"A new era is beginning." Gabriel Attal, France's current prime minister, who tendered his resignation on Monday, July 8, but was asked to stay on, has had to face the facts. The results of France's parliamentary elections have precipitated the downfall of Emmanuel Macron's majority and the advent of a powerful Parliament, one ready to emancipate itself from the executive branch's domination. The political landscape is still rearranging itself, as the unprecedented surge of the Rassemblement National (RN, far-right) and its allies in the first round of the snap parliamentary elections was finally halted by the "republican front" from the other parties to block the far right.
The Assemblée Nationale has been left without an absolute majority, and is divided into three blocs of comparable size: The left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) alliance (182 MPs), the presidential coalition (168) and the far right (143). The Les Républicains (LR, right) party, meanwhile, held out with 45 elected members, despite the centrifugal effects of this three-way split.
This parliamentary configuration, unprecedented in the Fifth Republic, is nevertheless the norm in many European parliamentary democracies, such as Germany, Spain, Italy and Belgium. "The center of gravity of power will be (...) from now on, more than ever, in the hands of Parliament," asserted Attal, calling on the elected lawmakers to "invent something new, great and useful." The presidential coalition has come out of the dissolution of the Assemblée shattered. The president's Renaissance party has 102 elected members in the Assemblée, the MoDem party 33 and Horizons 26.
To everyone's surprise, the left-wing alliance, under the banner of the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), won the largest number of seats in the Assemblée, with 182 elected members. After a campaign based on the principle of unity, constructed in the immediate aftermath of the dissolution, in the name of blocking the far right, the balance of power among the left has been profoundly reshaped. La France Insoumise (LFI, radical left) remains the largest party, with 74 MPs and three dissident members. However, the Parti Socialiste managed to more than double its number of MPs (59). The Greens obtained 28 MPs, and the Communists 9.
A different exercise of power
The NFP supplanted the Rassemblement National, which had expected to claim the position of leading political force in the Assemblée. In this election under a two-round majority system, the far-right party and its ally, contested LR president Eric Ciotti, found themselves without sufficient vote transfers in the second round, after a campaign marked by the racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic and homophobic attitudes of its candidates. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen said that, despite the failure, "the tide is rising. It didn't rise high enough this time, but it's still rising and, as a result, our victory is only deferred."
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