’s founder and leader, opposes backing the RN.

According to recent polls, the far-right alliance might get as much as 37 percent, possibly reaching a majority in the parliament.

Far-left bloc

Like the far-right, the far-left also formed a formidable alliance called the New Popular Front, whose name invokes French voters to recall pre-WWII leftist bloc, Popular Front, which aimed to prevent far-right leagues with connections to Germany’s Hitler and Italy’s Mussolini to come to power at the time.

The leftist bloc includes Mélenchon, the leader of France Unbowed party, who clinched a third place in the 2022 presidential election coming very close to qualifying for a second round, the Socialists, a party pulling a decreasing electorate appeal like the Republicans, the Communists, the Ecologists and Place Publique.

Unlike the far-right, the leftist bloc has not reached a decision to nominate a prime minister, showing its fragmented nature, which also led to the collapse of the Popular Front in 1938 two years after its coming to power.

According to a recent poll, the leftist bloc looks to claim nearly 30 percent of the French vote.

Macron’s centrists

The French president’s Renaissance party leads Macron’s liberal political alliance, which has been named as Together (Ensemble) since 2022. The alliance also includes Democratic Movement, Horizons, En commun, and the Progressive Federation. Also parties like Agir and Territories of Progress (TDP) joined the alliance under the Renaissance umbrella.

The recent polls indicate that the alliance fares around 20 percent, showing how Macron’s centrist politics is doomed for failure in the upcoming elections.

Experts fault Macron more than anyone else for the rise of not only the far-right but also the far-left, making mainstream right-left divide blurry with the centrist policies based on his persona. “He deregulated the French political system that was traditionally marked by a right-left divide,” said Stephane Cadiou, a professor of political science at the University of Lyon 2.

“To make his personal (political) business profitable, he had to convince people of the outdated nature of the right-left divide by undermining all the familiar benchmarks of the political space,” the professor added.