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France’s centre- and left-wing parties were racing against time on Monday to remove the far-right Rally National from power, despite the party’s victory in the first round of parliamentary elections.
The RN’s centre-left opponents have until Tuesday to decide whether to withdraw their candidates from hundreds of runoff elections after agreeing limited electoral cooperation with Marine Le Pen’s party.
France’s blue-chip CAC 40 index rose 1.6 percent as investors bet neither the far-right nor the far-left will win a majority in the National Assembly in next weekend’s second round of voting. The euro rose 0.3 percent to $1.075.
In the first round of voting on Sunday, the RN came out on top with 33.2% of the vote, ahead of the left-leaning New Popular Front’s 28% and President Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble coalition’s 22.4%.
The result was a political shockwave, with the RN projected to win the most seats in the runoff election, but its combined vote share with the League was lower than some polls last week had predicted.
“The results are probably better than feared, but not as good as they were three weeks before the election,” said Mohit Kumar, an analyst at Jefferies.
The spread between French and German 10-year government bond yields, seen as a barometer of the risk of holding French debt, narrowed to 0.75 percentage points on Monday after hitting its highest level since the 2012 euro zone debt crisis last week.
The Ensemble and NFP candidate, who came third in the constituency, is under strong pressure to withdraw to avoid splitting the anti-RN vote in the second round on July 7.
More than 300 three-way runoff elections will take place in the first round, an unprecedented number, according to calculations by the Financial Times, but the final figure will depend on how many candidates drop out.
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“The lesson of this evening is that the far right is trying to seize power. Our objective is clear: to prevent the RN from winning an absolute majority in the second round of voting and governing the country with its disastrous plans,” Gabriel Attal, Macron’s prime minister who is at risk of being ousted, said in a speech.
After counting almost every constituency, the RN came in first in 296 of 577 constituencies, the NFP in 150 and Ensemble in 60, according to calculations by the Financial Times. There will be around 65 constituencies where the RN and NFP will hold a runoff election. A party needs 289 seats to win a majority.
By Sunday night, all parties in the left-wing NFP, from the far-left Insubordinate France to the moderate Socialists, Greens and Communists, had announced they were withdrawing from the election, in which their candidate came third.
But each party in Macron’s Ensemble coalition issued slightly different guidelines, causing confusion.
Macron’s Renaissance party said it would decide on a case-by-case basis based on whether left-wing candidates were “compatible with republican values,” but did not explicitly rule out LFI.
Former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said his party, Horizon, would only ask candidates to withdraw in elections where there is no LFI representative. “I believe that no one should vote for candidates from the RN or the LFI who disagree with us not only on policies but also on fundamental values,” Philippe said.
French stock and bond markets plummeted after President Macron called early elections three weeks ago as investors worried that a runoff vote on July 7 would result in a political deadlock, with the far right winning or populist forces taking control of parliament.
In the second round of voting so far, French voters have often Republican Front — to shut out RNs, supporting candidates they would otherwise reject, but with the rise of the far-right, it remains to be seen whether such voting habits still work.
Socialist party leader Olivier Faure criticised Macron, saying left-wing voters had twice led him to victory as RN leader. “It remains a mess, too much of a mess for a president who benefited from your votes in 2017 and 2022,” Faure told a rally of the NFP.
In a sign that Macron’s camp was trying to attract new allies, Attal announced the suspension of unemployment insurance reforms that were due to come into force on Monday and which were opposed by the left because they would shorten the period for which recipients could receive benefits.
Le Pen said on Sunday that the first-round results had left Macron’s centrist powers “virtually wiped out.” “The French people have expressed their desire to put an end to seven years of a government that has shown them contempt,” she told supporters in her constituency of Henin-Beaumont in northern France.
If the RN wins a majority, Mr Macron would be forced into an inconvenient power-sharing arrangement in which he would install Jordan Bardella, a 28-year-old protégé of Ms Le Pen, as prime minister.
There have been three such instances of “coexistence” in France since 1958, but never before have they involved parties and leaders with such contrasting views.
Matthew Galard, a researcher at polling group Ipsos, said whether the RN could win a majority would depend mainly on Republican Front And how many left-wing and center-leaning voters made opposing Le Pen’s party a priority?
Steve Briois, a senior RN official, rejected the idea that tactical moves or voting advice would stop them from winning.
“[That] “Other parties should put up an anti-RN front, because that only irritates people and gives them an incentive to vote for us,” he told the FT in Hénin-Beaumont. “The glass ceiling, Republican Front — It doesn’t work anymore.”
