From the Liveblog of
Sunday, June 30, 2024
Exit polls: Far-right National Rally wins 1st round of French election, Macron alliance 3rd
The far-right National Rally (RN) has won the first round of legislative elections with President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance lagging in third place, behind the left, according to projections by polling groups.
The projections give the RN 34.5 percent of the vote — a strong but not decisive lead in the two-round election process — compared to 28.5-29.1% for the left-wing New Popular Front alliance, and 20.5-21.5% for Macron’s centrist camp.
The two-round vote could put the far-right in power in France for the first time since the Nazi occupation in World War II and give 28-year-old RN party chief Jordan Bardella, a protege of its longtime leader Marine Le Pen, the chance to form a government.
But with another torrid week of campaigning to come before the decisive final voting next Sunday, the election’s ultimate outcome remained uncertain.
“Faced with National Rally, the time has come for a broad, clearly democratic and republican alliance for the second round,” Macron said in a statement. He also said that the high turnout in the first round spoke of “the importance of this vote for all our compatriots and the desire to clarify the political situation.”
The results are projections of the national result based on sampling at key ballot boxes deemed representative of overall voting trends. Breakdowns of individual constituencies are not yet available.
In each constituency, only the two top candidates of the first round, alongside anyone else who won support from more than 12.5% of registered voters, continue to the runoff, which is scheduled for July 7. The preliminary result suggests that Macron’s party will be off the ballot in key constituencies where the choice be between National Rally and the New Popular Front, which is a merger created unexpectedly for the elections between the center-left Socialist party and the far-left France Unbowed party, or LFI.
The elections follow a political upheaval in France that began with the June 9 elections for the European Parliament, in which National Rally gained the highest share of the vote (27%) in France. An attempt by Macron to unite anti-National Rally voters behind his party, the snap elections he declared appears to have backfired in many constituencies.
Many French Jews regard France Unbowed as antisemitic. Many others loath also National Rally, whose founder and honorary president, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is a notorious antisemite with convictions for hate speech and Holocaust denial.
The turnout of at least 65.5% is the highest on record since the 1991 parliamentary elections, according to Le Monde.
