French parliamentary election tracker 2024
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Second-round results — July 7
Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National was projected to win the most seats in the National Assembly, but it came in third behind the leftwing Nouveau Front Populaire bloc and President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Ensemble alliance.
The fragmented results in the lower house, which has 577 seats, have led to a hung parliament and rocky negotiations over forming a government.
After RN performed best in the first round of voting, leftwing and centrist parties withdrew hundreds of candidates from the second round. The tactic, known as the “front républicain”, was a co-ordinated attempt to keep the RN out of power.
The map below shows the winning bloc in each constituency as an equally sized hexagon to give a true sense of the distribution of results across France.
These maps show the vote share of each political bloc in constituencies where they competed in round two, or had won outright in round one.
First-round results — June 30
Le Pen’s far-right RN won 33.2 per cent of the vote in the first round of the French parliamentary elections, according to pollster Ipsos. The leftwing NFP alliance finished second with 28.1 per cent, while Macron’s Ensemble alliance secured 21 per cent.
RN candidates secured the most first-place finishes in the first round of voting.
In constituencies where no candidate received more than 50 per cent of the vote, those who had secured at least 12.5 per cent of registered voters qualified for the second round run-offs.
Speaking from her Hénin-Beaumont constituency in northern France, Le Pen hailed the first-round result, saying it had “practically erased” Macron’s centrist bloc.
French voters turned out in record numbers for both rounds of voting. On June 30, 59 per cent had already cast their ballot by 5pm local time, compared with 39 per cent in 2022 — making it the highest first-stage turnout since 1986, according to Ipsos researcher Mathieu Gallard.
The outgoing assembly
Despite beating Le Pen in the 2022 presidential election, Macron’s party failed to win an outright majority in that year’s parliamentary vote, forcing his government to strike deals with other parties to pass laws.
Macron’s government at times bypassed lawmakers to pass budgets and reforms using a constitutional clause, known as the 49.3, which then exposed it to a no-confidence vote.
The first round of the 2022 legislative elections was predominantly a battle between the centre and the left, with Ensemble in run-offs against the Nupes.
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