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French winner-take-all politics faces coalition-building puzzle
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French political parties used to a winner-takes-all electoral system are struggling to wake up to the reality of a divided chamber following Sunday’s parliamentary ballot.
The 577-seat National Assembly is roughly split into thirds between the New Popular Front (NFP) left alliance with at least 190 seats, President Emmanuel Macron’s centrists at 164 and the far-right National Rally (RN), with 143.
Further complicating the situation is the make-up of the top-placed NFP, with its largest component, hard-left party France Unbowed (LFI) disliked even among other leftists for its strident rhetoric and ambiguous response to Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel.
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Other parties rallied to shut out the far right from power in the second round runoff, meaning “some voters said what they wanted, and some said what they wanted nothing to do with” by voting against the RN, said Jean-Daniel Levy, deputy director of pollster Harris Interactive.
The extensive tactical voting left voters’ expectations and preferences for the country unclear.
“As things stand, that doesn’t result in a mandate,” Levy added.
In recent decades, France’s parliamentary elections have been held in the wake of presidential votes, with voters tending to hand their new head of state a clear majority.
And unlike other Western European countries such as Germany, Spain or Italy, which use forms of proportional representation, France’s parliament is elected in a constituency-by-constituency vote over two rounds, long favoring a starkly bipolar party scene.
Sunday’s murky results leave leaders in “uncharted territory, because this isn’t a habit or a tradition we have,” said Pascale Joannin, director of the Robert Schuman Foundation think-tank.
“We’re going to have to leave behind posturing, comfort zones and ideological blinkers to try and say ‘this is what the voters wanted, what can we do to satisfy them and offer concrete answers?’,” she added.
‘Multiple unknowns’
Opinion polls in the wake of the election have provided little guidance.
None of the prospective alliances found more than 39 percent backing in a Wednesday survey of 1,002 people by pollster Elabe.
The most popular was a broad moderate coalition, from the Socialists and Greens on the left to Macron’s camp, as well as the conservative Republicans on the right.
That would shut out the forces decried by the president and his followers as equivalent “extremes”: RN on the far right and hard-left LFI.
It was a similar picture to one suggested by Macron himself Wednesday in a letter to voters that other parties swiftly rejected.
In another survey from pollster Odoxa, just 43 percent of 1,005 respondents said they favored any kind of coalition government, with the rest split between various unlikely options.
“At the moment it’s an equation with multiple unknowns,” said Harris Interactive’s Levy.
Even left-wing voters, “generally say they’re ready to open up as far as Macron’s camp, but even Socialist supporters aren’t always happy for LFI lawmakers to be involved.”
Party bosses have been busier ruling out potential partners than trying to thrash out common ground, with policy discussion largely absent.
“At no point has anyone said, ‘we want to do this, that and the other, do you agree or not?’,” Levy noted.
The left has insisted it should govern while failing to agree on a prospective prime minister by a self-imposed Friday deadline.
Meanwhile the Republicans – whose roughly 40 seats may prove indispensable to any alliance shutting out the RN – have ruled out coalitions altogether, leaving the door open to cooperate on a limited slate of draft laws.
‘Not inclined to compromise’
“Political parties are still thinking as if we were still in the previous system, where there was an absolute majority that governed, a single party,” said Olivier Beaud, a professor of public law at Paris’ Assas university.
“From the point of view of political customs, there’s going to have to be a very swift change in the French spirit, which is not at all one inclined to compromise,” he added.
Even if Macron were willing today to name a prime minister from the left or another party, they would likely immediately be ousted in a confidence vote unless they had first struck a coalition deal, Beaud pointed out.
One reason leaders may be reluctant to compromise is the fear they will be accused of betraying voters.
Unlike in neighbors Germany, Belgium or Italy, in France “coalitions are generally built ahead of the election, not after,” pollster Levy said.
Lurking in all leaders’ heads is the 2027 presidential election and the risk of RN figurehead Marine Le Pen profiting from the resulting mess to finally claim the top job.
“Where in other countries you might speak of coalitions, compromises, deals, the RN brings out very strong language like skulduggery, electoral trickery, to stoke the people’s ire,” Beaud said.
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