President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call early parliamentary elections following the crushing defeat in the Brexit vote was a risky gamble that few could have seen coming, observers told Al Jazeera, describing the early elections as a referendum on the far-right.
Macron dissolved the French parliament and ordered snap elections at the request of Jordan Bardella, the far-right candidate who won 31.5% of the vote in Sunday’s European elections.
The first round will be held on June 30th and the second round on July 7th.
Analysts said it was a high-stakes bid to restore credibility after Macron’s liberal Renaissance party fell to second place with 14.6 percent support, about half the vote, behind the Rally National.
Gilles Ivaldi, a professor at Sciences Po in Paris, said Macron hoped that the votes of his critics would mean nothing in practice.
Voting for the National Rally and its firebrand leader, Marine Le Pen, has traditionally been a way to show dissatisfaction with the government.
“Now Macron is telling voters: ‘We’re fighting for real,'” Ivaldi told Al Jazeera. “It’s not a question of expressing dissatisfaction. It’s a question of whether you really want the far right to be in power.”
Ivaldi, who studies far-right and populist parties at Sciences Po’s Center for Political Studies, said Macron wants voters to think twice before voting for the National Rally when there is a real possibility the far-right could take power.
“He hopes that fear of the far right will produce some significant change, including bringing together moderate parties to form a new majority,” he said.
But the move, not seen in French politics since 1997, could backfire.
Ivaldi said the National Rally had not only tapped into dissatisfaction with Macron’s government, but had also built support over the years on issues important to voters, such as immigration, security and the economy.
Le Pen challenged Macron in the second round of the last two presidential elections, in 2017 and 2022. Though Macron ultimately won both elections, his popularity has declined and Le Pen’s approval rating has risen from 34% to 41%.
Projections by Challenges, M6 and RTL’s Toluna Harris Interactive predict that the RNP will win the most seats in the lower house of parliament in the general election, but will fall short of an absolute majority.
Macron has pledged to serve out the remaining three years of his presidency whatever the outcome, and while he will continue to oversee defense and foreign policy, he could lose control of domestic policy to the National Rally.
This situation, known in political jargon as “coexistence,” will give Le Pen’s pro-Russia nationalist party the power to dictate direction on issues such as the rights of non-French nationals, aid to Ukraine and economic reform.
“Obviously this is a gamble,” Ivaldi said. “Nobody expected this to happen, and nobody knows what the outcome of the election will be.”
The rise of the far-right
The victories of the far-right in the European Parliament elections have shaken governments across the EU, but nowhere has this been more painful than for the French head of state.
Macron’s ruling liberal coalition won 13 of France’s 81 seats in the European Parliament. The Rally National won 30.
The party’s popularity is nothing new: Its support base has grown since the mid-1980s and it topped French opinion polls in the last two European elections, in 2014 and 2019.
But this year, he won by an unprecedented margin.
Sebastien Maillard, an associate research fellow at Chatham House, said the strategy to soften the image of the National Rally was working.
“It used to be an anti-Semitic party but now it is broadly pro-Israel,” Maillard told Al Jazeera.
The party has also abandoned its hostility towards Nato allies and its support for France’s withdrawal from the European Union (Frexit), and has largely overcome the racist slurs that defined the leadership of its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father.
Above all, Mayard said the party’s “normalisation strategy” revolves around Bardella, a soft-spoken 28-year-old political prodigy who took over the leadership of the Rally National in 2022 to help Le Pen prepare for the next presidential election.
With 1.2 million followers on TikTok, Bardella is attracting a younger generation to party.
He grew up in the suburbs of Paris and successfully cultivated the image of a son of poor Italian descent who overcame hardship to work his way up the political ladder.
Bardella has maintained a humble demeanor and shunned controversy while promoting his party’s strong anti-immigration message that prioritises safety and that “France belongs to the French”.
If the National Coalition wins a majority in parliament, he could be appointed prime minister.
According to several opinion polls, he is one of the politicians most favorably viewed as a possible successor to Macron.
While Le Pen is leading a rebranding of the party, Mayardo said the movement lacks a “clear platform.”
“Macron’s surprise election is exactly that: to force the Rally National to express its wishes and to show the French people how dangerous it is.”
Dissolving parliament would be a “nuclear” option, but perhaps a necessary step to quell growing discontent, he added.
“The National Rally turned the EU elections into a referendum on Macron. Now Macron is trying to turn the early elections into a referendum on the far right.”
