The Election Results: First Round, June 30, 2024 (Updated)

On Friday midnight, June 28, the short election season for the National Assembly closed and campaigning ended. On Sunday, June 30, 2024, French citizens are casting their ballots.  The news media must show absolute restraint–no polls, no interviews, nothing that would affect the ongoing voting.  By Sunday evening (in France) we will have the results of most of the first round.  Those candidates who get an absolute majority will win outright; otherwise there will be a second round of two, three, or even four candidates who qualify.  (The TL;DR version of this is below.*)

Two important changes have already occurred as a result of this off-cycle election.  

First, the newly elected candidates will have a five-year term.  This means that the system that has prevailed since 2002, in which the President and National Assembly are elected at the same time for the same five-year terms, is now ended.  (Macron has already stated that he will not resign, regardless of the outcome.)  The system was originally put in place to avoid “cohabitation” of a president and Prime Minister of another party, so as to assure some coherence in the policies followed.  It also, however, eliminated any kind of midterm check.  There are other elections within the cycle: the European Parliament elections (where abstention is high), the municipal and regional elections, where local issues may prevail; but the National Assembly “check” is most important.  One could even argue that Macron, who had an absolute majority for five years, would have been better served by a midterm check that would have forced him to compromise.  Having only a relative majority in the second term–not enough to pass legislation with his own party alone–led him instead to resort to article 49-3 for bypassing the legislature and enacting laws virtually by executive fiat [again, the TL;DR version is below**].  This was used for many spending bills and, most importantly, for the unpopular bill on retirement pensions.  Macron could dissolve the legislature again, but by the constitution he will have to wait a year.

Second, the role of parties, as opposed to personalities, has seen a revival.  It’s not clear if this will last, but it might be a very good change.  The debates this time have been among rival would-be prime ministers, chosen by their parties rather than by Macron.  The National Rally has appointed Jordan Bardella, the president of the party and recently re-elected to the European Parliament.  Gabriel Attal for the president’s Ensemble coalition is the sitting Prime Minister.  The Nouveau Front Populaire has a Mélenchon problem: he wants very much to be Prime Minister, and the other parties in the coalition, and even some of his own La France Insoumise cohort, don’t want him.  In the June 25, 2024 election debate Manuel Bompard spoke for the NFP.  Bompard was secretary of Mélenchon’s Parti de Gauche, which preceded LFI, he was presidential campaign director for him in 2017 and 2022, he was elected to the European Parliament in 2019, and he successfully ran for Mélenchon’s old National Assembly seat in Marseille in 2022.  He is close to Mélenchon, without actually being Mélenchon. At 38, he is the oldest of the three who were on the debate stage on Tuesday, followed by Attal at 35 and Bardella at 28.  Another debate on Wednesday featured Olivier Faure, Chair of the Socialist Party, in the NFP place.

The First Results:

About 67.5% of the population voted, approximately 20% higher than in 2022.

The Rassemblement National: 34% of the vote.

Nouveau Front Populaire: 28.1 % of the vote.

Ensemble (Presidential Majority): 20.3%

The remainder of Les Républicains, 10.2 %

Reconquête: 0.6%

And the Trotskyist Lutte Ouvrière got their usual 1.2%.

However, as Marine Le Pen stated, what matters is the second round. Marine Le Pen won her seat in the first round; it is too soon to tell how many are in the same position. She also called for giving the RN an absolute majority–which they are close to–so that Bardella could assume the prime ministry.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon called upon all Nouveau Front Populaire candidates who came in third to withdraw from the second round and support the non-RN candidate, so as not to give one more seat to the RN. It was a stirring speech–and thus typical of him–but it was not altogether clear, as the BFMTV announcers suggested, whether he was speaking for his own party, La France Insoumise, or for the entire coalition. What Mélenchon was saying, however, was that his side would rather elect a macroniste than an RN. Auroré Bergé, the Ensemble representative, could not say as much. Update: Later Gabriel Attal, the outgoing Prime Minister of Ensemble, called upon all of his third-place candidates to drop out of the race if they were up against a candidate who “shares our values”–meaning those who were neither RN nor LFI.

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*From the “Mémento à l’usage des candidats de métropole et d’outre-mer,” Ministère de l’intérieur et d’Outre-Mer.  Some candidates will likely be elected in the first round.  To accomplish this, they have to receive an absolute majority of the “votes cast,” and it must be a number of votes equal to a quarter of eligible voters (this last clause refers to the possibility of a high rate of abstention, which won’t be the case here).  To be in the second round, a candidate must have at least 12.5% of the eligible voters–whether they voted or not–in the first round.  If only one candidate qualifies for the second round, then the candidate with the next highest number of votes also goes forward to the second round  If no candidate fulfills this condition, then the top two candidates can go forward.  

**Constitution of the Fifth French Republic, Article 49-3: The Prime Minister may, after deliberation by the Council of Ministers, make the passing of a Finance Bill or Social Security Financing Bill an issue of a vote of confidence before the National Assembly. In that event, the Bill shall be considered passed unless a resolution of no-confidence, tabled within the subsequent twenty-four hours, is carried as provided for in the foregoing paragraph. In addition, the Prime Minister may use the said procedure for one other Government or Private Members’ Bill per session. From Constitution of the Fifth French Republic.

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