Emmanuel Macron is seeking help from France’s Communist Party in a bid to rebuild his coalition and block the hard Right and Left from power.

The French president is scrambling to keep his centrist bloc in parliament after losing 80 deputies in snap elections over the past fortnight.

Mr Macron’s party came third in the first round of the election on June 30 and second the week after.

Despite calling the election to offer clarity on the country’s political situation after European elections last month, the opposite has happened, with Mr Macron now trying to salvage his party’s position while shunning the hard Right and Left, who won the first and second rounds, respectively.

“For the moment, the president is moving towards a coalition ranging from the Communists to the Right,” one unnamed source told Le Figaro.

The Left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) alliance that won Sunday’s election is made up of Jean-Luc Melenchon’s France Unbowed (LFI) party, the Greens, the Socialist Party and the Communist Party.

However, there are differences between them, with Fabien Roussel, the Communist Party leader, taking a harder line on immigration than LFI and being more supportive of the police.

Last November, Mr Roussel broke away from the Left-wing Nupes coalition over Mr Melenchon’s refusal to label Hamas a terrorist group following the Oct 7 attack on Israel.

Under Mr Roussel, the Communist Party has also distinguished itself from Mr Melenchon’s party by positioning itself as a representative of working-class communities in small, rural towns rather than urban and suburban centres as represented by LFI.

The potential unlikely alliance between Mr Macron, who is a centrist, and the Communist Party comes as Elysee insiders paint a picture of closed-door meetings, frantic phone calls and working lunches to woo deputies over to Macron’s bloc.

According to Le Figaro, Sébastien Lecornu, the armed forces minister, has been making calls to former Republican party colleagues on the Right while centrist François Bayrou, the leader of Democratic Movement (MoDem), has made calls to ex-president François Hollande and spoken with the leader of the Greens, Marine Tondelier.

Leaders within the president’s alliance, Ensemble (Together), including Mr Bayrou and Édouard Philippe, the centre-right Horizons party leader, are working on a “declaration of principles” that will include everything from defence and the European Union.

Mr Macron called the election after his Renaissance party was trounced in European Parliament elections last month by Marine Le Pen’s hard-Right National Rally (RN) party.

Left and Centre parties clubbed together to keep her from winning the second round of election by removing candidates in regions that would split the anti-hard Right vote.

It has created the unexpected outcome, though, of the NFP winning and led to frustration within Mr Macron’s camp that he is not doing enough to mount a force against them. According to Le Figaro, aides said that Mr Macron is hoping the NFP will implode by itself.

Meanwhile, the RN has also experienced a major internal shake-up with the resignation of the general director, Gilles Pennelle, who was responsible for recruiting RN candidates for the parliamentary elections.

Dozens of candidates made headlines for alleged anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic remarks or for being violent convicted criminals.