France: Le Pen Loses, Only Third Place Behind Popular Front and Macron
Bardella denounces “alliance of dishonor,” unexpected Mélenchon demands his own government, Attal resigns
Surprisingly, the wave of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s Rassemblement Nationale (RN) crashed in the second round (and 218 candidate withdrawals) of French legislative elections. The leftist New Popular Front coalition won 178 seats in the next parliament against 156 for the Together party, led by President Emmanuel Macron, while the RN party settled on 142 seats. This is stated in the final results published by the French Ministry of the Interior. And this was an absolute surprise given the 33% of the vote in the first round and the polls that as late as yesterday afternoon were still showing the RN as the winner.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of France Unconquered, an extreme left-wing party with a majority of seats in the winning coalition, immediately demanded a government: “We are ready, let Macron admit defeat, he is obliged to hand over the government to the New Popular Front.” But he doesn’t have the number of seats needed to do so, and many analysts fear the country could become literally ungovernable.
Prime Minister Gabriel Attal resigned as early as the evening of July 7 with results that were not yet final, while distancing himself from Macron: “Dissolution of the Assembly was not my choice, and I really refused to accept it.”
Bardella, a right-wing wunderkind who long enjoyed a victory that never came, blamed resistance agreements that led to moderates voting for the extreme left and vice versa: “A shameful alliance that deprives the French of a government of real change,” he said. Meanwhile, RN leader Marine Le Pen has spoken out on the half-full glass principle, perhaps already thinking about a presidential goal for 2027. “The tide is rising, it’s not enough, but it keeps rising: victory is only postponed.”
The result was also the fruit of a large popular response, with a turnout of 67%, the highest since 1981, when François Mitterrand won.
However, celebrations of the left’s victory turned violent with clashes and accusations, according to Italian news agency ANSA, between “protesters, the Black Bloc, and police officers in Place de la Republique in Paris, while incidents were also reported in other cities across the country, where at least one policeman was injured in a Molotov cocktail throwing incident.”
