(LifeSiteNews) — The second round of elections for the French National Assembly – the lower chamber of Parliament but the one that wields the most power – was set to offer a near-landslide victory to the only party that can be loosely described as “anti-establishment,” the National Rally.
After unprecedented totals in the first round in which the party obtained the highest percentage nationwide – 29.26 percent and nearly 9,380,000 votes– it was expected to come close to an absolute majority in the 577-member National Assembly.
After the playoffs on Sunday, where the candidate who comes in first wins, the National Rally (RN) ended up with only 125 seats while a left-wing coalition, the New Popular Front, including the Communist Party and the radical left-wing party “La France insoumise” (France Unbowed), acquired 180 seats, meaning the coalition represents the largest political force in the Assembly.
The first lesson of this unprecedented political event in contemporary France is indeed the way in which the National Rally was bereft of a larger victory, leaving a highway open to the left and extreme left.
And it wasn’t only the French electoral system. It is true that if France had a “first-past-the-post” ballot like the UK, the National Rally would have won outright alone with no less than 297 seats – the number of constituencies where it came in first last week, eight more than the majority. French President Emmanuel Macron would have had to make 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, the party’s leader, the country’s prime minister, and an uneasy “cohabitation” between the globalist head of state and Bardella would have ensued.
However, only 37 candidates from the patriotic National Rally won in the first round, and several hundred were expected to come in first in the second round, especially in those places where three candidates would be able to stay in the race after gaining a minimum percentage.
What happened to prevent this was a manipulation of the system – not in any way illegal but totally untrue to reality. The RN, together with a few dozen allies from the center-right Républicains, was faced with two large coalitions: the New Popular Front (a throwback to the left-wing Front Populaire in the 1930s) that included the Communists, radical leftists, socialists and what remains of the ecologists, and “Ensemble” (together), with Macron’s Renaissance party as its pivot, and the rest of the Républicains as a supporting party.
Whirlwind agreements were concluded by both coalitions leading to the voluntary stepping down of a large number of candidates who came in third and who theoretically could have stayed in the race in places where the RN had come in first, giving the latter a good chance of victory.
This “Front Républicain,” or Republican Front, made sure that many RN candidates would find themselves pitted against just one other candidate, supported not only by the radical left and the Macronist “center” but by all the mainstream media and innumerable public celebrities, trendsetters, football players and virtue-signalers.
The strategy worked beyond anything the media and opinion pollsters had forecast. While abstention figures did not grow in this election that saw over 67 percent of voters actually casting their ballots — something that hadn’t happened in decades — left-wingers who routinely decry Macron as a “powdered Jupiter” and a man who despises the ordinary workers, the “people who are nothing” as he once publicly said, voted for his representatives.
Affluent, town-dwelling progressives who have no interest at all in the left’s push for even higher taxation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s record-holding champion of compulsory tax and social contribution levies (46 percent of the GDP) voted for extreme leftist candidates from LFI (France Unbowed). The latter was quick to claim victory on Sunday evening although as a party it only won 75 seats against its largest rival in the New Popular Front, the socialist party with its 66 seats, one being for former President François Hollande.
When Sunday’s vote is broken down, however, the Marine Le Pen and Bardella’s National Rally appears as France’s single largest party by far. It obtained the highest number of votes in the second round nationwide with nearly 8,750,000, or 32,05 percent, doing better than in the first round, although it was competing in fewer constituencies because it had already won 37. On average, the RN needed about 90,000 votes to obtain one seat, the other groups needed only 40,000 to 45,000.
What would have changed if the National Rally had not been ousted in this way? Obtaining power and the right to govern in the current difficult circumstances would not necessarily have been a boon: France is deeply fractured, and it has also been plunged into a spectacularly increased national debt by Macron and his team. The public debt now represents 110 percent of the GDP, France’s credit rating is floundering, and it takes more than what income tax is able to garner each year to pay the interest on the debt. Paying for COVID benefits during lockdowns is just one explanation. Public spending has been higher than income for years and is getting worse. It represents 60 percent of the gross domestic product; far from being a liberal, Macron presides over a predominantly socialist economy.
Despite this dire situation, infighting within the New Popular Front (LFI) has already begun with Jean-Luc Mélenchon as head of LFI clamoring to become prime minister with his promises of unbridled social and “climate spending, while the more moderate left-wingers such as the socialist reject his extreme policies. The centrist “Ensemble” movement hopes to obtain support on both sides of the political spectrum in order to impose a prime minister and government from its ranks. If that happens, Macron’s chess game can be said to have worked, although the structure of the National Assembly has now reached a situation where obtaining majority votes for new bills will become difficult indeed.
Macron’s chess game consisted in dissolving the National Assembly, as is his right, when his party dismally lost the European elections earlier in June. What he wanted was unclear: to gain a true majority he had lost two years ago after his reelection as president? To force the RN into power prematurely in the hope it would burn its wings in the face of the electorate?
Whatever his game, the RN has been laminated in a way that contradicts its nationwide support and success, and his party can play pivot among France’s renewed lawmakers.
Macron’s responsibility in giving the left and extreme left a much larger platform and extra power is one thing that cannot be contradicted. He took the deliberate risk to do so and he made things worse by creating an alliance with the New Popular Front, rejecting the RN as “extremist” with no precise reasons given, and offering a highway to communist and Trotskyist parties at least 100 million deaths caused directly by Communism and who want even more public spending, taxation, abortion, state interference, gender ideology, and mass immigration. It is true that they are promoting the same thing as the centrist liberals but only worse.
It should come as no surprise that up to 48 percent of young people are already voting LFI and that this vote is particularly high in ethnic suburbs. The future is already visible there.
Against this background, the National Rally has its failings, not least the fact that over half of its former 88 National Assembly members voted in favor of the enshrinement of the “freedom” to abort in the French constitution last March. But it does speak clearly on immigration policy and has a patriotic approach to what France stands for, at a point in time where so many ordinary people are feeling overwhelmed by energy prices, the rising cost of living and a general feeling of counting for nothing in the eyes of the so-called “elites.”
Macron has made France ungovernable. For the time being, he has reconducted his own youthful (and openly homosexual) Prime Minister Gabriel Attal for such time as will be needed to “ensure the country’s stability.” Coming from the man who gave a great kick in the anthill by dissolving the National Assembly, this is indeed akin to high art. Macron has already stated that he will do so again as soon as constitutional rules allow: one year from now.
Meanwhile, voices have already been raised, such as François Hollande, to say that one of the most urgent political moves at hand will be to relaunch the euthanasia debate that was cut short by Macron’s dissolution.
In that respect, nothing has changed.
