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      France’s Far Right Surges Into Parliament, and Further Into the Mainstream

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      Marine Le Pen’s National Rally now has a place of power in the political establishment and a chance to prove itself in the eyes of voters.PARIS — In 2017, after the far-right leader Marine Le Pen and her allies won only a handful of seats in parliamentary elections, she blamed France’s two-round voting system for shutting her party out of Parliament despite getting over one million ballots cast in its favor.“We are eight,” she said bitterly, referring to the seats won by her party in the National Assembly, the lower and more powerful house of Parliament. “In my opinion we are worth 80.”Fast-forward to last week’s parliamentary elections. The voting system hasn’t changed, but with 89 newly elected lawmakers — an all-time record for her party, currently known as the National Rally — Ms. Le Pen is now beaming.On Wednesday, she hugged her new colleagues, kissing cheeks left and right, before leading them into the National Assembly and posing for a group picture. “You’ll see that we are going to get a lot of work done, with great competence, with seriousness,” Ms. Le Pen told a scrum of television cameras and microphones. In contrast with “what you usually say about us,” she pointedly told the gathered reporters.For decades, dogged by its unsavory past and doubts over its ability to effectively govern, the French far right failed to make much headway in local and national elections even as it captured the anger of France’s disillusioned and dissatisfied. Most recently, President Emmanuel Macron defeated Ms. Le Pen in April’s presidential race.Supporters listening to a campaign speech by Ms. Le Pen in Stiring-Wendel, France, in April. For decades, the French far right failed to make much headway in local and national elections, even as it captured the anger of France’s disillusioned and dissatisfied.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesBut the National Rally surged spectacularly in the parliamentary election last weekend, capping Ms. Le Pen’s yearslong quest for respectability as she tries to sanitize her party’s image, project an air of competence and put a softer face on her resolutely nationalist and anti-immigrant platform.Fueled by anger against Mr. Macron and enabled by the collapse of the “republican front” that mainstream parties and voters traditionally erected against the far right, the results came as a shock even within the National Rally’s own ranks.“I would be lying if I told you that I wasn’t surprised,” said Philippe Olivier, Ms. Le Pen’s brother-in-law and special adviser, who described the 89 seats secured by the party in the 577-seat National Assembly as “a tidal wave.”The National Rally is now the second largest party in Parliament behind that of Mr. Macron, who lost his absolute majority and is now struggling to cobble together enough lawmakers to pass his bills, potentially forcing him to work with a reinvigorated opposition.In an interview with the news agency Agence France-Presse on Saturday, Mr. Macron said he had asked Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne to consult with parliamentary groups to form “a new government of action” that will be named early next month.He added that the new government could include representatives from across the political landscape, with the exception of the hard-left party France Unbowed and Ms. Le Pen’s party, which he said he did not consider to be “parties of government.”The National Rally does not have enough lawmakers to push through its own bills and will struggle to find allies in Parliament. But thanks to increased public funding based on its election results, the haul of seats is a financial boon for the heavily indebted party.Crucially, for the first time since the 1980s, it has enough seats to form a parliamentary group — the only way to get leverage in the lower house.The National Rally is now the second largest party in Parliament behind that of Mr. Macron, who lost his absolute majority and is now struggling to cobble together enough lawmakers to pass his bills.James Hill for The New York TimesNational Rally lawmakers can now bring a no-confidence vote, ask for a law to be reviewed by the Constitutional Council, create special investigative committees, fill top parliamentary jobs and use a new wealth of speaking time and amending power to push and prod the government and slow or block the legislative process.“During the previous term, there was a two-day debate on immigration,” Mr. Olivier recalled. “We had five minutes of speaking time!”Ms. Le Pen has said that her party will ask for positions that are traditionally allocated to opposition groups, including the vice presidency of the National Assembly and the leadership of the powerful finance committee, which oversees the state budget.Analysts say this established presence in Parliament could further anchor the far right in France’s political landscape, providing an invaluable launching pad for future elections.“I think Marine Le Pen understands that this is really the final test,” said Jean-Yves Camus, co-director of the Observatory of Radical Politics at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, a progressive research institute.Many voters, even those who might agree with her proposals, still question her party’s capabilities, Mr. Camus noted. Now, he said, she will try to show that, like other far-right populist parties in Europe, her party can harness institutional machinery from the inside, instead of railing against it from the outside.Mr. Olivier said that his party would try to push through legislation on its favorite themes, including lowering value-added taxes on energy and essential goods, drastically reducing immigration and increasing police powers. But he said his party would also be “a constructive opposition,” not a “troublemaker.”“If Macron proposes a bill on nuclear power, we will vote for it,” he said. “If a bill goes in the right direction, we will study it.”Migrants waiting to be allocated emergency housing by a nonprofit group in Paris last year. The far right wants to lower sales taxes on energy and essential goods, drastically reduce immigration and increase police powers.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesMs. Le Pen has engaged in a long and deliberate strategy to “undemonize” her party and widen her electorate. Since her defeat by Mr. Macron in 2017, she has tried to foster her credibility and rebrand her party away from its extremist roots.Many of the new far-right lawmakers came to politics during this makeover era and learned the ropes as city councilors or parliamentary assistants who tried to project rigorousness and break with the excesses of some of the party’s longtime lieutenants, who were often associated with antisemitism and xenophobia.“A bit of new blood and some new faces won’t hurt,” Bryan Masson, who captured a seat in the Alpes-Maritimes area of southern France, told BFM TV last Monday. At 25, he is one of Parliament’s youngest members, after a decade of activism for the National Rally, first as a leader of its local youth branch and then as a regional councilor.Ms. Le Pen also has dropped ideas that alienated mainstream voters, such as a proposal to leave the eurozone, which helped her to get 41.5 percent of the vote in April’s presidential election, an eight-point increase from 2017.That was not enough to defeat Mr. Macron, who called for a “republican front,” a longtime strategy in which mainstream voters put political differences aside to support anyone but the far right in runoff votes.That front has weakened in recent years, however, and last week it appeared to collapse, amid the growing polarization in French politics around three strongly opposed blocs: Mr. Macron’s broad, pro-globalization center, the far right and the hard left of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, France Unbowed.Last weekend, the National Rally won half of its runoff matches against candidates from an alliance of parties supporting Mr. Macron, compared with less than one in 10 in the previous legislative elections.Many in Mr. Macron’s party put the far right on near-equal footing with Mr. Mélenchon’s leftist coalition, saying both were extreme, prompting half of the president’s supporters to abstain in runoffs pitting the National Rally against the left, according to a recent poll.Newly elected lawmakers from the far-right National Rally party visiting the National Assembly on Wednesday, in Paris.Christophe Ena/Associated PressSimilarly, the left-wing alliance said that “not a single vote” should go to the far right, but it did not encourage voters to back Mr. Macron’s alliance, leading many supporters to stay home.Gilles Ivaldi, of the Center for Political Research at Sciences Po in Paris, said the far right had surfed on the wave of resentment against Mr. Macron’s pro-business policies and his perceived arrogance, as many voters wanted mainly to punish the president.“These legislative elections looked a lot like midterms,” he said, despite being held barely two months after Mr. Macron’s re-election victory.But the National Rally’s new presence in Parliament is a double-edged sword, analysts say.Ms. Le Pen has to manage a delicate balancing act that entails “being almost completely normalized while remaining transgressive,” Mr. Camus said, as the party fully joins a political system it had long castigated as inefficient and corrupt.“What brought voters to the National Rally was that they were an anti-establishment party,” he added.Now, they are at the establishment’s heart. 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      France’s Far-Right Surges into Parliament, and Further into the Mainstream

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      Marine Le Pen’s National Rally now has a place of power in the political establishment and a chance to prove itself in the eyes of voters.PARIS — In 2017, after the far-right leader Marine Le Pen and her allies won only a handful of seats in parliamentary elections, she blamed France’s two-round voting system for shutting her party out of Parliament despite getting over 1 million ballots cast in its favor.“We are 8,” she said bitterly, referring to the seats won by her party in the National Assembly, the lower and more powerful house of Parliament. “In my opinion we are worth 80.”Fast-forward to last week’s parliamentary elections. The voting system hasn’t changed, but with 89 newly elected lawmakers — an all-time record for her party, currently known as the National Rally — Ms. Le Pen is now beaming.On Wednesday, she hugged her new colleagues, kissing cheeks left and right, before leading them into the National Assembly and posing for a group picture. “You’ll see that we are going to get a lot of work done, with great competence, with seriousness,” Ms. Le Pen told a scrum of television cameras and microphones. In contrast with “what you usually say about us,” she pointedly told the gathered reporters.For decades, dogged by its unsavory past and doubts over its ability to effectively govern, the French far right failed to make much headway in local and national elections even as it captured the anger of France’s disillusioned and dissatisfied. Most recently, President Emmanuel Macron defeated Ms. Le Pen in April’s presidential race.Supporters listening to a campaign speech by Ms. Le Pen in Stiring-Wendel, France, in April. For decades, the French far right failed to make much headway in local and national elections, even as it captured the anger of France’s disillusioned and dissatisfied.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesBut the National Rally surged spectacularly in the parliamentary election last weekend, capping Ms. Le Pen’s yearslong quest for respectability as she tries to sanitize her party’s image, project an air of competence, and put a softer face on her resolutely nationalist and anti-immigrant platform.Fueled by anger against Mr. Macron and enabled by the collapse of the “republican front” that mainstream parties and voters traditionally erected against the far right, Sunday’s results came as a shock even within the National Rally’s own ranks.“I would be lying if I told you that I wasn’t surprised,” said Philippe Olivier, Ms. Le Pen’s brother-in-law and special adviser, who described the 89 seats secured by the party in the 577-seat National Assembly as “a tidal wave.”The National Rally is now the second largest party in Parliament behind that of Mr. Macron, who lost his absolute majority and is now struggling to cobble together enough lawmakers to pass his bills, potentially forcing him to work with a reinvigorated opposition.In an interview with the news agency Agence France-Presse on Saturday, Mr. Macron said he had asked prime minister Élisabeth Borne to conduct consultations with parliamentary groups to form “a new government of action” that will be named in early July.He added that the new government could include representatives from across the political landscape, with the exception of the hard-left France Unbowed party and Ms. Le Pen’s party, which he said he did not consider to be “parties of government.”The National Rally does not have enough lawmakers to push through its own bills and will struggle to find allies in Parliament. But thanks to increased public funding based on its election results, the haul of seats is a financial boon for the heavily indebted party.Crucially, for the first time since the 1980s, it has enough seats to form a parliamentary group — the only way to get leverage in the lower house.The National Rally is now the second largest party in Parliament behind that of Mr. Macron, who lost his absolute majority and is now struggling to cobble together enough lawmakers to pass his bills.James Hill for The New York TimesNational Rally lawmakers can now bring a no-confidence vote, ask for a law to be reviewed by the Constitutional Council, create special investigative committees, fill top parliamentary jobs, and use a new wealth of speaking time and amending power to push and prod the government and slow or block the legislative process.“During the previous term, there was a two-day debate on immigration,” Mr. Olivier recalled. “We had five minutes of speaking time!”Ms. Le Pen has said that her party would ask for positions that are traditionally allocated to opposition groups, including the vice presidency of the National Assembly and the chair of the powerful finance committee, which oversees the state budget.Analysts say this established presence in Parliament could further anchor the far-right in France’s political landscape, providing an invaluable launching pad for future elections.“I think Marine Le Pen understands that this is really the final test,” said Jean-Yves Camus, co-director of the Observatory of Radical Politics at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, a progressive research institute.Many voters, even those who might agree with her proposals, still question her party’s capabilities, Mr. Camus noted. Now, he said, she will try to show that like other far-right populist parties in Europe, her party can harness institutional machinery from the inside, instead of railing against it from the outside.Mr. Olivier said that his party would try to push through legislation on its favorite themes, including lowering value-added taxes on energy and essential goods, drastically reducing immigration, and increasing police powers. But he said his party would also be “a constructive opposition,” not a “troublemaker.”“If Macron proposes a bill on nuclear power, we will vote for it,” he said. “If a bill goes in the right direction, we will study it.”Migrants waiting to be allocated emergency accommodation by a nonprofit organization in Paris last year. The far right wants to lower sales taxes on energy and essential goods, drastically reduce immigration, and increase police powers.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesMs. Le Pen has engaged in a long and deliberate strategy to “undemonize” her party and widen her electorate. Since her defeat by Mr. Macron in 2017, she has tried to foster her credibility and rebrand her party away from its extremist roots.Many of the new far-right lawmakers came to politics during this makeover era and learned the ropes as city councilors or parliamentary assistants who tried to project rigorousness and break with the excesses of some of the party’s longtime lieutenants, who were often associated with antisemitism and xenophobia.“A bit of new blood and some new faces won’t hurt,” Bryan Masson, who captured a seat in the Alpes-Maritimes area of southern France, told BFM TV on Monday. At 25, he is one of Parliament’s youngest members, after a decade of activism for the National Rally, first as a leader of its local youth branch and then as a regional councilor.Ms. Le Pen also has dropped ideas that alienated mainstream voters, such as a proposal to leave the eurozone, which helped her to get 41.5 percent of the vote in April’s presidential election, an eight-point increase from 2017.That was not enough to defeat Mr. Macron, who called for a “republican front,” a longtime strategy in which mainstream voters put political differences aside to support anyone but the far right in runoff votes.That front has weakened in recent years, however, and last week it appeared to collapse, amid the growing polarization in French politics around three strongly opposed blocs — Mr. Macron’s broad, pro-globalization center, the far right, and the hard left of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed party.Last weekend, the National Rally won half of its runoff matches against candidates from an alliance of parties supporting Mr. Macron, compared to less than one in 10 in the previous legislative elections.Many in Mr. Macron’s party put the far right on near equal footing with Mr. Mélenchon’s leftist coalition, saying both were extreme, prompting half of the president’s supporters to abstain in runoffs pitting the National Rally against the left, according to a recent poll.Newly elected lawmakers from the far-right National Rally party visiting the National Assembly on Wednesday, in Paris.Christophe Ena/Associated PressSimilarly, the left-wing alliance said that “not a single vote” should go to the far right, but it did not encourage voters to back Mr. Macron’s alliance, leading many supporters to stay home.Gilles Ivaldi, of the Center for Political Research at Sciences Po in Paris, said the far right had surfed on the wave of resentment against Mr. Macron’s pro-business policies and his perceived arrogance, as many voters wanted mainly to punish the president.“These legislative elections looked a lot like midterms,” he said, despite being held barely two months after Mr. Macron’s re-election victory.But the National Rally’s new presence in Parliament is a double-edged sword, analysts say.Ms. Le Pen has to manage a delicate balancing act that entails “being almost completely normalized while remaining transgressive,” Mr. Camus said, as the party fully joins a political system it had long castigated as inefficient and corrupt.“What brought voters to the National Rally was that they were an anti-establishment party,” he added.Now, they are at the establishment’s heart. 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      France’s Far Right Wins Record Number of Seats in Parliament

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      PARIS — The French far right was projected to win a record number of seats in the election on Sunday, which could make it the third biggest political force in Parliament. It will also secure enough seats to form a parliamentary group for the first time since the 1980s, reflecting its solid political foothold and highlighting the success of Marine Le Pen’s longtime efforts to moderate her party’s image.Ms. Le Pen’s party, the National Rally, was expected to win between 75 and 100 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, according to preliminary projections. The party needs to secure only 15 seats to become a parliamentary group, a designation that would give it more public funding and speaking time, and specific legislative powers such as creating special committees.That result came despite a lackluster legislative campaign by Ms. Le Pen.After her loss to Emmanuel Macron in the presidential election in April, Ms. Le Pen all but disappeared from the political stage, resurfacing only in May to acknowledge on television that Mr. Macron would most likely secure a majority in Parliament — indirectly conceding defeat in advance.For several weeks, the National Rally campaigned without any real leadership, failing to drive the public debate around its favorite themes of economic insecurity, immigration and crime. Instead, much of the momentum has been with a coalition of left-wing parties that managed to overtake the far right as the main opposition force to Mr. Macron.Still, Ms. Le Pen’s party secured about 19 percent of the vote in the first round of the parliamentary elections last week, about a six-point increase from five years ago, allowing 208 of its candidates to advance to a runoff, up from 120 in 2017.And the seats the National Rally was expected to capture on Sunday will be a significant increase from the eight seats it currently holds.“This group will be by far the largest in the history of our political family,” Ms. Le Pen said in a speech on Sunday.She added that her party had achieved the three objectives it had set itself: to prevent Mr. Macron from securing an absolute majority; to continue restructuring France’s political landscape; and to build a strong opposition group.Forming an official group in Parliament is crucial for the National Rally, which has long struggled financially, and will help raise its profile. The last time the far right secured such a group was when Jean-Marie Le Pen, Ms. Le Pen’s father, led 35 lawmakers into Parliament in 1986.The legislative elections this month have also cemented Ms. Le Pen’s overwhelming dominance on the right of the political spectrum. Éric Zemmour, a far-right pundit and her main competitor during the presidential election, was knocked out in the first round, as were all of his party’s candidates. More

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      It’s Macron vs. the Left in a Fierce Battle for France’s Parliament

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      President Emmanuel Macron’s supporters and an alliance of left-wing parties came in neck and neck in the first round of voting. Now they are in a bruising face-off for control of the lower house of Parliament.PALAISEAU, France — Five years ago, Amélie de Montchalin, a politician known more for her quiet technocratic skills than her oratory, easily won election to Parliament from this southern suburb of Paris, and later became one of President Emmanuel Macron’s ministers.But at a small rally last week, at risk of losing her seat to a left-wing opponent in this year’s parliamentary elections, she launched into an uncharacteristically fiery tirade, accusing the left of promoting “a vision of disorder” that would lead France to “submission” to Russia.If the left won, Ms. de Montchalin told the crowd gathered in a sun-drenched square, “in a few weeks or a few months, there will be bankruptcies and unemployed people.”Her outburst reflected the bruising rhetorical battle that Mr. Macron’s centrist forces and a coalition of left-wing candidates are waging ahead of the second round of voting in the parliamentary elections on Sunday. The stakes are high for Mr. Macron given that a defeat could hamper his majority in the National Assembly, France’s more powerful house of Parliament, and hinder his ambitious agenda.Only months ago, Mr. Macron was wooing the left as he sought re-election as president in a bid to keep the country’s rising far right from winning power. Now, a left-wing coalition has become his No. 1 enemy.Amélie de Montchalin, France’s Ecological Transition and Territories’ Cohesion minister, spoke at a campaign rally last week in Palaiseau, near Paris.Alain Jocard/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Macron’s supporters describe a potential victory by the coalition and its leader, the hard-left politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, as a catastrophe that would ruin France. The left says Mr. Macron and his allies are panicking because they are losing their grip on power, and they accuse the president of staging photo ops in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, as he seeks to mediate in the Ukraine war instead of caring for French voters.Both sides are desperately chasing the roughly 52.5 percent of the French electorate who did not vote last Sunday, the lowest level in the first round of a legislative election since 1958.Polls and projections suggest it could be difficult for Mr. Macron’s alliance of centrist parties, known as Ensemble, to retain the absolute majority that it enjoyed during his previous term and that allowed him to push legislation through relatively unimpeded.Instead, the president could be left with a relative majority — more seats than any other political force, but not more than half of the 577 seats in the National Assembly — forcing him to reach across the aisle for certain bills.“Even if he gets a majority, it is likely that he will have to negotiate more,” said Olivier Rozenberg, an associate professor at Sciences Po in Paris. After five years of Mr. Macron’s top-down governing style, which left many lawmakers feeling sidelined, “the logic of governing will probably be a little less vertical,” Mr. Rozenberg said.Weeks ago, Mr. Macron appeared likely to secure an absolute majority after convincingly defeating Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, in the presidential race. Over the past 20 years, voters have usually given their newly elected president a strong parliamentary backing.Mr. Macron, third left, and other European leaders on Thursday in Irpin, Ukraine. Mr. Macron’s opponents have chastised him for staging photo ops in Ukraine instead of focusing on the concerns of French voters.Pool photo by Ludovic MarinThen, France’s fractious leftist parties unexpectedly agreed to set aside major differences on foreign and economic policies, at least temporarily, and forge an alliance for the parliamentary election called NUPES, for Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale, which includes Mr. Mélenchon’s France Unbowed Party, and the Socialist, Green and Communist parties. In the first round last Sunday, they finished neck and neck with Mr. Macron’s alliance, with roughly 25 percent of the vote.Pointing to the leftist alliance’s proposals, which include overhauling France’s Constitution and raising the monthly minimum wage to $1,580, Mr. Macron’s top lieutenants have compared Mr. Mélenchon with Hugo Chávez, the populist former Venezuelan leader. They have warned that a leftist victory would return France to “Soviet regulation” and bring a “fiscal guillotine at all levels.” They have also castigated Mr. Mélenchon as being too soft on Russia.Jérôme Guedj, a Socialist who is running for the leftist coalition in the Essonne department against Ms. de Montchalin, lamented what he called “demonization, caricature and amalgam” that reflected Mr. Macron’s and his party’s “panic” over possible defeat.“It really reminds me of 1981,” Mr. Guedj said, referring to the year when François Mitterrand, the Socialist leader, won the presidency with support from French Communists. “People were saying, ‘There will be Russian tanks on the Place de la Concorde.’”The left has lobbed accusations of its own. Mr. Mélenchon’s supporters say the government is secretly planning to increase the value-added tax in order to reduce the country’s deficit, an assertion that Mr. Macron’s alliance has called a falsehood.The speed with which Mr. Macron went from courting the left in the presidential election to battling it for the parliamentary vote is partly a result of France’s two-round electoral system. But it is also a testament to Mr. Macron’s shifting political nature, and to the fact that his party has gradually occupied an enlarged center with radical opponents on both sides, Mr. Rozenberg said.Mr. Mélenchon this week in Toulouse, southwestern France. Mr. Macron’s supporters describe a potential victory by the left coalition and Mr. Mélenchon as a catastrophe that would ruin France.Lionel Bonaventure/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Macronism developed by eating at its margins, by eating the center left and eating the center right rather than making alliances or negotiating coalitions,” he said.This shapeshifting has not been without confusion. The president’s alliance initially struggled to give clear voting guidance to supporters in districts where Ms. Le Pen’s party was facing off against leftist candidates in runoffs, at times describing both forces as equally threatening. Party leaders eventually stressed that “not one vote” should go to the far right.But some of Mr. Macron’s supporters appear divided on the issue.Michèle Grossi, 74, a retiree from a constituency near Paris where the far right and the left will face off on Sunday, said she would vote for Ms. Le Pen’s candidate in the absence of a Macron candidate because she was “very afraid of Mélenchon.” Another supporter of Mr. Macron, Christophe Karmann, said that presented with the same scenario, he would back the left because it was a “republican force.”Ms. Grossi also echoed concerns among some of the president’s supporters that he had been disengaged from the campaign, saying it was “unfortunate that Macron has not spoken more.”Mr. Macron tried to dispel that notion last week, issuing dire warnings about what was at stake in this election. In a solemn address on Tuesday on the tarmac of Orly airport, south of Paris, he said that “in these troubled times,” the vote was “more crucial than ever.” He urged voters to give him a “solid majority” for the “superior interest of the nation.”“Nothing would be worse than to add a French disorder to the global disorder,” said Mr. Macron, who was about to embark on a trip to Eastern Europe, partly to visit French troops dispatched in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.But Mr. Macron’s comments, made as the presidential aircraft’s engines thrummed in the background, did little to quell accusations from his opponents that he had avoided open confrontation.“His ship is sinking and Macron is taking a plane,” Mr. Mélenchon said mockingly at a rally in Toulouse. In an interview with Le Parisien, Mr. Mélenchon said the French president was disconnected from ordinary citizens’ concerns over rising food and energy costs.A market in Amiens, France, in March. Rising costs for basic items continue to be a talking point for France’s politicians.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times“He doesn’t understand French society,” he said. “He doesn’t realize how people are being suffocated by prices.”In the Essonne department, Ms. de Montchalin, who is currently the minister in charge of France’s green transition, trailed Mr. Guedj by seven percentage points after the first round. She is one of 15 ministers who are running for a seat in Parliament and who have been warned by Mr. Macron that losing would mean leaving his cabinet.To gin up support during the rally last week, Ms. de Montchalin invited a notable guest: Bruno Le Maire, France’s longtime finance minister. He told the crowd that the economy had improved — unemployment has fallen to 7.3 percent, the lowest level in a decade — and that unlike Mr. Mélenchon, Mr. Macron was not promising “a bright future on credit.”But Ms. de Montchalin’s campaign staff acknowledged it would be a tough election.Mr. Karmann said he had bet with friends that should Mr. Macron’s party fail to muster a solid working majority, the president would dissolve the National Assembly and call new elections. France in the next five years, he said, “will be hard to govern.”Constant Méheut More

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      Pro-Macron Forces Expected to Prevail but Face Left-Wing Challenge

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      The French president’s party and its centrist allies were neck and neck with a left-wing alliance in France’s first round of parliamentary elections.PARIS — After a first round of voting in French parliamentary elections marked by the lowest turnout on record, President Emmanuel Macron’s party and its allies looked likely on Sunday to retain a majority even as a newly formed coalition of left-wing parties mounted a strong challenge, according to preliminary projections.Just 47.5 percent of the electorate voted, according to the projections based on initial results, a reflection of widespread disillusionment with politics and a feeling that nothing will change whatever the country’s political alignment.The projections, which are generally accurate, showed pro-Macron parties and the left each getting around 25 to 26 percent of the vote. However, the projections also suggested that after the second round of voting Mr. Macron’s centrist alliance would win between 255 and 310 seats in the 577-member National Assembly.The left-wing alliance known by the acronym NUPES, for Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale, would have 150 to 210 seats.The second round of the elections — for candidates who did not win outright this time — will be held next Sunday.Unlike many of its European neighbors, France awards seats to candidates who get the most ballots in each district, rather than by proportion of the total vote across the country, meaning that percentage vote shares are an imperfect measure of what the National Assembly will ultimately look like.President Emmanuel Macron of France after casting his ballot in parliamentary elections on Sunday in the seaside town of Le Touquet, in northern France. Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIf Mr. Macron’s party and its allies muster an absolute majority of seats — 289 — he will have relatively free rein to enact his legislative agenda. That seemed plausible but by no means certain after the first round.There has been no honeymoon for Mr. Macron, who was decisively re-elected in April. In the end, he won more because enough voters were determined to keep his extreme-right opponent, Marine Le Pen, out than because there was any wave of enthusiasm for him. Energy and food bills have been rising, and the president has at times seemed curiously disengaged from France’s citizens and their concerns.The result in Sunday’s elections represented a remarkable achievement for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the fiery leftist leader who has benefited from the broad anxiety in French society over inflation. He managed to forge a movement uniting his own France Unbowed Party with the Socialists, Greens and Communists, after the left proved hopelessly divided during the presidential election and was largely sidelined.Emmanuel Macron’s Second Term as President of FranceWith the reelection of Emmanuel Macron, French voters favored his promise of stability  over the temptation of an extremist lurch.Cabinet: President Macron’s new government combines continuity with change, as newcomers at the foreign and education ministries join first-term veterans.New Prime Minister: Élisabeth Borne, the minister of labor who previously was in charge of the environment, will be the second woman to hold the post in France.Overcoming Tragedy: Ms. Borne’s father, a World War II resistance member and a Holocaust survivor, killed himself when she was 11, an experience she has rarely discussed in public.Rape Allegations: Two women have accused Damien Abad, the newly appointed minister for solidarity and for disabled people, of raping them. Mr. Abad has denied the allegations.However, Mr. Mélenchon, who had wanted to turn the vote into a plebiscite that would force Mr. Macron to make him prime minister, appeared to have failed in that aim.Among other measures, Mr. Mélenchon wants to reduce the retirement age to 60 from 62, raise the minimum wage, phase out the nuclear plants that provide most of France’s energy and bend European Union rules to allow higher debt and deficits.A poster for the NUPES coalition, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, in Paris, on Sunday. Mr. Mélenchon is pictured on the left in the poster. Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Mélenchon, in a televised address on Sunday, said that the left-wing alliance had “magnificently” succeeded in its first test, “campaigning together, shoulder to shoulder, and convincing.” He insisted, against the evidence, that Mr. Macron’s party had lost its dominance.“For the first time in the Fifth Republic, a newly elected president has been unable to muster a majority in the following legislative election,” he said, an apparent reference to the equal vote shares on Sunday.The final composition of the National Assembly will become clear only after the second round of voting. Runoffs are usually held when no candidate gets more than half of the vote in the first round. They are contested between the top two vote-getters in a district, although under certain conditions they can feature three or even four candidates. Whoever wins the most votes in the runoff wins the race.If Mr. Macron’s party and its allies lose their absolute majority next Sunday, he will be forced to reach out to lawmakers from opposing parties, most probably the center-right Republicans, for support on certain bills. The projection showed the Republicans and their allies claiming 40 to 60 seats.The president, whose party and its allies currently hold 345 seats, named a government only last month, led by Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne. Her impact up to now seems to have been minimal.Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne of France voting on Sunday in Calvados, in the country’s north.Sameer Al-Doumy/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSeveral of Mr. Macron’s cabinet members are running in the elections, including Ms. Borne. On Sunday none appeared to have been knocked out of the election. Their races were being closely watched, as a loss by one or several of them next week would be a rebuke of Mr. Macron, who has warned that those who are not elected will be obliged to leave his cabinet.Ms. Borne said in a televised address on Sunday that Mr. Macron’s party and its allies were the “only political force capable of obtaining a majority.”“Faced with the situation in the world, and war on Europe’s doorstep, we cannot take the risk of instability and of approximations,” she said. “Faced with extremes, we will yield nothing, not on one side nor the other.”If the turnout — the lowest on record for the first round of legislative elections — was linked to broad dissatisfaction with politics, it might also have reflected Mr. Macron’s highly personalized top-down style during his first term, which has often made France’s Parliament seem marginal or even irrelevant. He has now promised to govern in a more consultative way — but then he promised that in 2017, only to embrace the enormous powers of the presidency with apparent relish.Mr. Macron is the first incumbent to be re-elected since Jacques Chirac in 2002. After stumbling during the presidential campaign, he recovered to defeat Ms. Le Pen by a margin of 17 percentage points.Since then, Ms. Le Pen’s anti-immigrant National Rally party has had trouble connecting with voters and, after the first round of voting, appeared likely to end up with no more than a few dozen seats.On Sunday, Ms. Le Pen, who was poised to keep her seat in Parliament, called on her supporters to abstain from voting in the event of a runoff between a candidate from the left-wing alliance and one from Mr. Macron’s coalition, to prevent Mr. Macron from gaining an absolute majority.“It’s important to not let Mr. Macron get an absolute majority,” she said. “If you let him, we risk entering a tunnel over the next five years, a lightless tunnel.”Éric Zemmour, a far-right pundit who briefly shook up the presidential election with anti-immigrant stances even more extreme than Ms. Le Pen’s, had entered the parliamentary race in the southern Var area of France, but on Sunday he was knocked out.Marine Le Pen after voting in Henin Beaumont, in northern France.Stephanie Lecocq/EPA, via ShutterstockForeign policy is largely determined by the president, but Mr. Macron needs Parliament for his domestic agenda. This includes his contentious vow to raise the legal age of retirement progressively to 65 from 62. He would like to see a bill enacted within 12 months to that effect.More pressing is a government bill to prop up French purchasing power, which has taken a hit from rising inflation. The government wants Parliament to vote over the summer on the bill, which includes subsidies for poorer households to buy essential food products.The National Assembly is the more powerful house of Parliament, with greater leeway to legislate and challenge the executive than the Senate. It usually has the final word if the two houses disagree on a bill, and it is the only house that can topple a French cabinet with a no-confidence vote.The party that Mr. Macron founded, La République en Marche, swept to victory in 2017 with a wave of political newcomers as candidates. For these elections, La République en Marche is the largest force in a coalition called Ensemble, which includes some of Mr. Macron’s longtime centrist allies and some newer ones.The left-wing alliance ran a vigorous campaign that saturated airwaves and that focused heavily on Mr. Mélenchon. With typical bravado, and equally typical hyperbole, he promised that French voters could “elect” him prime minister by sweeping in a left-wing majority in Parliament for the first time in a decade. The prime minister is in fact appointed by the president.But Mr. Macron is a formidable opponent, as several elections have now shown. He has proved masterful in occupying the entire middle ground in French politics, eclipsing both the center-left Socialists and the center-right Republicans.Whatever the temptation of the extremes for French voters angered over the economic situation and immigration, the center retains a strong appeal, and the country has resisted the kind of blow-up-the-system political lurch evident in America’s election of Donald J. Trump and Britain’s choice of Brexit.Constant Méheut More

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      Newly United, French Left Hopes to Counter President in Upcoming Vote

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      Left-wing parties have joined forces ahead of France’s two-stage parliamentary elections, hoping to revive their fortunes and put a break on President Emmanuel Macron’s agenda.ALLEX, France — With its centuries-old stone villages nestled among lavender fields, cows and goats grazing in the mountains and miles of vineyards, the Drôme region resembles a France in miniature.Steeped in tradition and seemingly averse to change, the vast southeastern district, tucked between Lyon and Marseille, has for the past two decades been the political domain of France’s center-right. But with the first round of France’s two-step parliamentary elections approaching on Sunday, the long-excluded left sees a rare opening to challenge President Emmanuel Macron, after his convincing re-election victory in April over Marine Le Pen, his far-right challenger.Largely nonexistent in the presidential campaign, France’s fractious leftist parties have forged an alliance with the aim of making themselves relevant again, blocking Mr. Macron from getting a majority in Parliament and complicating his new five-year term.At least that is the hope of politicians like Marie Pochon, the local left-wing candidate in the third constituency of the Drôme, where left-wing parties outscored Mr. Macron’s in the presidential vote by more than 10 percentage points.Marie Pochon, left, a candidate representing the leftist coalition NUPES, campaigning door to door in Allex, France, a town in the Drôme.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesDuring a recent stop in Allex, a small village of cream-colored stone houses in the eastern part of the Drôme, Ms. Pochon was met with an enthusiasm that had long eluded the left in this part of France.“Keep going, we’re all behind you!” Maud Dugrand, a resident of Allex, told Ms. Pochon as she rang doorbells on a narrow street and handed out leaflets, which one resident, reading a newspaper on his terrace, refused, saying he was already convinced by her.“Our constituency is a laboratory,” said Pascale Rochas, a local Socialist candidate in the 2017 legislative elections who has now rallied behind Ms. Pochon’s candidacy. “If we can win here, we can win elsewhere.”The Drôme, indeed, is a snapshot of small-town France, giving the local election the veneer of a national contest. Until recently, the region was typical of the disarray of the left at the national level, with each party refusing to collaborate and instead clinging to its strongholds.Emmanuel Macron’s Second Term as President of FranceWith the reelection of Emmanuel Macron, French voters favored his promise of stability  over the temptation of an extremist lurch.Cabinet: President Macron’s new government combines continuity with change, as newcomers at the foreign and education ministries join first-term veterans.New Prime Minister: Élisabeth Borne, the minister of labor who previously was in charge of the environment, will be the second woman to hold the post in France.Overcoming Tragedy: Ms. Borne’s father, a World War II resistance member and a Holocaust survivor, killed himself when she was 11, an experience she has rarely discussed in public.Rape Allegations: Two women have accused Damien Abad, the newly appointed minister for solidarity and for disabled people, of raping them. Mr. Abad has denied the allegations.The Socialists and Communists have long dominated the southern Provençal villages, while the Greens and the hard left have battled for the more economically threatened farmlands in the north.Residents discussing the upcoming legislative elections in a market in Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux, in the Drôme, on Tuesday.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesBut the new leftist alliance — forged under the leadership of the longtime leftist firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon — is now trying to bridge those gaps, uniting Mr. Mélenchon’s own France Unbowed Party with the Socialists, Communists and Greens.Mr. Mélenchon, who came third in April’s presidential race, has portrayed the parliamentary election as a “third round” presidential vote. He has called on voters to metaphorically “elect” him prime minister (the position is appointed by the president) by giving the coalition a majority in the National Assembly, the lower and most powerful house of Parliament.The alliance has allowed the left to avoid competing candidacies and instead field a single candidate in almost all of France’s 577 constituencies, automatically raising its chances of winning seats in Parliament.Stewart Chau, a political analyst for the polling firm Viavoice, said the alliance was “the only dynamic in the current political landscape.”Since her loss in the presidential election, Ms. Le Pen’s National Rally party has failed to drive the public debate around its favorite themes of economic insecurity, immigration and crime, and the two-round voting system, which generally favors more moderate candidates, will most likely result in the far right securing only a few dozen seats in Parliament.Posters featuring Ms. Pochon, in the commune of Saoû.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesMr. Chau said Mr. Mélenchon had created a new “center of gravity” for the French left and had “succeeded in pushing through the idea that the game was not up yet,” despite Mr. Macron’s re-election.Opinion polls currently give the leftist coalition — called Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et sociale, more commonly known by its acronym NUPES — a chance of winning 160 to 230 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly.That could be enough to put a break on Mr. Macron’s political agenda in Parliament and upset his second term as president, though it is far from certain.Ms. Pochon, 32, an environmental activist, perhaps best embodies the outreach of the left-wing alliance even in areas that the center-right has long controlled.Economic and social issues vary greatly along the roads that run through the Drôme’s third constituency. Each of its 238 municipalities, populated by only a few thousand people, face specific challenges.Voters mingling after Ms. Pochon’s rally on Tuesday before the first round of voting on Sunday.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesEconomic insecurity, a shortage of doctors and a lack of public transportation are the main concerns in the district’s northern farmlands, whereas Provençal villages in the south are more worried about lavender production, a key feature of the local economy increasingly threatened by rising temperatures.To address the variety of issues, Ms. Pochon has drawn on the alliance’s extensive platform, which includes raising the monthly minimum wage to 1,500 euros, or about $1,600; kick-starting ecological transition with big investments in green energy; reintroducing small train lines; and putting an end to medical deserts.“We’re witnessing the emergence of a rural environmentalism, of a new kind of left in these territories,” Ms. Pochon said during an interview.It has also helped that local left-wing forces have teamed up in the election, putting an end to divisions that Ms. Rochas said had been a “heartbreak.”Celia de Lavergne, right, a candidate in Mr. Macron’s center-right party, canvassing for votes at a market.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesIn the Drôme, Macron supporters acknowledged the challenge they face. “NUPES worry us a bit because they’re very present on the ground,” said Maurice Mérabet, as he was handing out leaflets at an open-air market for Célia de Lavergne, the constituency’s current lawmaker and a member of Mr. Macron’s party, La République En Marche.Ms. de Lavergne, who is running for re-election and was campaigning in Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux, a small town in southern Drôme, said it would “be a close race” between her and Ms. Pochon.She attacked the leftist alliance for its economic platform, saying it was unrealistic and slammed the coalition’s plans to phase out reliance on nuclear power.Instead she highlighted how she has fought to try to get an additional reactor for the local nuclear plant, as part of Mr. Macron’s ambitious plans to construct 14 new-generation reactors.“Being antinuclear is a total aberration,” said Jean-Paul Sagnard, 72, a retiree, as he wove his way through the market’s vegetable stalls. He added that Mr. Macron’s platform was “the one that makes the most sense economically speaking.”Nuclear power and climate change are key issues for voters in the Drôme.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesCriticism about Mr. Mélenchon’s fiery personality is also frequent, even among left-wing supporters.Maurice Feschet, a lavender producer, said that even though he would vote for the leftist alliance on Sunday, Mr. Mélenchon’s calls to elect him prime minister had left him indifferent.“I don’t think that he has what it takes to lead the country,” said Mr. Feschet, standing in the middle of a lavender field.In the narrow streets of the village of Allex, Ms. Dugrand, the supporter of Ms. Pochon, also told the candidate that Mr. Mélenchon “is not my cup of tea.” But she could not hide her excitement at the prospect of the left becoming the main force of opposition to Mr. Macron, after five years during which it was virtually voiceless.“We only have one wish, that something happens,” she said.Campaign posters in Allex, a village in the Drôme, speak to the region’s importance in the upcoming election.Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times More

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      America’s Doug Mastriano Problem

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      If the Ohio Senate primary two weeks ago provided some clarity about the ideological divisions in the Republican Party, Tuesday’s primaries often seemed more like a showcase for the distinctive personalities that populate a Trumpified G.O.P.The Pennsylvania Senate race gave us an especially vivid mix: As of this writing, the Celebrity Doctor and the Hedge Fund Guy Pretending to Be a MAGA True Believer may be headed for a recount, after the Would-Be Media Personality With the Inspiring Back Story and the Unfortunate Twitter Feed faded back into the pack. In the governor’s race, Republican voters chose to nominate Doug Mastriano, a.k.a. the QAnon Dad. In North Carolina, they ended — for now — the political career of Representative Madison Cawthorn, the Obviously Suffering Grifter.On substance, as opposed to personality, though, the night’s stakes were relatively simple: Can Republicans prevent their party from becoming the party of constitutional crisis, with leaders tacitly committed to turning the next close presidential election into a legal-judicial-political train wreck?This is a distinctive version of a familiar political problem. Whenever a destabilizing populist rebellion is unleashed inside a democratic polity, there are generally two ways to bring back stability without some kind of crisis or rupture in the system.Sometimes the revolt can be quarantined within a minority coalition and defeated by a majority. This was the destiny, for instance, of William Jennings Bryan’s 1890s prairie-populist rebellion, which took over the Democratic Party but went down to multiple presidential defeats at the hands of the more establishmentarian Republicans. You can see a similar pattern, for now, in French politics, where the populism of Marine Le Pen keeps getting isolated and defeated by the widely disliked but grudgingly tolerated centrism of Emmanuel Macron.In the alternative path to stability, the party being reshaped by populism finds leaders who can absorb its energies, channel its grievances and claim its mantle — but also defeat or suppress its most extreme manifestations. This was arguably the path of New Deal liberalism in its relationship to Depression-era populism and radicalism: In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt was able to sustain support from voters who were also drawn to more demagogic characters, from Huey Long to Charles Coughlin. Two generations later, it was the path of Reaganite conservatism in its relationship to both George Wallace’s populism and the Goldwaterite New Right.The problem for America today is that neither stabilizing strategy is going particularly well. Part of the Never Trump movement has aspired to a Macron-style strategy, preaching establishment unity behind the Democratic Party. But the Democrats haven’t cooperated: They conspicuously failed to contain and defeat Trumpism in 2016, and there is no sign that the Biden-era variation on the party is equipped to hold on to the majority it won in 2020.Meanwhile, the Republican Party at the moment does have a provisional model for channeling but also restraining populism. Essentially it involves leaning into culture-war controversy and rhetorical pugilism to a degree that provokes constant liberal outrage and using that outrage to reassure populist voters that you’re on their side and they don’t need to throw you over for a conspiracy theorist or Jan. 6 marcher.This is the model, in different styles and contexts, of Glenn Youngkin and Ron DeSantis. In Tuesday’s primaries it worked for Idaho’s conservative incumbent governor, Brad Little, who easily defeated his own lieutenant governor’s much-further-right campaign. Next week the same approach seems likely to help Brian Kemp defeat David Perdue for the governor’s nomination in Georgia. And it offers the party’s only chance, most likely via a DeSantis candidacy, to defeat Donald Trump in 2024.Unfortunately this model works best when you have a trusted figure, a known quantity, delivering the “I’ll be your warrior, I’ll defeat the left” message. The Cawthorn race, in which the toxic congressman was unseated by a member of the North Carolina State Senate, shows that this figure doesn’t have to be an incumbent to succeed, especially if other statewide leaders provide unified support. But if you have neither unity nor a figure with statewide prominence or incumbency as your champion — no Kemp, no Little — then you can get results like Mastriano’s victory last night in Pennsylvania: a Republican nominee for governor who cannot be trusted to carry out his constitutional duties should the presidential election be close in 2024.So now the obligation returns to the Democrats. Mastriano certainly deserves to lose the general election, and probably he will. But throughout the whole Trumpian experience, the Democratic Party has consistently failed its own tests of responsibility: It has talked constantly about the threat to democracy while moving leftward to a degree that makes it difficult to impossible to hold the center, and it has repeatedly cheered on unfit Republican candidates on the theory that they will be easier to beat.This happened conspicuously with Trump himself, and more unforgivably it happened again with Mastriano: Pennsylvania Democrats sent out mailers boosting his candidacy and ran a big ad buy, more than twice Mastriano’s own TV spending, calling him “one of Donald Trump’s strongest supporters” — an “attack” line perfectly scripted to improve his primary support.Now they have him, as they had Trump in 2016. We’ll see if they can make the story end differently this time.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Emmanuel Macron Inaugurated for a 2nd Term as France President

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      “Rarely has our world and our country confronted such a combination of challenges,” Mr. Macron said, promising to govern France more inclusively.PARIS — Beneath the chandeliers of the Elysée Palace, Emmanuel Macron was inaugurated on Saturday for a second five-year term as president of France, vowing to lead more inclusively and to “act first to avoid any escalation following the Russian aggression in Ukraine.”In a sober speech lasting less than ten minutes, remarkably short for a leader given to prolixity in his first term, Mr. Macron seemed determined to project a new humility and a break from a sometimes abrasive style. “Rarely has our world and our country confronted such a combination of challenges,” he said.Mr. Macron, 44, held off the far-right nationalist leader Marine Le Pen to win re-election two weeks ago with 58.55 percent of the vote. It was a more decisive victory than polls had suggested but it also left no doubt of the anger and social fracture he will now confront.Where other countries had ceded to “nationalist temptation and nostalgia for the past,” and to ideologies “we thought left behind in the last century,” France had chosen “a republican and European project, a project of independence in a destabilized world,” Mr. Macron said.In a sober speech lasting less than ten minutes, Mr. Macron projected a new humility and a break from a sometimes abrasive style.Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHe has spent a lot of time in recent months attempting to address that instability, provoked above all by Russia’s war in Ukraine. His overtures have borne little fruit. Still, Mr. Macron made clear that he would fight so that “democracy and courage prevail” in the struggle for a “a new European peace and a new autonomy on our continent.”The president is an ardent proponent of greater “strategic autonomy,” sovereignty and independence for Europe, which he sees as a precondition for relevancy in the 21st century. This quest has brought some friction with the United States, largely overcome during the war in Ukraine, even if Mr. Macron seems to have more faith in negotiating with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia than President Biden has.Understand France’s Presidential ElectionThe reelection of Emmanuel Macron on April 24 marked the end of a presidential campaign that pitted his promise for stability against extremist views.Presidential Election: Mr. Macron triumphed over Marine Le Pen, his far-right challenger, after a campaign where his promise of stability prevailed. Growing Disillusionment: The election was marked by record levels of abstention, a sign of people’s frustration with the political establishment. Signs of Trouble: Despite Mr. Macron’s victory, the low turnout and Ms. Le Pen’s strong showing offered warning signs for Western democracies. Political Parties: France’s mainstream left and right-wing parties used to have it all, but fared poorly in the presidential election. What went wrong?Mr. Macron gave his trademark wink to his wife Brigitte, 69, as he arrived in the reception hall of the presidential palace, where about 500 people, including former Presidents François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, were gathered.Laurent Fabius, the president of the Constitutional Council, formally announced the results of the election. A general presented Mr. Macron with the elaborate necklace of Grandmaster of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest distinction.Guests came from all walks of life, ranging from the military to the theater. But in a sign of the distance France has to travel in its quest for greater political diversity, the attendees included a lot of white men in dark blue suits and ties, the near universal uniform of the products of the country’s elite schools.At the ceremony, Mr. Macron received the necklace of a Grandmaster of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest distinction.Pool photo by Gonzalo FuentesThe president then went out to the gardens, where he listened to a 21-gun salute fired from the Invalides on the other side of the Seine. No drive down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées followed, in line with the ceremony for the last re-elected president, Jacques Chirac, two decades ago.Mr. Macron will travel to Strasbourg on Monday to celebrate “Europe Day,” commemorating the end of World War II in Europe, which in contrast to Mr. Putin’s May 9 “Victory Day” is dedicated to the concept of peace through unity on the Continent.Addressing the European Parliament, Mr. Macron will set out plans for the 27-nation European Union to become an effective, credible and cohesive power. He will then travel to Berlin that evening to meet German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in a sign of the paramount importance of Franco-German relations.Sometimes referred to as the “president of the rich” because of the free-market reforms that initiated his presidency (and despite the state’s “whatever-it-takes” support for furloughed workers during the pandemic), Mr. Macron promised a “new method” of governing, symbolized by renaming his centrist party “Renaissance.”Dismissing the idea that his election was a prolongation of his first term, Mr. Macron said “a new people, different from five years ago, has entrusted a new president with a new mandate.”He vowed to govern in conjunction with labor unions and all representatives of the cultural, economic, social and political worlds. This would stand in contrast to the top-down presidential style he favored in his first term that often seemed to turn Parliament into a sideshow. The institutions of the Fifth Republic, as favored by Charles de Gaulle in 1958, tilt heavily toward presidential authority.Mr. Macron greeted two of his presidential predecessors, Nicolas Sarkozy, center, and François Hollande.Pool photo by Gonzalo FuentesMs. Le Pen’s strong showing revealed a country angry over falling purchasing power, rising inflation, high gasoline prices, and a sense, in blighted urban projects and ill-served rural areas, of abandonment. Mr. Macron was slow to wake up to this reality and now appears determined to make amends. He has promised several measures, including indexing pensions to inflation beginning this summer, to demonstrate his commitment.However, Mr. Macron’s plan to raise the retirement age to 65 from 62, albeit in gradual stages, appears almost certain to provoke social unrest in a country where the left is proposing that people be allowed to retire at 60.“Let us act to make our country a great ecological power through a radical transformation of our means of production, of our way of traveling, of our lives,” Mr. Macron declared. During his first term, his approach to leading France toward a post-carbon economy was often hesitant, infuriating the left.This month, left-wing forces struck a deal to unite for next month’s parliamentary election under the leadership of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a hard-left politician who came just short of beating out Ms. Le Pen for a spot in the presidential election runoff. Mr. Mélenchon has made no secret of his ambition to become prime minister, and Mr. Macron no secret of his doubts about this prospect.The bloc — including Mr. Mélenchon’s France Unbowed Party, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party and the Greens — represents an unusual feat for France’s chronically fractured left and a new challenge to Mr. Macron. He will be weakened if he cannot renew his current clear majority in Parliament.A crowd from all walks of life, ranging from the military to the theater, at the Elysée Palace.Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe creation of the new Renaissance Party and an agreement announced on Friday with small centrist parties constituted Mr. Macron’s initial answer to this changed political reality.Mr. Macron’s first major political decision will likely be the choice of a new prime minister to replace Jean Castex, the incumbent. The president is said to favor the appointment of a woman to lead the government into the legislative elections.However, he will not make the decision until after his second term formally begins on next Saturday, after the first term expires at midnight.Constant Méheut More