French election choice is as stark as Brexit, warns centre-left politician

French voters on Sunday face a choice as stark as the UK’s EU referendum: deciding whether they want to be governed by the far right, a leading centre-left politician has warned.

Raphaël Glucksmann, a rising star in the leftwing Nouveau Front Populaire alliance (NFP) that came second in last week’s first round of snap elections, said his bloc would not be able to win enough parliamentary seats to form a government on its own.

A writer and activist-turned-centre-left EU lawmaker, Glucksmann asked voters from across the political spectrum to hold their noses to vote for candidates from parties they do not usually support.

With Rassemblement National the only party still gunning for an outright majority, it left voters with a simple choice: “Do you want the extreme right to govern France?”

“It’s almost a Brexit referendum,” Glucksmann told the Financial Times. “You aren’t being asked if you are for or against [European Commission president] Ursula von der Leyen, you are being asked: do you want to leave the EU? That was the Brexit question. Here, the question that is posed is also a yes or no question.”

He added: “You must consider all the candidates who are opposed to the RN as a ‘no’ vote, and forget their names, their parties, and their logos.”

The RN and its allies won 33 per cent of the vote in the first round, putting it within reach of the 289 seats needed to form a majority in the French parliament, and enact its nativist policies. According to the final results from the French interior ministry the NFP secured 28 per cent and Emmanuel Macron’s centrist bloc Ensemble won 20 per cent.

The first-round results show how Macron’s gamble to call the election in an effort to stave off the far-right’s ascent has backfired.

Candidates on Sunday qualified for an unprecedented number of three-way races for more than half of the seats in the 577-strong assembly. That has put centrists and leftwing candidates who came in third under pressure to drop out by a Tuesday evening registration deadline so as to maximise the odds of depriving Marine Le Pen’s party of an outright majority.

Glucksmann led a joint list of his Place Publique party and the centre-left Socialist party, which secured third place in last month’s European parliament elections. He has clashed repeatedly with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the anti-capitalist firebrand leading the far-left La France Insoumise party (LFI). But Glucksmann put aside those difference and joined the NFP, a bloc that put forward a radical economic programme largely inspired by Mélenchon.

On Sunday, NFP parties that also include the Greens and the Communists immediately said their third-placed candidates would withdraw in an effort to beat the RN.

But Macron’s centrist camp has not fully reciprocated. The president pledged most of his third-placed candidates would drop out, but potentially not in favour of an LFI candidate they deem too extreme. Other Macron allies, such as his former prime minister Édouard Philippe, ruled out dropping out for LFI candidates.

Antoine Bristielle, director at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, said the result of the election would hinge on the willingness of Macron’s camp to “systematically withdraw” third-placed candidates.

Criticising the centrists for their wavering, Glucksmann said voters and politicians “must know how to hierarchise the threats and the perils”.

But he also criticised Mélenchon and his LFI allies for making “counterproductive” claims that the left can obtain a majority so as to appoint an LFI prime minister, and enact the NFP’s radical tax-and-spend economic programme.

“It’s completely false, it’s absurd and the result is pushing away centrist voters who could vote, not for the NFP programme, but to block the extreme right.”

Glucksmann acknowledged it would be difficult for some voters to back LFI candidates and for “very leftwing people” to support conservatives or centrists running in their constituencies.

“If we consider that [a far-right government] is the main threat weighing on our country and indeed on the whole of Europe, we must act accordingly, despite what it costs us morally, ethically, politically, intimately, to do.”