An unexpected win for the French left

French voters did what was necessary to keep the extreme-right Le Pen family cabal out of power, leading to an unexpected win for the brand new broad-left alliance.

France has avoided the nightmare scenario of an extreme-right takeover of the French parliament by the depraved Le Pen family cabal.

The broad left-green alliance New Popular Front exceeded expectations by winning with 182 seats, Macron’s so-called "centrists" came second with 163, Le Pen’s horrible mob came in third with 143, and the right-wing Les Républicains won only 39.

With 577 seats in total and 289 required to form a majority, no party has won outright, and the process of forming any kind of government is going to be extremely complicated, with the choice for Prime Minister lying in Emmanuel Macron’s hands.

Macron’s party

Macron’s Renaissance party has held power in the French parliament since 2017, first with a massive majority, and then as by far the biggest party just short of a majority since 2022.

After Macron’s snap election they’ve lost 82 more seats and collapsed to second place behind the left-wing alliance with 163, but this still outperformed the widespread expectation that they’d slump to third place.

Macron took a massive gamble in daring the French people to vote Le Pen’s party into power, it’s come at a significant cost to his party, his Presidency, and his reputation.

New Popular Front

British capitalist media loves to portray the brand new broad-left NFP alliance as "hard-left", but that’s deliberately misleading because it’s a hastily established coalition of four different left-wing parties which include the once mighty centre-left French Socialist Party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s unashamedly left-wing La France Insoumise, the French Green Party, and the genuinely hard-left French communists.

The second biggest party in NFP is the sister party of Keir Starmer’s Labour. They’re far from "hard-left" but they did do what’s necessary, put their differences aside, and join an alliance of the wider left in order to prevent the extreme-right from winning power through splits in the left-wing vote. They deserve a lot of credit for putting factionalism aside like this, not misleading claims that they’re somehow now political extremists.

Not only is this kind of successful broad-left cooperation utterly inconceivable to Brits who have become used to endless fractures and factionalism on the left, it’s also extraordinary that an alliance that was only established a month ago is now the biggest bloc in the French Parliament.

The alliance was built on the principle of collective leadership, so it’s still unclear who they’d put forward to serve as Prime Minister.

Le Pen’s National Front

Given their win in the European Parliament elections in May, their win in the first round of voting last week, and their poll lead, it’s remarkable that Le Pen’s depraved mob finished in third, but 143 seats is still by far their best performance by far in a French parliamentary election far surpassing 89 in 2022 and 35 way back in 1988.

The European extreme-right have exploded in collective rage at this result, but the majority of Europeans are breathing a big sigh of relief that the French public kept them out of power.

It seems odd that they won the third most seats with the biggest share of the vote (33% compared to 26% for the left and 25% for Macron’s party, but it’s the result of tactical voting and tactical withdrawals of scores of third placed candidates.

Les Républicains

The continued collapse of the French equivalent of the Tory party to another all-time worst performance is a joy to behold. The once mighty party of Chirac and Sarkozy is now a minor player that erupted into civil war during the election campaign when their leader unilaterally attempted to form a political alliance with the Le Pen extremists.

They had been hoping to hold the balance of power in a new extreme-right French parliament, but they’ve fallen so hard that it’s now mathematically impossible for them to make any difference.

What next?

Under the French constitution the President chooses a candidate to become Prime Minister, so it’s up to Macron to decide what to do, but he’s now in an incredibly difficult position.

The previous Prime Minister Gabriel Attal has already resigned, and Macron would be deeply unwise to try and impose another Prime Minister from his own party given that they finished third in vote share, and were only saved from third in seats as well by the tactical voting of the French left to keep out Le Pen candidates.

He’s almost certainly going to have to pick someone from the NFP, but that’s far from easy given their lack of a specific leader, and Macron’s bitter hatred of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise who won the most seats out of the four parties in the alliance.

Macron’s people have been talking about inviting specific parties from the NFP to join them in government, in order to exclude La France Insoumise, but that would be an incredibly divisive move that would be seen as an absolute stitch-up by voters, and even then, if Macron does manage to divide the political alliance that just won the election, it’s hard to see how his numbers would add up either.

Given the way Macron and his allies spent the election attacking and smearing the NFP more than Le Pen’s National Front, while imitating extreme-right bigotry and rhetoric in their attacks, it’s difficult to see how Macron is going to work with them at all, let alone divide them to keep his own people in power.

Whatever Macron does now is going to be deeply unpopular.

If he attempts to divide the broad left for his own advantage people will see it as the cynical opportunism it is.

If he forces the left to run a minority administration and then obstructs their legislation for the next few years, his party will surely face a backlash from voters, especially the significant number of leftists and greens who cast tactical votes for Macron’s candidates in order to keep Le Pen’s out.

If he agrees a coalition between his party and NFP, people will rightly bring up all of the disgusting anti-left bile and propaganda his party spewed during the election, and ask why he’s prepared to work with the broad-left alliance that he personally called "four times worse" than Le Pen’s disgusting rabble just weeks ago.

Whatever the eventual outcome, it’s fantastic news that French voters and ignored Macron’s vitriolic and inexplicable attacks on the left during the election campaign, and that significant numbers of his own politicians defied his orders to split the anti-Le Pen vote by not standing down where they’d finished third in the first round.

This result is evidence that when the left works together they can win, and proof that the anti-left hatred in Macron’s inner circle is not shared by the French public, who actually prefer the left to Macron’s so-called "centrists", but will vote for whoever has the best chance of preventing fascists from running their country for the first time since the days of Vichy France and the Nazi occupation.

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