Image source, FRANCOIS MONIER/AFP
- Author, Paul Kirby
- Role, BBC News
French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal has called on voters to prevent the National Rally (RN) party of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella from winning Sunday’s legislative elections.
The party came out on top in the first round last Sunday with more than 33% of the vote and has already won dozens of seats. If it wins more than half of the 577 seats in the National Assembly, it will be able to form a government.
“There is one bloc in a position to win an absolute majority, and that is the far right,” Mr Attal told French radio.
Many French voters would not want to use their vote to block the RN, he said, but “I consider it our responsibility to do so.”
The second round of French legislative elections usually consists largely of three-round contests between the top two candidates in a constituency, but with many third-place finishers advancing on Sunday, this resulted in more than 300 three-round contests.
Some 218 candidates, either from the left-wing alliance or from Mr Attal’s centrist bloc, withdrew their candidacies before the Tuesday evening deadline to give their political rivals a greater chance of defeating the RN.
Marine Le Pen denounced what she called the political class which “gives an increasingly grotesque image of itself”.
Party leader Jordan Bardella, the favourite to become prime minister under an RN government, denounced an “alliance of dishonour”. He told Le Figaro that he found it regrettable to see a president who had accused the radical left La France Insoumise of anti-Semitism “throw himself into the arms of the enemy”. [its leader] “Jean-Luc Mélenchon”.
Mr Bardella said he was convinced that his party still had a chance of winning an absolute majority on Sunday because it had an ambition and a project for France. He already has the support of a section of conservative Republicans, and he called on others to join him and reject the “Macron-Mélenchon coalition”.
Image source, DANIEL DORKO/Hans Lucas/AFP
If the RN fails to form a government, one may wonder about the possibility of forming a coalition without the RN or the radical left. But the Prime Minister has declared that he will not impose on France any coalition that is not the one they have chosen.
President Macron has promised to stay in power regardless of the outcome, until the end of his term in 2027. He did not need to call the parliamentary vote, but after his party’s poor showing in last month’s European elections, he said a vote was the only way to allow France to “progress and reunify”.
Not everyone in the centrist camp is happy to have finally struck a deal with a left-wing alliance that includes Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and there is no evidence that French voters will do as party leaders suggest and vote for a party they would otherwise avoid.
Mr Mélenchon has been accused of championing anti-police sentiment and has been criticised for refusing to label Hamas a terrorist organisation.
Mr. Attal clarified that the withdrawal of candidates in favor of the New Popular Front did not mean a rapprochement with Mr. Mélenchon. “There is not and there will never be an alliance with La France Insoumise,” he promised.
However, the broad agreement to withdraw candidates left French voters with some bizarre choices.
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin now finds himself in the second round facing his RN rival, after the withdrawal of Leslie Mortreux, from La France Insoumise, and the same goes for former Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne.
Among the Macron candidates who came in third place to drop out are two ministers, Sabrina Agresti-Roubache and Marie Guévenoux.
Edouard Philippe, who was prime minister for three years at the start of Macron’s presidency in 2017, has said he would vote for a Communist candidate in the second round.
But he made clear he would not support Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, having witnessed how it contributed to political chaos.
“I prefer to have a deputy that I know and with whom I can work… even if we have differences, who, I think, shares my democratic demands, rather than the National Rally,” he declared on TF1.
François Hollande, former socialist president and former boss of Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée, considered that these concerted withdrawals had “minimized” the chances of the extreme right of winning an absolute majority, even if this could not be “excluded”.
Mr Attal chaired a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that could be his last as prime minister.
National Rally leader Marine Le Pen accused him of taking advantage of the opportunity to make a series of appointments, including to police chief posts.
Government spokeswoman Prisca Thevenot responded by saying she should read the constitution.
“I think we knew that Mrs Le Pen was lying, now we know that she is manipulating information,” she said. Such appointments are nothing new, she said, especially when it comes to preparing for the start of the school year.
Meanwhile, the president of the French Confederation of Small and Medium Enterprises (CPE), François Asselin, complained that President Macron’s decision to dissolve parliament had cost France “a quarter of its growth” and that no one seemed to have taken the economy into account.
If the New Popular Front (NFP) or the National Rally (RN) manage to put their economic projects into practice, “the punishment of the markets will be immediate,” he told BFMTV.
