France has entered uncharted waters 66 years after it designed the Fifth Republic to ensure stable parliamentary government under a strong presidency.
Not since General Charles de Gaulle was appointed to the system that was tailor-made for him has the country found itself after an election with so little idea of who will run the country.
The unexpected outcome of President Macron’s snap parliamentary polls has created a potentially hung parliament with three powerful blocs, none close to holding an overall majority.
• French election results: latest news and reaction
Bitterly disappointed after reaching the brink of power in the first round, Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally has nevertheless multiplied its parliamentary presence. It stands no chance, however, of finding enough allies from the hardline wing of the much-reduced conservative Republicans to forge a governing majority.
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Macron’s Renaissance party and its centrist allies are relieved to have survived without greater losses but they too are now unable to govern alone.
Macron’s party lost its overall majority in 2022 but carried on by winning ad hoc support for legislation from other parties and by using executive decrees. They were helped by opposition reluctance to trigger early elections with a no-confidence vote.
• Why Macron pressed the nuclear button of snap elections
On the face of it, the victory of the leftwing New Popular Front, an alliance of squabbling parties cobbled together less than a month ago, has put it in pole position to take power in some form of “cohabitation” with Macron.
France has already spent three periods run by opponents of the sitting president. These cohabitations, in 1986-88, 1993-95 and 1997-2002, were not supposed to happen under the Fifth Republic and its winner-takes-it-all political system. They worked, however, because the opposition prime ministers commanded healthy majorities in the National Assembly.
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• France heads for instability of cohabitation as left tops polls
Macron would normally be expected to ask the leader of the party with most seats to form a government but the New Popular Front presents a problem that the president is certain to exploit. It has no leader after failure to agree among its feuding members: the anti-capitalist Unbowed France of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Greens, Communists and the centre-left Socialists.
Macron campaigned against Unbowed France, depicting it as an extremist force every bit as dangerous as the Rally of Le Pen and her lieutenant Jordan Bardella. It is unlikely that he would ask Mélenchon, a veteran provocateur, to form a government, although he leads the bloc’s biggest party.
Mélenchon laid down the gauntlet an hour after the first results came in, saying the only option for Macron was a full-scale leftwing government led, of course, by his hardline party.
Analysts expect the president to attempt to forge a working coalition between his centrists and moderate leftwingers. That would mean splitting away the Socialists, a former party of government under presidents Mitterrand and Hollande, and Greens from the hardliners of Unbowed France.
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The outline of a broad government of “national unity”, involving moderate opposition parties and his Renaissance, was floated by Macron and Attal in the election campaign as a remedy to the menace of a hard right take-over.
France, however, has had no tradition of coalition-building since its revolving-door governments of the 1950s. The compromises among parties that are the norm in Germany, Belgium, Italy and elsewhere are alien to modern France, with its polarised politics.
Macron began his political life in President Hollande’s Socialist administration and his cabinet includes former Socialists but his policies have alienated the party, led now by Olivier Faure.
Some commentators suggested that if the National Rally comes third, Macron could argue that his Renaissance party remains the biggest in parliament because the left’s New Popular Front is not a party but a loose alliance.
It appears near certain, however, that if the left agreed to any form of coalition with the Macron camp, it would supply the prime minister, not the president’s party.
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Long negotiations of a kind not seen in France for decades are expected before a government emerges.
Macron is expected to ask Attal, his prime minister who on Sunday night offered his resignation, to stay on as caretaker until a new government emerges. That would at least ensure that he has a prime minister of his choosing at his side when he welcomes the world to the Paris Olympics on July 26.
