Surprise French election result puts left in lead

The results were surprising. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and her allies, which polls had predicted would win a majority, are set to become the third-largest parliamentary bloc. Ipsos estimated they would win between 134 and 152 seats. That’s a huge leap from the 88 seats the RN held in the outgoing parliament, and shows how far it has come from being a fringe pariah to an almost respectable party supported by a large proportion of French voters. But it will be a disappointment for Le Pen, who wanted a majority, and for Jordan Bardella, her 28-year-old protégé, who had hoped to become the next prime minister.

For President Emmanuel Macron, who called the election against the wishes of his inner circle, the result will come as a relief. According to Ipsos projections, Ensemble, his centrist coalition, would retain 152 to 163 seats, compared to 250 in the previous legislature. While painful, it is not quite the calamity that was expected. His bloc is expected to become the second largest, slightly ahead of the RN, and his group of deputies could now hold the key to either forming a governing coalition or keeping a left-wing minority government in power.

On election night, Mr. Mélenchon, a far-left activist and former Trotskyist, was the first to take the stage and triumphantly proclaim his victory. He called on Mr. Macron to invite the NFP to try to form a government, insisting that his radical electoral program would be implemented. It promises, among other things, to raise the minimum wage by 14 percent, reinstate the wealth tax and cap energy prices. Offering support for an independent Palestinian state, the alliance has done particularly well in a belt around Paris northeast and other large multicultural cities. Mr. Mélenchon recently called anti-Semitic acts in France “residual,” worrying French Jews.

It is likely that the four parties that make up the alliance, Jean-Pierre Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI), the Socialists, the Communists and the Greens, will soon experience much internal strife. Before the election, the alliance was unable to field a single candidate for prime minister. Many figures within the NFP are deeply unhappy with Jean-Pierre Mélenchon’s dominance and want to sideline him. The Socialists are expected to have a similar number of seats to LFI and may well insist on taking the leadership of the party, which would make it much easier to form a coalition with the centrists. Among the Socialist deputies who will sit in the new assembly is none other than François Hollande, the former president who was Jean-Pierre Macron’s boss.

One lesson of this election is that a solid majority of French people still reject the hard right. After the first round, polls suggested that, under France’s first-past-the-post electoral system, the RN had a chance of winning a majority of seats. But a tactical effort by Ensemble and the left alliance to remove third-place candidates in more than 200 constituencies avoided splitting the anti-RN vote. It was a laborious, confrontational, and sometimes painful operation, but it appears to have worked. To the chagrin of Mr. Bardella, who denounced an “alliance of dishonor,” it turned the vote in many constituencies into a referendum on the RN, which could pose problems for his voters in the future, who will feel they lost their victory because of a set-up by the Parisian elite.

Under the French constitution, it is now up to the president to appoint a prime minister. Political convention suggests that Mr Macron will ask the largest parliamentary bloc to do so, which appears to be the NFP. According to a source in the presidency, however, Mr Macron believes the results do not make it clear “who could govern”. A minority government could fall, thanks to a motion of no confidence, at the first stage. His best hope is that there will be an alternative parliamentary effort to form a coalition that would draw the moderate left and the Greens away from Mr Mélenchon’s team and ally itself with the centre.

But France, unlike Germany, Italy and many other European countries, has no experience with the compromises needed to hold a governing coalition together. The three blocs that will make up the new assembly love each other deeply and distrust each other even more. Given this uncertainty, Mr. Macron may well ask Gabriel Attal, his 35-year-old current prime minister, who announced Monday that he would submit his resignation to the president, to continue as prime minister during the negotiations. That arrangement could last well into the summer, including through the Paris Olympics, which begin July 26. France appears to have pulled back from the brink, but it is still heading into the unknown.

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