France: Can the far-right group that topped the first round of elections actually grab power?
With a score of 33%, the National Rally is on course to become the biggest group in the National Assembly but uncertainty persists.
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French voters went to the polls on Sunday for the first round of snap legislative elections. For the first time, a victory for the far right is looking like a credible prospect – an extraordinary turnaround for a party that until 2022 held only a handful of seats in parliament.
The far-right National Rally has topped the polls with a score of more than 33% of the first-round vote (compared with 18.7% in 2022). The left-wing New Popular Front alliance is a few points behind in second place with 28% of the vote. And Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Ensemble alliance is languishing in third place after scoring a disappointing 21%.
This result puts the National Rally on course to become the biggest group in the 577-seat National Assembly. But there is still a high degree of uncertainty regarding whether the far right can win enough seats to obtain a working majority, and even greater uncertainty about what will happen if it does not.
The two-round electoral system means that some seats produce complex three-way competition (triangulaires) in the second round. With turnout being at its highest in decades, more than half of all seats saw three candidates qualify for the second round, which takes place on July 7. A handful...
