French President Emmanuel Macron's party will remain in power in the legislature after National Assembly elections on Sunday, but it will need a coalition government with second-place leftist coalition party NUPES to do so, and rival Marine Le Pen's authoritarian National Rally party had its best showing ever winning nearly 90 seats.
Voters in France’s legislative elections dealt President Emmanuel Macron a serious blow on Sunday as his centrist coalition lost its absolute majority in the lower house of Parliament to a resurgent far-right and a defiant alliance of left-wing parties, complicating his domestic agenda for his second term.
With all votes counted, Mr. Macron’s centrist coalition won 245 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, the lower and more powerful house of Parliament. That was more than any other political group, but less than half of all the seats, and far less than the 350 seats Mr. Macron’s party and its allies won when he was first elected in 2017.
For the first time in 20 years, a newly elected president failed to muster an absolute majority in the National Assembly. It will not grind Mr. Macron’s domestic agenda to a complete halt, but will likely throw a large wrench into his ability to get bills passed — shifting power back to Parliament after a first term in which his top-down style of governing had mostly marginalized lawmakers.
Mr. Macron’s government will likely have to seek a coalition or build short-term alliances on bills, but it was unclear Sunday night how it might go about doing so.
The results were a sharp warning from French voters to Mr. Macron, who just months ago convincingly won re-election against Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader. “The Slap” was Monday’s headline on the front page of the left-leaning daily Libération.
Élisabeth Borne, Mr. Macron’s prime minister — who won her own race in Normandy — said on Sunday that the results were “unprecedented” and that “this situation constitutes a risk for our country, given the challenges we must face.”
“Starting tomorrow we will work on building a majority of action,” she said, suggesting, without giving details, that the government would work with other political parties to “build good compromises.”
Mr. Macron appeared disengaged from the parliamentary elections and did little campaigning himself, seeming more preoccupied by France’s diplomatic efforts to support Ukraine in its war against Russia — which Sunday’s results should not impact, as French presidents can conduct foreign policy mostly as they please.
Speaking on an airport tarmac before a trip to Eastern Europe that took him to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, this past week, he had urged voters to give him a “solid majority” in the “superior interest of the nation.”
But many French voters chose instead to either stay home — only about 46 percent of the French electorate went to the ballot box, according to projections, the second-lowest participation level since 1958 — or to vote for Mr. Macron’s most radical opponents.
Several of Mr. Macron’s close allies or cabinet members who were running in the election lost their races, a stinging rebuke for the president, who had vowed that ministers who failed to win a seat would have to resign. Richard Ferrand, the president of the National Assembly, and Amélie de Montchalin, his minister for green transition, were both defeated.
“We disappointed a certain number of French people, the message is clear,” Olivia Grégoire, a spokeswoman for Mr. Macron’s government, told France 2 television on Sunday.
“It’s a disappointing first place, but it’s a first place nonetheless,” she said, adding that Mr. Macron’s coalition would work in Parliament with “all those who want to move the country forward.”
Final results gave the alliance of left-wing parties — which includes the hard-left France Unbowed party, the Socialists, Greens and Communists, and is led by the leftist veteran Jean-Luc Mélenchon — 131 seats, making it the biggest opposition force in the National Assembly. The National Rally, Ms. Le Pen’s far-right party, secured 89 seats, a historic record.
Ironically 46% turnout for a midterm election here in the states would be pretty good.
Macron will now have to make major concessions to the left, and considering both NUPES and National Rally want France to wash its hands of Ukraine and hand it off to Putin, things could get very interesting in the days ahead in Paris.
We'll see.
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