The incontestable victory for Marine Le Pen's National Rally (RN) this Sunday in France marks a precedent that is at the same time historic and worrying. For the first time, the extreme right takes victory in a French legislative election. A left-wing grouping with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of Insubmissive France, as its figure of reference, has reached second place and won a prominent position over the other options in many of the run-offs that will take place next Sunday against Le Pen's candidates. The big loser of the night is Emmanuel Macron who has been devoured by his impromptu action to dissolve the National Assembly and call a general election.
His plan was to do a Pedro Sánchez and he ended up doing a Pere Aragonès. He has not reduced the electoral strength of the National Rally - and this, despite the fact that voter turnout was historically high for a first round vote, more than 20 points higher than in the legislative elections of 2022, thus giving a greater moral validity to the result. But after finishing third with 20% of the vote, the French president's political future is very much in doubt. We will have to wait until the second round, but at the moment the two most likely scenarios are bad for Macron. If Marine Le Pen's party and her allies ends up reaching an absolute majority in the National Assembly as a result of a miscalculation by Macron, it will be something more than a black mark on his biography, but if the end result is that governance is deadlocked, France will also have a problem.
Macron's plan was to do a Pedro Sánchez and he ended up doing a Pere Aragonès
This is so because the meeting point of a hypothetical government programme between the New Popular Front and the presidential majority is something more than an unknown. There is also a question mark about how the voters of the respective parties will respond to the call that will be made for them to vote for the best positioned candidate, in order to block far-right access to power. In particular, for two reasons: one, if the National Rally has climbed not only to first place, but to an ample victory, it is because it has ceased to provoke fear in large layers of French society. But also, it will not be easy, wherever it happens, for the left to vote for a centrist candidate and for Macron's voters to do the same with the candidates of the New Popular Front.
They have six days for all of this, bearing in mind that, after what has happened on this election Sunday, there is little margin for an appeal for greater turnout next Sunday. Macron and Melenchon already sent messages in this direction on Sunday night. Apparently without nuances and with great generosity. With the first round results in hand it is very difficult to be optimistic, but the truth is that a small window of opportunity does exist.