The foreign press has reacted with concern to the results of the first round of the French snap parliamentary elections, which have put the far right at the doorstep of power. Often cruel to Emmanuel Macron, as the architect of a dissolution that has backfired, the editorials published across Europe, the US, Africa and the Arab world, on Monday, July 1, also expressed fears of the destabilization of France, the erosion of its prestige coupled with a crisis of governance, and apprehension as to the impact these possible upheavals would have on the international scene.

"French democracy speaks and it is frightening," wrote the Swiss daily newspaper Le Temps in its front-page editorial, pointing out that with the breakthrough of the far-right party, France is moving away from republican principles. For the newspaper, the Rassemblement National's victory "is the dizziness of a democracy that leads to what some democrats fear most." For the German-language Swiss daily newspaper Blick, "France has just democratically, but enduringly, settled into a period of turbulence and uncertainty that is hardly conducive to its recovery."

The Belgian press was no less harsh. Describing the elections as a "bazooka vote," the daily newspaper Le Soir wrote that "in a total reversal of values and ideals, young people, workers, graduates, women and men alike have decided that hope, today in France, is embodied by a racist party. (...) This discredit bears the face of Emmanuel Macron, a president who, far from protecting his country against the far right for good, has legitimized it by abandoning the ballot box to it." The same diagnosis can be found in La Libre Belgique, whose headline referred to a "vertical plummet into the unknown" and called out the president's responsibility, the man who "dreamed of an upsurge" and "became a stepping stone for the far right."

The British press headlines were divided between Jude Bellingham's acrobatic overhead kick against Slovakia, which saved their national team from elimination from the Euro football tournament, and the triumph of France's far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party. For the center-right newspaper The Times, the "French right humiliates Macron." The Daily Telegraph was even more radical, quoting RN leader Marine Le Pen as claiming to have "wiped out Macron." The BBC, which had relocated its studios to a Parisian café for the occasion, meanwhile referred to the RN "turning French politics on its head."

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