France is going to the extreme right, Macron "gambled" and lost

Emmanuel Macron faces a bitterly painful choice: Throw everything he has at stopping the far right or try to save what's left of his once-dominant movement's ultimate collapse.

For the 46-year-old leader of France, yesterday's first round of parliamentary elections was a huge humiliation. He called snap elections, after the far-right's crushing defeat in June's European elections, with one goal in mind: to stop the spiral into extremism. He achieved the opposite, writes Politico.

Europe's second-largest economy and Europe's only nuclear-armed power is now closer than ever to far-right rule. The National Assembly Party (RN) won the first round of voting.

If voters give him a parliamentary majority on July 7, which according to forecasts is possible, France will find itself in uncharted waters. The country will find itself under the leadership of those who support Vladimir Putin, have promised a war on migration and considered leaving NATO.

Although the National Assembly has softened some of his harsher views, he remains deeply skeptical of mainstream Western political views. A far-right victory in this election would also greatly boost its prospects in the 2027 presidential election.

According to the analysis of the public opinion research institute Ipsos, the projected results bring the National Assembly closer to an absolute majority. The party received 33,2 percent of the votes in the first round, which means it can win between 230 and 280 parliamentary seats.

As the threshold for an absolute majority in parliament is 289 seats, the far right could even be in a position to form a government within a week, with party chief Bardell as prime minister. Now the question is whether something, or someone, can stop it.

How close Le Pen gets to an absolute majority depends on how other parties, including Macron, react to her victory yesterday. Will the other parties put their differences aside and unite and create a cordon sanitaire to defeat the extreme right.

French parliamentary elections are a complex two-round process in which two candidates who receive a minimum of 12,5 percent of the vote in the first round advance to the second round. In an estimated 315 constituencies, a third candidate, often someone from Macron's Ensemble coalition, also qualified for the second round.

Last night Macron's allies were trying to figure out what to do. Macron's centrist parliamentary group is set to shrink from 250 MPs to less than 100 in the National Assembly.

Now his centrist allies are facing huge pressure to pull out of the race in many areas and are advising their supporters to vote for a leftist alliance, which includes far-left radicals, in an attempt to defeat Le Pen.

After the first screenings were announced, thousands of French citizens gathered on the Place de la République in Paris to protest against the extreme right. The scenes were reminiscent of protests against Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine's father, when he qualified for the 2002 presidential runoff as a candidate for the party then known as the National Front.

On that occasion, parties and voters united against the extreme right, putting aside their differences to defeat an extreme candidate. However, European politics has changed dramatically in the last two decades.

Emmanuel Macron faces a bitterly painful choice: Throw everything he has at stopping the far right or try to save what's left of his once-dominant movement's ultimate collapse.

For the 46-year-old leader of France, yesterday's first round of parliamentary elections was a huge humiliation. He called snap elections, after the far-right's crushing defeat in June's European elections, with one goal in mind: to stop the spiral into extremism. He achieved the opposite, writes Politico.

Europe's second-largest economy and Europe's only nuclear-armed power is now closer than ever to far-right rule. The National Assembly Party (RN) won the first round of voting.

If voters give him a parliamentary majority on July 7, which according to forecasts is possible, France will find itself in uncharted waters. The country will find itself under the leadership of those who support Vladimir Putin, have promised a war on migration and considered leaving NATO.

Although the National Assembly has softened some of his harsher views, he remains deeply skeptical of mainstream Western political views. A far-right victory in this election would also greatly boost its prospects in the 2027 presidential election.

According to the analysis of the public opinion research institute Ipsos, the projected results bring the National Assembly closer to an absolute majority. The party received 33,2 percent of the votes in the first round, which means it can win between 230 and 280 parliamentary seats.

As the threshold for an absolute majority in parliament is 289 seats, the far right could even be in a position to form a government within a week, with party chief Bardell as prime minister. Now the question is whether something, or someone, can stop it.

How close Le Pen gets to an absolute majority depends on how other parties, including Macron, react to her victory yesterday. Will the other parties put their differences aside and unite and create a cordon sanitaire to defeat the extreme right.

French parliamentary elections are a complex two-round process in which two candidates who receive a minimum of 12,5 percent of the vote in the first round advance to the second round. In an estimated 315 constituencies, a third candidate, often someone from Macron's Ensemble coalition, also qualified for the second round.

Last night Macron's allies were trying to figure out what to do. Macron's centrist parliamentary group is set to shrink from 250 MPs to less than 100 in the National Assembly.

Now his centrist allies are facing huge pressure to pull out of the race in many areas and are advising their supporters to vote for a leftist alliance, which includes far-left radicals, in an attempt to defeat Le Pen.

After the first screenings were announced, thousands of French citizens gathered on the Place de la République in Paris to protest against the extreme right. The scenes were reminiscent of protests against Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine's father, when he qualified for the 2002 presidential runoff as a candidate for the party then known as the National Front.

On that occasion, parties and voters united against the extreme right, putting aside their differences to defeat an extreme candidate. However, European politics has changed dramatically in the last two decades.