France is set to elect the right-wing National Rally (RN) as the largest party in government, yet no party may emerge with a clear majority in this tightly contested election as the second round of voting kicks off this weekend.
The first round, which occurred June 30, resulted in just 76 of the 577 constituencies in the French National Assembly determining their representative. Any candidate who did not receive an outright majority in the first round of voting heads on to the second-round runoff, which is set for July 7.
Those few contests that concluded in the first round revealed a lot about voter sentiment and indicated trouble for the current government after RN took one-third of the vote, the most by any party.
The current government is an “ensemble,” a coalition of parties, including French President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance (RE), Democratic Movement, Horizons, En Commun and the Progressive federation. Despite the assembly election results, Macron will retain his mandate as president until the 2027 election.
But Marine Le Pen has found support among some of France’s Jewish voters as antisemitism continues to grow in Europe.
Her anti-Islam views and comments, however, have raised concerns among other voters, as well. In 2017, she suggested France expel any foreigners convicted of a crime or suspected of being radicalized and said convicted extremists with dual nationality should be stripped of their French passports, Radio France Internationale reported.
“The measures that I want to put in place would mean that many of these people (Islamist attackers) would not have been on our territory or living freely,” she said in an interview with BFM TV.
In the event the votes should fall as the polls predict, the most likely outcome for France will be a hung parliament with some kind of begrudging alliance created to get a leader in place. The Conservative Party in Britain regained power from Labour in 2010 through a hung parliament alliance with the Liberal-Democrats, ultimately establishing an outright majority in the following election.
But, at that time, the Conservatives had 306 of 650 seats, making it far easier to broker such a deal. For France, RN would need support from two other parties or would need to form some kind of alliance with a direct rival.
The government has urged voters to do what they can to continue diminishing RN’s chances of achieving control of the assembly, with Attal arguing voters had a “responsibility” to block RN from victory.
“On Sunday evening, what’s at stake in the second round is to do everything so the extreme right does not have an absolute majority,” Attal said during an appearance on France Inter radio as reported by Voice of America.
“It is not nice for some French to have to block … by using a vote that they did not want to,” he added, clarifying that he “did not speak about a coalition. I do not want to impose on the French a coalition they did not choose.”