French turn out in droves in high-stakes snap elections

French voters on Sunday turned out in record numbers in the first round of a high-stakes snap election that could usher in a far-right government and shake the EU to its core.

By 5pm local time, 59.39 per cent of voters had already cast their ballot, compared with 39.42 per cent in 2022 — making this year the highest turnout at this stage since 1986, according to Ipsos researcher Mathieu Gallard.

Voter participation is a key factor in this election because it will help determine how many of President Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble candidates qualify for next week’s final round of voting. Pollsters on Sunday afternoon were predicting an unprecedented number of three-way runoffs on July 7 in nearly half of the 577 districts.

Macron called for the unexpected legislative poll earlier this month after losing European parliamentary elections to the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) by a wide margin.

Although the move stunned the public and angered many even in his own camp, Macron defended it as a “moment of clarification” for citizens to decide who they wanted to govern the country given the steady rise of Marine Le Pen’s RN party. Macron also argued that the National Assembly, where his centrist alliance lost its outright majority in 2022, was riven by “disorder” that made legislating difficult.

But Macron’s extraordinary gamble to call snap elections looks set to backfire. 

Although seat projections are difficult to make given the two-round voting format, pollsters say the RN and its allies will come in first and potentially win an outright majority in the assembly. That would force Macron into an uncomfortable power-sharing government known as a “cohabitation” and compel him to pick Le Pen’s 28-year-old protégé Jordan Bardella as prime minister. 

An Ipsos poll on Friday before the first round showed Le Pen’s RN with 32 per cent of voting intentions, while a leftwing alliance known as the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) was at 29 per cent. Ensemble was set to come in third with 20 per cent of the vote.

The two-round format and the high turnout complicate seat projections. Candidates securing their seat outright in the first round with more than 50 per cent of the votes are a rare occurrence. Most of the districts will be decided in a run-off between candidates who won at least 12.5 per cent of registered voters in the first round. The higher the turnout, the lower the threshold to make it through the second round.

Parties will have 48 hours after the first round to decide whether to maintain their candidates for the run-offs, and pressure will mount on Macron’s candidates and the left’s to tactically drop out to stave off the RN.

Polls opened at 8am local time, and will close at 6pm in small towns and 8pm in big cities when exit polls will be unveiled. The final results will not be known until after the second round on July 7.

Many French voters have come to reject Macron, who they see as elitist and out of touch, and prefer Le Pen’s RN for its emphasis on cost of living issues and wages, on top of its traditional anti-immigration stance. Public opinion has also drifted rightward in the past decade as identity politics have moved centre stage, with the RN casting France’s Muslim minority as a threat to the secular values of the republic.

The election may also end in a hung parliament in which there is no majority behind a prime minister who could survive a no-confidence vote. Gridlock would ensue, and Macron cannot call for another dissolution of parliament for a year. 

If the RN triumphs and forces a cohabitation with Macron after more than 50 years in opposition, it will mark the culmination of Le Pen’s decade-long effort to “detoxify” the party her father co-founded with a former soldier in the French unit of the Nazi’s Waffen-SS. 

In a cohabitation, the RN would run the government, domestic affairs and set the budget, while Macron would remain chief of the armed forces and set foreign policy. There have been three cohabitations in France’s postwar history, but none involving parties with such diametrically opposite views. 

Le Pen and Bardella have both signalled in recent days that they would challenge the president’s authority including on defence and foreign policy — a prospect which is likely to alarm allies and markets alike.

The NFP alliance — consisting of the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the centre-left Socialists, the Greens and the Communists — has a heavy tax-and-spend economic programme and has cast itself as the only way to block the RN. But its factions have different views on many issues and have been unable to settle on a candidate for prime minister. The three-time presidential candidate Mélenchon has indicated he wants the job, but his allies disagree.