Can Macron still stop a Le Pen victory?

France could be on the brink of electing a hard-right government for the first time since the Second World War, after Marine Le Pen won the first round of the country’s parliamentary elections last night.

Following Sunday’s snap election – which recorded the highest voter turnout in 40 years – Le Pen’s anti-immigration National Rally (RN) has emerged as the biggest party by quite some margin, securing over 33.4 per cent of the vote. 

The vote was called unexpectedly by President Macron last month after his centrist alliance was trounced by the RN in the European Parliament elections. His hope that the EU election served as a protest vote for the French – and results wouldn’t be replicated on a national level – has proven naive. Macron’s Ensemble alliance has once again endured punishing losses at the hands of the electorate, coming in third with 20.7 per cent of the vote.

Firmly in second place – with 27.9 of vote – is the leftist New Popular Front bloc, a heterogeneous coalition of socialists, spearheaded by hard-left France Unbowed leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, an unapologetic Marxist. 

So much for elections being won from the centre. 

The notion that the party headed by Le Pen – with its murky history of Nazi apologism – could ever become the dominant political force in France would, not so long ago, have seemed unthinkable. 

But Le Pen has made efforts to give the RN an acceptable rebrand, even kicking its original founder – her own father, Jean-Marie Le Pen – out of the party. 

And, as Tim Marshall wrote in Reaction last week, hard right and hard left parties are also sweeping up the youth vote thanks to savvy use of social media. Le Pen’s right-hand man, 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, is a Tik Tok sensation. Which feeds into a wider pattern emerging across Europe, he says. Populist parties jumped on platforms such as TikTok, Telegram and Instagram long before the establishment parties which are now trying – and failing – to play catch up.

Rising anti-immigrant sentiment undoubtedly also explains the surge in support for Le Pen. The RN has pledged to prioritise French nationals for jobs, social welfare assistance and housing all the while making French citizienship much more difficult to obtain. Perhaps most controversially, it wants to abolish France’s “droit de sol”, which would mean scrapping nationality rights for children born and raised in France by foreign parents.

While the party is anti-immigration, many of its economic policies could be construed as left-wing. Le Pen has vowed to reverse Macron’s hugely unpopular pension reform, scrap income tax for under 30s, grant students free train travel and extend benefits for French nationals. Nor is she afraid to borrow to fund her plans, despite France contending with the biggest debt pile in the Eurozone. Hence why the prospect of a RN victory has made French bond markets jittery. 

Of course, whether that victory will bear fruit is still highly uncertain. 

For the RN to take full control of the National Assembly and form a government on its own, it needs to win 289 seats in next Sunday’s final vote. Currently, it’s on course to win between 240 and 310 in France’s 577-seat National Assembly. And Macron is now teaming up with leftist coalition leaders, urging the public to vote tactically to block RN candidates from winning an outright majority. 

Macron’s efforts to stop Le Pen from gaining power may well succeed. Yet his own project has failed. 

Walter Ellis has penned a piece in Reaction looking back at the emergence of Macron’s En Marche party. Campaigning on a platform that was “neither right nor left”, it was supposed to replace France’s increasingly unpopular centre-left and centre-right parties and banish the likes of Le Pen and Mélenchon to the political margins.

He succeeded in his first goal of pulling down the temple that housed the centre-right and centre-left. Yet he has left no solid structure in place. On the contrary, writes Ellis, France has been left with “a hard-right and a hard-left, kept apart by little more than shifting sand.”

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