After the electoral shock in France, the real struggle for power begins

The drama and vitriol of this summer’s general election is over. Now comes the drama and vitriol of the second stage – and what could be a much longer and equally fractious struggle to build a functioning coalition from the inconclusive results of Saturday’s vote.

“A lot of things are unclear. We know who lost, but we don’t know who won. Can we learn the art of compromise, which is so unusual for us? Nobody knows, the signs are not necessarily good,” Sylvie Kauffmann, a columnist for Le Monde, told me.

The risks of impasse – for France itself, for its constitutional order, for European stability and even for Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression – are serious.

But it should not be forgotten that this country is no stranger to political upheaval. In addition to revolutions, there was the chaos and revolts that followed World War II that ultimately upended the French constitutional order, giving rise to the current system of government, known as the Fifth Republic.

And more recently there have been the challenges of “cohabitation,” when presidents and prime ministers from rival parties have been forced to share power.

As politicians head off for their summer vacations or refocus their attention on the impending Paris Olympics, it seems more than likely that the political temperature in France will drop a degree or two, at least briefly.

But the cohabitation battles of the 1980s and 1990s seem like gentlemen’s quarrels over a wine menu compared with the furious dawn brawls that many observers predict will preoccupy the French National Assembly for weeks, if not months, to come.

Some wonder whether the French electorate – by loading parliament with three minority blocs of almost equal size – has made the country “ungovernable,” or whether it simply faces the kind of deal-making challenge that so many other European nations face almost as a matter of course.

Having emerged, to everyone’s surprise, with the largest number of seats in these parliamentary elections, the French left-wing coalition, the New Popular Front (NPF), has now won the right to choose – or try to choose – the next prime minister and implement his or her programme.

But in the absence of a sufficient majority, any viable candidate will have to win the support of other, more centrist parties. Who might fit that profile?

The NPF quickly coalesced around a common platform ahead of the election. But it is riddled with deep political divisions, from anti-capitalists and communists to traditional social democrats. The coalition also contains controversial figures, such as far-left activist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who could quickly cause the coalition to collapse due to the factionalism that has often marked the left of French politics.

Some wonder whether Green Party leader Marine Tondelier might be a good candidate. Her relatively low profile could be an asset in a political landscape marked by years of deeply personal, and sometimes virulent, feuds.

Amid all this, President Emmanuel Macron remains on his throne, scarred by self-inflicted political wounds, but arguably a little stronger than he was a few days ago.

His centrist group lost nearly a third of its seats in the National Assembly because of its completely futile electoral gamble of dissolving parliament and calling elections. But a disciplined frenzy of negotiations with the NPF allowed it to hang on to many more seats in the second round than pollsters had predicted.

Could the parliamentary impasse allow Macron to rise above the chaos and strengthen his position? Even his allies seem skeptical, convinced that he is now trapped between the extremes he once promised to banish from French politics.

“Today, the President of the Republic will keep a little room for maneuver to act. But he will no longer be the political programmatic engine of the country. From this point of view, after seven years, Macronism is dead,” Gilles Legendre, a disillusioned former MP who led Emmanuel Macron’s party in the Assembly, told the BBC.

As for the far-right National Rally (RN), it will likely recover quickly from the shock of Sunday night’s results, which prompted a somber silence at party headquarters – a stark contrast to the euphoric celebrations of left-wing voters on the streets of Paris that evening.

The RN has already tried to portray its third-place disappointment as the result of a cynical deal struck by a “dishonest alliance” of its rivals, rather than as evidence of its own limited pool of credible candidates and its inability to convince enough French voters of the sincerity of its move away from the far right.

The RN will likely try to push its own agenda, including a crackdown on immigration and reforms to schools and the police. Its commitment to supporting Ukraine remains unclear, given the party’s recent support for the Kremlin and its occupation of Crimea. The RN must now hope that the assembly is deadlocked or dominated by an economically profligate far-left agenda that could further threaten France’s already tight budget.

Months, or even years, of unrest could then give the party a chance to present itself as a stable, modernizing force, thwarted by left-wing extremists and old elites.

This in turn could give the RN a good chance of increasing its share of votes in possible subsequent early parliamentary elections or – and this is the real issue – of bringing its leader Marine Le Pen to the presidency in 2027.

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