The results of the first round of France’s National Assembly election were met with a mixture of excitement and horror across the country and the continent. For the first time, the far-right National Rally finished with the most votes in an Assembly election, and there is discussion in political circles about them winning an overall majority of seats in the second round.
This is important because of how government in France is constituted. President Macron, who is directly elected, is primarily responsible for defense and foreign affairs, while the Prime Minister is responsible for domestic and fiscal affairs. Though the President has the power to appoint a Prime Minister, the National Assembly has the power to dismiss them. This means that the President may be forced to share power with a different party if that party has a majority in the Assembly, in what is known as “cohabitation”.
What happened in the first round?
If this election had been contested under first past the post, National Rally would have finished with an overall majority of seats with a third of the vote, despite the hasty formation of an alliance of parties from the centre-left to far-left. While National Rally did manage to win some seats outright in the first round, most of the seats will require a second round of voting for a Deputy to be elected.
In order for a candidate to win outright in the first round, they need to get both 50% of the valid votes in their constituency, and 25% of all eligible voters. If no candidate reaches both of these thresholds, then the top two candidates advance to the second round, as does any other candidate who gets at least 12.5% of eligible voters.
This election has seen the highest turnout for a first round since 1997, making it easier for candidates to reach that 12.5% threshold to get into the second round. This has resulted in more than half of all constituencies having more than two candidates qualify for the second round (compare to just eight constituencies in 2022).
Looking ahead to the second round
For fear that a split in the anti-RN vote in these three-candidate races would allow the National Rally to achieve an overall majority, both Macron’s Ensemble alliance and the left-wing National Popular Front alliance withdrew their candidates in a number of races where they came third. This brought the number of seats constested by more than two candidates from 307 down to 91. Of the 163 potential three-ways where National Rally finished in first place, only 11 remained as three-ways once the ballot papers were printed.
As I often say when it comes to electoral alliances or pacts like this, it would be lazy to assume that anyone who would have voted for one of the two alliances that dropped in their constituency out will automatically vote for the other. The question, though, is how many of these voters would need to make such a switch to prevent a National Rally majority?
There were a number of seats where the National Rally, despite finishing with the most votes in the first round, only finished slightly ahead of Ensemble or the NFP. There are enough such seats that it would only take a very small share of either of these parties — fewer than one in ten — switching to the other in order to prevent a National Rally majority.
While it is mathematically possible for the NFP to get a majority on Sunday, the number of seats in play makes this highly unlikely. But there are enough close seats in play to prevent the National Rally from winning a majority, and likely to block the National Rally leader from becoming Prime Minister. While it will be next to impossible to prevent President Macron from being forced into cohabitation, it seems highly plausible to prevent him being forced into what would be, for him, the more unpalatable party with whom he’d have to share power.
The second round of France’s National Assembly elections will be held on Sunday 7 July from 8am to 8pm Central European Time.
All data sourced from the French Ministry of the Interior and Overseas France.
