The French voters have once again mobilised to stop Marine Le Pen’s far right party from taking power.
The election delivered a shock and messy result, with no party winning enough seats for a parliament majority, plunging French politics into turmoil that could last for months.
French President, Emmanuel Macron called the snap election in June in an effort to stop Le Pen’s surging far-right National Rally in its tracks. But in these elections, her party enhanced its profile and won 50 more seats than in 2022, while the president’s own Liberal Coalition went on the backfoot.
Governing France will be hellish now
The 577-seat National Assembly, the lower house of France’s legislature, is now split between the left, the center and the far-right. No group or party is even close to a majority, with all of them falling short of 200 MPs.
“It’s not possible to govern France if you don’t have 240 to 250 lawmakers,” said Sylvain Maillard, MP for Macron’s Renaissance party. “I was president of the Renaissance group with a coalition of 250 members of parliament and it was already very complicated.”
Even though the leftist alliance and Macron’s liberals agreed to collaborate and vote tactically to stop Le Pen’s National Rally from winning, a deeper coalition between the two groups to govern France appears unlikely.
Veteran far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed, one of the parties within the left-wing alliance, has ruled out governing with the president’s liberals. Likewise Macron’s Prime Minster, Gabriel Attal, has said his side would never share power with Mélenchon.
On Sunday evening, Attal opened the door to leading a caretaker government to provide some stability during the Olympic Games later this month.
Whatever government emerges from the mess, it’s unlikely to be stable for long. This autumn’s budget talks will be the first potential flashpoint. France is under pressure to cut its deficit after missing targets earlier in the year. There are many ideas that the left, the liberals and the far-right will never agree on. Fiscal policy is near the top of the list.
