France: Indecisive first round gives way to record number of three-way contests on 7 July

This story has been updated. The previous version was published at 9:45 a.m. on 1 July 2024.

As predicted by exit polls and opinion polls in France, the far-right Reassemblent Nationale (National Rally) of Marine Le Pen emerged as the party with the highest vote share of 33 per cent in Sunday’s first round of polling, by all available accounts till now.

The number of seats it won is, however, unclear and will be decided in the second round of polling on 7 July. Marine Le Pen herself, however, won her seat in the first round itself for the very first time.

Candidates who secure at least 50 per cent of the votes polled and at least 25 per cent of the votes of the registered or total voters in the first round are declared winners. The highest turnout, however, appears to have led to an unusually large number of winners who have failed to reach the prescribed threshold.

BBC reported that an estimate put the number of three-way contests in the second round at a staggering 315 constituencies. Such three-way contests in 2022 were just eight and only one in 2017.

Every candidate securing a minimum of 12.5 per cent of the total voters in the constituency qualified for the run-off election. Reports suggest that in one of the 577 constituencies, as many as four candidates got qualified for contesting in the second round.

With the counting over in all the seats, far right RN (Le Pen) was leading in a staggering 297 seats, NPF (the Left) in just 149 seats and Ensemble (Macron) in only 58 seats. The traditional Right, the Republicans, were leading in 33 seats. Candidates who receive the most votes in the second round will win, even without an absolute majority. So even though the RN is clearly in the lead, it's still unclear if it will secure an absolute majority. Chances of a hung house with no party securing the majority, leading to a period of political instability, cannot be ruled out yet.

Even as RN supporters erupted in joy and celebrated their second successive electoral victory, there were huge protests in Paris at the Place de Republique in Paris by Left supporters, vowing to stop the far-right in the second round.

Leaders of both the leftist New Popular Front and Macron’s centrist Ensemble alliance hinted that they will forge a tactical alliance before the second round of polling next Sunday and many of their candidates placed third in the first round would withdraw to ensure more direct contests and enable their first and second place holders to beat the far-right.

The NPF has come second in the first round, despite not having projected any prime-ministerial candidate because of sharp differences between the left parties which hastily came together in the last three weeks to contest as a left coalition.

Much will depend on the voter turnout in the second round with some observers predicting that it will be even higher than the first round. While both centrist and left parties were taken by surprise by President Macron calling for a snap poll on 9 June and had little time to put their act together, they made the best of a bad bargain.

The decision for a snap poll, they now say, was a mistake and showed the President’s poor reading of the popular mood and his own unpopularity with a large number of people in France, particularly the young, concerned about rise in cost of living.

The French economy, as other economies in Europe, has been stressed because of the war in Ukraine and the steady flow of immigrants, leading to voter-frustration and Islamophobia, which facilitated the rise in popularity of the French far-right.

Described as an existential election for France and the future of the European Union, the far-right RN being Eurosceptic and more aligned with Putin and Russia, the election has generated high degrees of interest and tension.

Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old presumptive prime ministerial candidate with zero experience of governance and described as her ‘lion cub’ by Marine Le Pen, has declared that he would not stake claim to form the government unless the party gets an absolute majority of 289 seats in the 577-member lower house.

It is not clear how many seats the RN would eventually secure on 7 July. President Macron a week ago had declared in an interview that France could see a ‘civil war’ if the ‘extremes’, the far right and the far-left, came to power. It remains to be seen if the warning has been taken seriously.