France’s centre- and left-wing parties were racing against time on Monday to remove the far-right Rally National from power, despite the party winning the first round of parliamentary elections.
The RN’s centre-right and left-wing opponents have until Tuesday to decide whether to withdraw their candidates from hundreds of runoff elections and have launched a limited electoral cooperation against Marine Le Pen’s party.
France’s blue-chip CAC 40 index rose 1.3 percent as investors predicted neither the far right nor the far left would win a majority in the National Assembly in the second round of voting next weekend.
In the first round of voting on Sunday, the RN came out on top with 33.2% of the vote, ahead of the left-leaning New Popular Front on 28% and President Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble coalition on 22.4%.
The result marks a political shock, with the RN still expected to win the most seats in the runoff election, but its combined vote share with the League was lower than some polls last week had predicted.
“The results are probably better than feared, but not as good as they were three weeks before the election,” said Mohit Kumar, an analyst at Jefferies.
The spread between French and German 10-year government bond yields, seen as a barometer of the risk of holding French debt, narrowed to 0.74 percentage points on Monday after hitting its highest level since the 2012 euro zone debt crisis last week.
The Ensemble and NFP candidate, who came third in the constituency, is under intense pressure to withdraw to avoid splitting the anti-RN vote in the second round of the July 7 election.
More than 300 three-way runoff elections will take place in the first round, an unprecedented number, according to calculations by the Financial Times, but the final figure will depend on how many candidates drop out.
By Monday afternoon, some candidates from the left and from Macron’s centrist party had begun to withdraw from the election in an attempt to stop the RN from winning in their constituencies.
Agnès Pannier-Runacher, Macron’s former energy minister, was grateful that her Green rival, who came third in the runoff election in the Pas-de-Calais region, an area particularly strong in the far-right, had dropped out.
Similar moves are happening across the country: in the Somme constituency, prominent NFP candidate François Ruffin will benefit from the withdrawal of the Ensemble candidate.
But there was some fierce fighting as the third-place candidates, especially the more centrist ones, refused to back down.
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Dominique Faure, Macron’s minister for regional affairs, said he would not withdraw from the election to support the Socialist candidate who came first in a region near Toulouse.
“I didn’t know how to donate,” Faure said. [people] “The only option is to vote between the RN and the far left.” Her decision was harshly criticised by the left.
“The lesson of tonight is that the far right is trying to seize power,” Macron’s prime minister, Gabriel Attal, who is facing ouster, said in a speech on Sunday night.
“Our objective is clear,” he added, “to prevent the RN from winning an absolute majority in the second round of voting and governing the country with its disastrous plans.”
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Monday expressed concern about the RN’s victory in the first round of voting: “It cannot help but be disturbing that a party that sees Europe as a problem and not a solution is in control of a country that is our closest partner and best friend,” she said.
After counting nearly every constituency, the RN came in first in 296 of 577 constituencies, the NFP in 150 and Ensemble in 60, according to calculations by the Financial Times. There are about 65 constituencies where the RN and NFP hold runoff elections. A party needs 289 seats to win a majority.
By Sunday night, all parties in the left-wing NFP, from the far-left Insubordinate France to the moderate Socialists, Greens and Communists, had announced they were withdrawing from the election, in which their candidate came third.
However, each party in Macron’s Ensemble coalition issued slightly different guidelines, causing confusion.
Macron’s Renaissance party said it would decide on a case-by-case basis based on whether left-wing candidates were “compatible with republican values,” but did not explicitly rule out LFI.
French stock and bond markets plummeted after President Macron called early elections three weeks ago as investors worried that a runoff vote on July 7 would result in a political deadlock, with the far right winning or populist forces taking control of parliament.
In the second round of voting so far, French voters have often Republican Front — to shut out RNs, supporting candidates they would otherwise reject, but with the rise of the far-right, it remains to be seen whether such voting habits still work.
Le Pen said on Sunday that the first-round results had left Macron’s centrist powers “virtually wiped out.” “The French people have expressed their desire to put an end to seven years of a government that has despised them,” she told supporters in her constituency of Henin-Beaumont in northern France.
If the RN wins a majority, Mr Macron would be forced into an inconvenient power-sharing arrangement in which he would install Jordan Bardella, a 28-year-old protégé of Ms Le Pen, as prime minister.
Matthew Galard, a researcher at polling group Ipsos, said whether the RN could win a majority would depend mainly on Republican Front And how many left-wing and center-leaning voters made opposing Le Pen’s party a priority?
Steve Briois, a senior RN official, rejected the idea that tactical moves or voting advice would stop them from winning.
“[That] “Other parties should put up an anti-RN front, because that only irritates people and gives them an incentive to vote for us,” he told the FT in the RN’s stronghold of Hénin-Beaumont. “The glass ceiling, Republican Front — It doesn’t work anymore.”
On Monday, the RN renewed efforts to portray the left as its main rival. In a letter published on social media, Bardella called the NFP an “existential threat to the French state” and one that “opens the door to a flood of immigrants.”
