While the second round of the French elections is being described as a huge triumph for the far-left dominated Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) the final seat tallies, with the NFP as the largest grouping but over 100 seats short of a majority, was only possible as a result of an unprecedented “alliance” of the establishment right of Macron’s Ensemble and a group that is itself a rag tag of basically incompatible extremists and centrists of the Left.
The final results give the NFP 182 seats compared to 168 for Ensemble and 143 for Rassemblement National (RN) and its allies. Few had predicted the extent to which the Left/Macron alliance based solely on a determination to stop RN would succeed. RN has doubled its vote share since 2022.
Of 178 three way second round constituency run offs between the NFP, RN and Ensemble, the NFP withdrew their third placed candidate in 99 of these, and Ensemble withdrew 79 candidates. The NFP also withdrew 27 candidates in constituencies to allow the second placed Republican (LR) with whom they have absolutely nothing in common a chance to beat the RN candidate.
There was no such official reciprocation on the part of the nominally conservative Republicans for offers of co-operation from Le Pen and RN. That may have saved LR some seats through the support of the Left but it lost more of its vote share to RN and finished with just 5.4% of the vote on Sunday.
Despite this witch’s brew the share of the votes showed that not only did RN increase to 37% from 33.2% last Sunday but finished more than 11% ahead of the Left which is being cast as the victor and whose share of the vote fell by 2.5%. The only other major grouping to increase its vote share was Macron’s Ensemble which clearly benefited from the votes of the Left.
A good example of how this worked in practice was in Des Haute-Alpes where the withdrawal of the Ensemble candidate allowed the Socialist Party/NFP candidate who took 30.5% of the vote in the first round to defeat the RN candidate who had topped the poll last Sunday with over 38% and whose vote share increased to 48.4% yesterday.
By way of comparison, on Friday some of the same media who are now pitching yesterday’s French election as a “disaster” for Le Pen and RN and a “surge” for the Left were on Friday heralding the “landslide” of Keir Starmer’s British Labour Party who won the UK general election with 34% of the popular vote, 3% lower than RN.
As I noted after last week’s first round, the fact that RN enjoys greater support among the traditional French working class than the Left belies the delusions of the Left that it is the representative of the popular classes. A fact underlined in the south of France where the “far right” now holds 30 of the 42 seats in the once largely red Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region.
No better illustrated than by the taking by Raasemblement National of the last seat held near Marseilles by the once mighty Communist Party of France which lost its only seat in the region to RN. The Communist Party, once the strongest and most abjectly Stalinist of the western Communist Parties during the totalitarian era, is now reduced to being a rump of the NFP dominated by parties which the PCF once denounced as “social fascists.”
The impossibility of the NFP forming a stable government is underlined not only by the fact that its sole common ground with Macron was stopping RN but by its own internal divisions. Of its 182 seats, 74 are going to members of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise which claims to be devoted to “Eco-socialism,” similar to People Before Profit here.
The other main component of the NFP is the Socialist Party which won 59 seats. It is a member of the European socialist group of which its Irish equivalents are the Labour Party and Social Democrats. The Greens have 28 seats and the Communist Party has 9 seats. The other 12 NFP seats went to Generation-S which took 5 and is devoted to the more Pollyanna aspects of infantile leftism such as legalising weed; 5 to members of leftie micro groups and 2 to regionalists.
In Irish terms, think of a party that might have Mary Lou, Paul Murphy, Ivana Bacik, Holly Cairns. Pippa Hackett, Ming the Merciless Flanagan and Panti Bliss all on the same ticket. Yes, indeedy. Well, just imagine how 75% of the French people are feeling this morning.
Then imagine that all of the above had decided to run basically a joint election campaign with Simon Harris and Micheál Martin but still hated one another and were wondering awkwardly what to do the morning afterwards as they pored over the results wih their Fairtrade coffee and croissants.
Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella may well be correct in their claims that the triumph of RN has merely been postponed by the French ruling elite placing its future in the hands of communists and other far left extremists. Extremists whose hatred of order and of their own fellow citizens did not prevent them again engaging in violence last night and early this morning. Despite their so-called “triumph.”
