France’s prime minister has said nationwide efforts to prevent Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) winning an outright majority in parliament could succeed, after more than 200 candidates pulled out of Sunday’s legislative election runoff to avoid splitting the anti-far-right vote.
“We can avoid an absolute majority for the far right,” Gabriel Attal said on Wednesday, adding that 90% of candidates from President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist camp had quit three-way races if they were in third with an RN candidate ahead of them.
RN and its potential future prime minister, 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, finished a comfortable first in last Sunday’s first-round election with 33% of the vote, followed by the New Popular Front (NFP) alliance on 28% and the president’s Together alliance on 20%.
A historically high turnout dramatically boosted the number of second-round contests featuring three candidates to more than 300, increasing the anti-immigrant party’s chances of securing the 289 seats it would need for an absolute majority.
Although accurate seat projections are difficult before the shape of each constituency contest is known, pollsters’ initial estimates suggested RN could return as many as 300 deputies.
The high number of runoff withdrawals makes that less likely, and one poll released on Wednesday predicted the RN would fall short of a majority on Sunday, with between 190 and 220 seats. The Harris Interactive poll had the NPF in second place, with 159-183, and Macron’s centrist camp in third with 110-135.
Attal said centrist candidates were right to stand down even in favour of a rival from the radical-left France Unbowed (LFI), part of the NFP leftwing alliance. “Neither LFI or NFP can win an absolute majority,” he said. “RN can.”
He added: “What’s at stake is to do everything so that the extreme right does not have an absolute majority. It is not nice for some French to have to block … by voting in a way they did not want to. I say it’s our responsibility to do this.”
According to Le Monde, 221 candidates, including 132 from NFP and 83 from Macron’s camp and its allies, had withdrawn from potential three-way runoffs by the Tuesday evening deadline, leaving 94 so-called “triangular” contests.
The “republican front”, aimed at shutting the far right out of power, has long been a feature of French politics but had shown signs of fraying in recent elections as voters tired of having to vote against candidates they disliked rather than for those they backed.
While the parties have largely swung behind it, this time there is no guarantee centrist voters will be prepared to vote for candidates from the far-left LFI, or that leftwing voters angry with Macron will be happy to cast their ballots for candidates from his camp.
Asked about calls for the creation of a provisional cross-party government in the event of a hung parliament, Attal repeated his proposal for a range of mainstream parties to cooperate on individual pieces of legislation. “I hope the Together camp is as big as possible. After that, we will seek to secure majorities on a project-by-project basis,” he said.
The former prime minister Édouard Philippe called on Wednesday for a more formal broad-based coalition. He said such an alliance could run from “the conservative right to social democrats”, but would exclude the far left, saying there could be “no discussion about a coalition with LFI”. Many centrists argue the radical-left party, which believes traditional parties no longer serve democracy, does not share “republican values”.
Le Pen said on Tuesday that she could try to form a rightwing coalition with MPs from other parties if RN fell short of an absolute majority. Bardella had previously said he would only form a government with a sufficiently strong mandate.
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She said her party would seek to form a government with “for example, 270 MPs”, which would require it to find support from a further 19 to govern. “If we then have a majority, then yes, of course, we’ll go and do what the voters elected us to do,” she said.
With RN already supporting dozens of dissident candidates from the divided centre-right Les Républicains party, however, most analysts believe the far-right party will have difficulty recruiting more than a handful more supporters in parliament.
The government spokesperson, Priscille Thevenot, on Wednesday dismissed claims by Le Pen of an “administrative coup d’état” by Macron after the president made a number of senior public sector appointments between the two rounds of voting.
“We knew that Marine Le Pen lies, now we know she also manipulates information,” Thevenot said after a cabinet meeting. She said a similar number of nominations were made every week and these had been “completely routine” and “nothing specific”.
The UN human rights chief on Wednesday warned of a hardening of rhetoric in recent months, including hate speech and dehumanising language against immigrants and other minorities, linked to elections in Europe and elsewhere.
“This is an alarm bell,” Volker Turk said. Turk refused to comment on specific elections but said: “Narratives that denigrate the other, that dehumanise, that make scapegoats of migrants or refugees or asylum seekers or minority groups” are on the rise.
Several RN candidates have been deselected or are the target of judicial investigations after media revelations of allegedly racist or discriminatory remarks and social media posts. Bardella said on Wednesday it “could happen” that there were “black sheep” among the party’s candidates but added that he was dealing with them firmly.
Analysts say the most likely outcome of the second-round vote is a hung parliament that could lead to months of political paralysis. The chaos also risks damaging the international credibility of Macron, who has not spoken in public since last week.