The pollsters failed to foresee the left’s victory in France’s parliamentary elections, or indeed the defeat of the populist National Rally.
Marine Le Pen’s hard-right movement won the first round of the elections on June 30 but lost the second as President Macron’s centrists teamed up with the left to form what they called the Republican Front — an electoral agreement to keep the National Rally from power.
Polling institutes had predicted that the deals would dent the Rally’s chances of winning an absolute majority, but not that left-wing and centrist voters would implement the Republican Front so massively across the country. Their discipline pushed the hard right party into third place.
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Voter turnout
Turnout was high, confirming that voters saw these elections as particularly important. Many sometime abstentionists went to the polls to prevent a Rally victory that would have ushered in the first hard-right government in France since the Second World War.
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Tactical voting
President Macron called the snap parliamentary elections after the Rally won European elections on June 9. Macron said he hoped the outcome would be a defeat for the hard right and a clear majority for his centrists in the National Assembly. The Rally won the first round of the parliamentary election but stumbled in the second after the left joined forces with Macron’s centrists.
The difference between the two rounds of voting, a week apart is shown starkly by political maps of the results:
Setback for the hard right
The outcome of the election was a setback for the Rally, as Macron had hoped. But it was also a defeat for his centrists, who emerged with fewer seats than in 2022 and lost their relative majority. Nevertheless, there was some relief in Macron’s camp, which had feared even bigger losses at one stage.
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Coalition building
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Macron had been confident that his centrists would win an absolute majority in the National Assembly in parliamentary elections in 2022 two months after he had secured a second presidential term of office. Instead, he found himself with a relative majority after the left united to form a coalition and the Rally performed better than expected.
This year, he bet that left-wing divisions and a swing against the Rally would give him the absolute majority he had missed in 2022. Again, however, the left pulled together to thwart him while the Rally continued to progress, although on nothing like the scale for which it had hoped.
