There is something paradoxical about the election season that has just come to a close in France with the second round of the legislative elections on Sunday June 19^th. On the one hand, a phenomenon observed in the first round of the presidential election in April has been confirmed. This is that the old parties of the past, who had dominated French politics from the start of the 1980s to the start of the 2010s, are no longer the ones vying for power at national level. Yes, the Socialist Party (PS) and the rightwing Les Républicains managed to survive the seismic shock of the 2017 elections which saw Emmanuel Macron enter the Élysée and then win a huge Parliamentary majority. But new political forces, or those that had been kept on the margins of power, now dominate the three electoral blocs – Macron’s centre-right, the leftwing NUPES alliance and the far-right - into which France is divided.

On the other hand, there are still several questions that remain unanswered about this new political map. The precise boundaries of these three electoral blocs, the balance of power within them and how they will co-exist within France’s political institutions are all likely to evolve. In the coming years, for example, there could be successors to one or all of the leaders of these three blocs - Emmanuel Macron, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen. The greatest uncertainty of all, of course, stems from the fact that, for the first time since presidential terms were cut from seven to five years two decades ago, a newly-elected president has just lost an overall majority in the National Assembly.

Florent Gougou, a lecturer at Sciences Po Grenoble university in south-east France, uses an historical analogy to assess what has just occurred. “In 1986 we went through the first of [President] François Mitterrand’s cohabitations with the Right,” he said, referring to the period in which because of the balance of power in Parliament the socialist president had to choose a prime minister from the Right. “With hindsight, it was a first step in the consolidation of an electoral order which has been ushered in by the change in 1981 [editor’s note when Mitterrand was elected, and following which the traditional Left and Right alternated in power]. But at the time people didn’t know if this kind of situation was exceptional or was likely to happen again.”

With 246 MPs the presidential Ensemble coalition is 43 seats short of an overall majority in today’s new National Assembly. The origins for this failure lie in a drop in the Ensemble coalition vote in the first round of the election on June 12^th. This in turn led to fewer face-to-face duels contested by Macronista candidates in the second round compared with 2017. They paid the price of a mediocre government election campaign but also for the pent-up anger that had built up over five years and which ended up penalising Macron less than his ’rootless’ party.

But the presidential coalition did not just have fewer candidates in the second round than five years ago; those who did go through also faced much stiffer competition from the Left in working class city centre and suburban constituencies in mainland France. Moreover, they were swept aside by sitting Les Républicains MPs who had strong local roots. Indeed, the Macron camp lost three-quarters of its head-to-head contests with candidates from the traditional Right, which now has more than 60 seats in the National Assembly. The ruling coalition also lost nearly half of its duels with candidates from the far-right Rassemblement National (RN).

This shows how candidates from the government’s Ensemble coalition fared in their electoral duels with candidates from other parties. © Tam Kien Duong

Ensemble was not the only coalition to have problems when it came to a duel with the far-right. The broad left and environmental alliance NUPES (Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale) lost a majority of its head-to-head second round contests with the RN. “If these two groups had won their duels in the same proportions as in the old electoral world then Ensemble would not have been far from an outright majority and Jean-Luc Mélenchon would not be seeing his status as the main opposition figure disputed by the RN,” said Florent Gougou.

Yet the sociological background of abstainers – the turnout rate was very low at around 46% of registered voters – did not change markedly. In other words, the RN achieved its historic result of 89 MPs despite a voting system that has always hindered it in legislative elections and despite a pool of voters – those who did actually turn out – which was very different to its main support base. This gives an insight into the far-right’s performance and underlines just how much potential it still has in elections where there is a higher turnout.

Long-term factors have also contributed to this result. Since its revival during the presidency of President Nicolas Sarkozy the RN has continue to increase its electoral audience. The number of MPs it has now just gained reflects the particularly high score that Marine Le Pen achieved in the first round of the presidential vote in April. It is also consistent with the second round of that same election, too, when she managed to poll higher than her victorious opponent Emmanuel Macron in 158 of the country’s 577 constituencies.

The RN has become particularly strong in certain areas, with some entire départements or counties electing their MPs just from this party: the Haute-Marne and Haute-Saône in the north-east, and Aude and Pyrénées-Orientales in the south.

 Crumbling barriers againt the far-right

Some more short-term factors were also at play in the RN’s strong performance. “Part of the RN’s score was decided between the two rounds of voting [editor’s note, between June 12^th and 19^th],” said political specialist Vincent Tiberj, referring to the language used by the presidential camp, who had equated the RN and NUPES, labelling them both as “extreme”.

“The government had reused rhetoric employed by Jean-François Cope and Laurent Wauquiez [editor’s note, both from the traditional Right and now both members of Les Républicains] in the years 2000 to 2010,” said Professor Tiberj from Sciences Po Bordeaux university, who thinks Ensemble voters were thus strongly dissuaded from turning out to support NUPES candidates when they were in a head-to-head duel with a far-right candidate.

The converse is also true. Having been a major factor in the ’Republican Front’ that blocked Marine Le Pen from winning the second round of the presidential election in April, voters on the Left equally chose not to turn out in those seats where Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble candidates were in a duel with the RN. The violence of the government’s speech against the Left - as well as the feeling that one MP either way would not change things - hardly encouraged leftwing voters to turn out to block the far right a second time.

In fact, in the many constituencies where the RN won against NUPES or Ensemble candidates there was a noticeable rise in the abstention rate and an increase in the number of spoilt or blank ballot papers, while some votes were given to the NUPES or Ensemble candidate’s opponent.

In other words, in this new tripolar political world, not only do the elites from each of the three sides speak harshly about the two others, the voters themselves often follow them down this path of polarisation. Based on an Ipsos poll carried out for the second round vote, the polling firm’s research director Mathieu Gallard said that “seven NUPES voters out of ten didn’t make a choice if the RN were present, just like seven Ensemble voters out of ten”.

How the far-right Rassemblement National fared in its head-to-head duels in the second round of the legislative election. © Tam Kien Duong

In the old bipolar political world between socialists and post-Gaullists, the “parties of government fought each other but were capable of working together and in the end they showed they could agree on a certain number of things, in particular supporting neo-liberal globalisation,” said Florent Gougou. In a way, their voters found a form of common ground in their rejection of the RN.

Now, however, ideological and sociological differences between all the blocs are very marked and their supporters tend to see the others as enemies rather than simply as opponents. It was Vincent Tiberj who put forward this distinction, in his contribution to a collective work, to differentiate between “parties on the other side to whom the individual is opposed but with whom he accepts he shares certain values” and those that are parties of the “enemy, who is outside of what each individual defines as acceptable in terms of their standard preferences”.

We are still only speaking here of just a half of all registered voters who felt involved in this vote. Vincent Tiberj points to the discontent shown by a large section of other citizens towards politics, suggesting they could in turn one day destabilise the new political balance we have now. “With each passing generation there are more and more citizens who feel unhappy and removed from what’s going on, who are not just ’critical’,” he said. “And this won’t go away, especially if they are faced with parties who are less and less present on the ground.” If this is true, then the foundations of the new tripolarisation could themselves be somewhat “shaky”.

 The Left and the abstention problem

The leftwing coalition is one of the groups most affected by this low turnout, as shown by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s concern about the issue on the night of the second round. In fact, more than two thirds of voters aged 18 to 34 – who are strongly pro-NUPES when they do vote – did not show up for Sunday’s second round. NUPES also has some of its strongest support among people in mid-ranking professions and among employees, who are also more likely on average to abstain.

How can one explain this low turnout, even though this legislative election seemed far more hotly-contested than any since 2002, and when even the issue of climate change cropped up at the end thanks to what appeared to be a very “political” heatwave in which France sweltered? Once again, any short-term reason to vote was offset by more powerful longer-term trends. Anyone under the age of 34 has, ever since their adolescence or childhood, only known a system that was made more favourable for a presidential style of government in 2002. That was when legislative elections started to be held immediately after presidential ones. This reduced the parliamentary polls to a secondary status, as they effectively just rubber-stamped a parliamentary majority for the newly-elected head of state.

“I’m convinced that there’s a problem about understanding the political system, especially among young voters,” said Camille Bedock, a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). “To position yourself in relation to the Right or Left is one thing, but there can be a kind of institutional short-sightedness among those who are only interested in the presidential election, turning the legislatives into a niche election which is only for those who are most into politics and for those taking part.”

She also adds other factors that relate to the appeal of politics or lack of it: candidates who are little-known locally and have few local roots, attempts to dramatise the stakes which failed to capture the imagination and, more broadly, the lack of quality in an election campaign which it cannot be said was the centre of media attention. On that point, noted Vincent Tiberj, the “media habits of the youngest are quite fractured, there’s a real difficulty in reaching them and getting them mobilised”.

For the Left, whose NUPES alliance enabled them to win significantly more seats than in 2017 though not more votes, the generational change is double-edged. While it is supposed to benefit the Left, it also fuels low-turnout and the RN vote (both tendencies being less common among older voters). As it is, NUPES lost the majority of its head-to-head duels in all the different configurations. It won enough to reach a level of representation in the National Assembly which is close to that which it achieved in 2002 – a time which is not much discussed on the Left, as its candidate Lionel Jospin had been knocked out in the first round of the presidential election that year. But it lost too many of these duels to enable it to threaten Ensemble and stop the latter from becoming the biggest single party. This is despite the fact that the two groups were neck-and-neck in the popular vote in the first round of the election.

You could argue that what this is really about is the unfairness of a voting system that takes place over two rounds, and that proportional representation would not distort the leftwing vote as much (nor the RN vote either). But that still leaves the difficulty of how to enlarge the Left’s base support in the existing system.

“To change the balance of power the most effective way is to impose your own themes on the agenda of electoral competitors,” said Florent Gougou. “That would allow you to turn the tables and drag some social groups away from their initial preferences.”

 The Fifth Republic’s system ’breaking down’

In the meantime, the 2022 election season has come to an end with a sense that the government is in gridlock. The almost ’automatic’ outright Parliamentary majority that the newly-elected president has consistently won for the last 20 years was thwarted this time. The result is “one of the most representative Assemblies we’ve had for a long time” said Ipsos’s Mathieu Gallard.

The problem of this current situation is not in itself that it obliges the winning camp to reach a compromise with others. This is, after all, the norm in other European democracies and the situation has already occurred in France – a few times under the current presidential Fifth Republic established in 1958, and as a matter of course before that under previous parliamentary regimes. The problem is that since 2002 the institutional dynamic to which France’s political leaders have become accustomed has been very different.

“The Fifth Republic has changed in the sense of becoming more presidential since the 2000s,” said Camille Bedock. “But today the system is breaking down. Its initial premises, such as the fact that a two-round legislative election bars the doors of the Assembly to the far-right, no longer exist. Its sole good point, which was rock solid stability at the expense of being representative, can no longer be invoked.”

In theory, a government coalition between Ensemble and Les Républicains would be the most logical outcome of this situation. But at this stage the government does not seem ready to compromise on its political direction in order to attract the lasting support of other political groups. And ranged against them, all the other groups want to stay in opposition. “The culture of coalition and negotiation is absent from the ranks of the current political classes,” said Camille Bedock. “But the situation is also not very favourable to any agreement.”

In fact, we come back to the polarisation between the three blocs that have formed in this new electoral landscape. Even in countries which are more parliamentary in nature this kind of situation, with the emergence of new parties and a massive polarisation between the major political forces, can cause difficulties. “That’s what happened in Italy in 2013 and it required several years of a ’waiting period’ and adjustments in behaviour by the political participants for it to be resolved,” said Camille Bedock.

It remains to be seen whether France’s political leaders will themselves “adjust” their behaviour, and if the issue of institutional rules will raise its head because of the potential impasse in terms of reaching agreements. That is the uncertain dimension of the political landscape that has emerged since 2017; its full nature and internal logic will only become clear in the fullness of time.

FABIEN ESCALONA

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