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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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      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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      What to Know About France’s Parliamentary Elections

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      President Emmanuel Macron is looking to secure a strong majority to help him pass bills during his second term, but a reinvigorated alliance of left-wing parties hopes to thwart him.PARIS — Weeks after re-electing President Emmanuel Macron, voters in France return to the polls on Sunday to choose their parliamentary representatives, elections that will determine whether Mr. Macron’s bills sail or stumble through the legislature during his second term.All 577 seats are up for grabs in the National Assembly, France’s lower and more powerful house of Parliament, which Mr. Macron’s party and its allies currently control. Most polls predict that will remain the case — to a degree.France’s modern presidential and parliamentary elections are held only months apart, on the same five-year cycle. Over the past two decades, voters have always given their newly elected president strong parliamentary backing, and polls and experts suggest that would be a likely outcome for Mr. Macron this time, too.His biggest challenge comes from a reinvigorated alliance of France’s left-wing forces, which have taken the rare step of setting aside personal squabbles and ideological differences to mount a united front. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the far-left France Unbowed party, the dominating force in that alliance, is hoping it can eke out a narrow victory and compel Mr. Macron to appoint him prime minister.But so far, according to recent surveys, voters have been more concerned by surging inflation than by the campaign, and pollsters say they expect record-low turnout.Here is a primer on the elections, which will be held in two rounds, on Sunday and on June 19.President Emmanuel Macron’s party and its allies currently control the National Assembly, and most polls predict that will remain the case — to a degree.Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat is at stake?Presidents hold France’s most powerful political office, with broad abilities to govern by decree. But they need Parliament, and especially the National Assembly, to accomplish most of their bigger domestic policy goals, push through spending bills or change the Constitution.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.Some of Mr. Macron’s prominent campaign promises, like his vow to raise the legal age of retirement, require legislation. His new government also wants to tackle the effects of inflation, requiring lawmakers to vote on measures like food subsidies.The main players in the elections are:Ensemble, a centrist coalition that includes La République en Marche, the party that Mr. Macron founded and that swept to victory in 2017 with a wave of political newcomers as candidates.La Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale, more commonly known by its acronym NUPES, a left-wing alliance brought together by Mr. Mélenchon’s France Unbowed party that includes the Socialist, Green and Communist parties.A group of traditional right-wing parties, led by Les Républicains, the mainstream conservatives.The far-right National Rally party of Marine Le Pen, who was defeated by Mr. Macron in the presidential runoff in April.The latest polls suggest that Ensemble and NUPES are neck-and-neck, with about 25 to 28 percent each. The National Rally is predicted to receive around 20 to 21 percent of the vote, with Les Républicains roughly 10 to 11 percent. Smaller groups, including the party of Éric Zemmour, a far-right pundit who ran for president, are polling in the single digits.If Mr. Macron’s party alone musters an absolute majority of seats — 289 — he will have relatively free rein to enact his legislative agenda. A repeat of the current situation, in which his party and its allies hold an absolute majority, would make him dependent on the coalition to pass some legislation. But if his party and its allies lose too much ground, they could be forced to reach out to lawmakers from opposing parties on certain bills. And if NUPES is able to secure control of Parliament, it would force Mr. Macron to appoint a new prime minister and a new cabinet, potentially blocking much of his agenda.A polling station in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, in April during the second round of the country’s presidential election.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesHow do the elections work?France’s 577 electoral districts cover the mainland, overseas departments and territories, as well as French citizens living abroad. Each district has one seat. More than 6,200 candidates are running for office nationwide.Any number of candidates can compete in the first round in each district, but there are specific thresholds to reach the second round. While in most cases the runoff will feature the top two vote-getters, it can sometimes feature three or even four of them. Whoever wins the most votes in that runoff wins the race. (Under some conditions, a candidate who gets more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round wins outright.)The two-round system usually produces stable majorities that French governments can rely on, but it comes at a cost. The makeup of the National Assembly does not always accurately reflect the country’s broader political landscape and usually skews in favor of bigger parties. Smaller ones complain that their voters do not get the representation they deserve, fueling disaffection with the political system.French presidential candidates, including Mr. Macron, have repeatedly floated the idea of fixing that discrepancy by introducing a dose of proportional representation for parliamentary elections. But a bill on that issue never came to fruition during Mr. Macron’s first term, and it is unclear whether he will pursue the idea during his second.Jean-Luc Mélenchon speaking on Friday at a gathering in Marseille, in southern France, to support candidates from NUPES, a left-wing coalition.Daniel Cole/Associated PressWhat does the National Assembly do?The National Assembly and the Senate — currently controlled by the right — are France’s two houses of Parliament. Both are based in Paris and play important roles in drafting bills and voting laws. But only the National Assembly is elected directly by the people, and it has more leeway to legislate and challenge the executive.The National Assembly 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. It has some prerogatives on key legislation like spending or social security bills.Lawmakers can question cabinet members; they can also establish investigative commissions and hold hearings, although their powers and the scope of their investigations are more limited than congressional inquiries in the United States.Unless the president dissolves the National Assembly and calls for new elections — a move that is rarely attempted — lawmakers are in office for five years.Inside the National Assembly in Paris. The body’s lawmakers are elected to serve for five years.Stephane De Sakutin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat comes next?The last voting stations close at 8 p.m. on Election Day, which is when the French news media will work with pollsters to publish the first projected results based on preliminary counts. Races will be called district by district as the evening progresses.Those first results will give a sense of each party’s standing and of the direction each race might take, but the National Assembly’s final composition will become clear only after the runoffs.Several ministers are running in the elections, including Élisabeth Borne, the prime minister. Their races will be closely watched, as a loss by one or several of them would be seen as a rebuke of Mr. Macron, who has warned that those who are not elected will leave his cabinet. 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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      Are Traditional Political Parties Dead in France?

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      Presidents, prime ministers, Parliament — France’s mainstream left and right-wing parties used to have it all. In the first round of April’s presidential elections, they got less than 7 percent of the vote.PARIS — Since the 1950s, France’s traditional left- and right-wing parties have provided three-quarters of the country’s presidents and nearly all of its prime ministers.Parliament has also swung from one to the other in alternating waves of pink, the color associated with the Socialist Party or its predecessors, and blue, which represents the main conservative party, known today as Les Républicains.But in this month’s presidential election, candidates for both parties cratered.In the first round of voting, Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist candidate, got only 1.75 percent of the vote. Valérie Pécresse, the Républicain candidate, got 4.78 percent, far less than the 2017 candidate for her party, François Fillon, who garnered 20.01 percent — even after a scandal involving a no-show job for his wife.Both Ms. Hidalgo and Ms. Pécresse were unceremoniously knocked out of the race.President Emmanuel Macron, whose centrist party was created just six years ago, then battled Marine Le Pen, of the far-right National Rally party, and won a second term.The stark collapse of the Socialists and Les Républicains capped a yearslong downward spiral for both parties, which have struggled to persuade voters that they could handle concerns including security, inequality and climate change, experts say.Supporters of Valérie Pécresse, the presidential candidate for Les Républicains, watching the results of the first round of the presidential election in Paris, on April 10.Adnan Farzat/EPA, via ShutterstockThe old left-right division has given way to a new landscape, split into three major blocs. Mr. Macron’s broad, pro-globalization center is now flanked by radical forces: on the right, Ms. Le Pen and her anti-immigrant nationalism; on the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a fiery politician who champions state-led policies against E.U. rules and the free market.Many now wonder what will remain of the former stalwart political parties.“Before, there was the left, the right — that was clearer,” said Jeanette Brimble, 80, speaking recently on a narrow cobblestone street in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence. For decades, she voted for mainstream conservatives. This time, pleased by Mr. Macron’s shift rightward, she cast a ballot for him.The downfall of the traditional parties, Ms. Brimble said, was “a bit disturbing for my generation.”In 2017, Mr. Macron’s first election landed an initial blow to the system, shattering the left. With the vote this month, the right is feeling the damage.Mr. Macron is set to be in office until 2027 — French law limits presidents to two consecutive terms. After that, it is unclear whether the traditional parties will be able to rebound.Dominique Reynié, a political analyst who heads the Foundation for Political Innovation, a research institute that focuses on European and economic policy, said a departure from politics by Mr. Macron “would give the traditional governing parties a chance to get back into the game.”But some expect volatility instead.“I don’t believe that traditional parties are going to be reborn on the ashes of La République en Marche,” said Martial Foucault, director of the CEVIPOF political research institute at Sciences Po in Paris, referring to Mr. Macron’s party. In France’s increasingly personality-driven politics, disillusioned voters could shift from one charismatic leader to another, regardless of party affiliation, he said.“Citizens want efficiency,” he added. “So they are prone to these electoral movements, effectively leaving the system in total turbulence.”Mr. Macron, whose policies have straddled the left and right, is scheduled to be in office until 2027.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesIn Aix-en-Provence, a city of 145,000 that has long leaned right, the collapse was striking. Five years ago, Mr. Fillon came in first there with 27.45 percent of the vote. This month, Ms. Pécresse came in sixth with 5.5 percent.Nationwide, the Elabe polling institute found that roughly a third of those who had voted for Mr. Fillon in 2017 chose Mr. Macron this time, versus only a quarter for Ms. Pécresse, Mr. Fillon’s successor as the candidate of Les Républicains. Even Nicolas Sarkozy, the party’s last French president, from 2007 to 2012, didn’t endorse her.In a particularly humiliating turn of events, Ms. Pécresse came in fourth behind Mr. Mélenchon in Versailles, the bourgeois Parisian suburb that she once represented in Parliament. Ms. Hidalgo, who has been mayor of Paris for over eight years, got only 2.17 percent of the capital’s vote.Financial concerns compound the embarrassment.Presidential candidates can get a state reimbursement of up to 8 million euros for funds that they personally contribute to their campaigns. But the amount is much lower — 800,000 euros, or about $865,000 — if they get less than 5 percent of the vote.Mainstream candidates long considered 5 percent a low bar, allowing them to take out loans with the assurance that a large chunk of their expenses would be reimbursed once they cleared the threshold. But Ms. Pécresse, now personally in debt for €5 million, has been forced to appeal for donations.“At stake is the survival of Les Républicains, and beyond that, the survival of the republican right,” she said. (So far she has collected €2 million.)A poster of Ms. Pécresse lying on a street in Marseille, southern France, on April 6.Daniel Cole/Associated PressBoth the Socialists and the Républicains failed to capitalize on anger against Mr. Macron, who wooed voters with sweeping promises of pragmatic centrism but whose first term was divisive. Mainstream parties have struggled to address issues like immigration, security, inequality or climate change, experts say, partly because Mr. Macron has cherry-picked from their platforms, especially on the right.Alix Fabre, who voted for Mr. Fillon in 2017 before turning to Mr. Macron, said in Aix-en-Provence that the president’s pro-business policies and those of the mainstream right felt similar.“Most people around me are from the right, and they’ve joined Macron,” she said.Experts also see a deeper disconnect, saying that both parties grew complacent in the belief that their turn in office would always come again. Fixated on internal quarrels and hemorrhaging dues-paying members, they lost touch with ordinary citizens, failing to harness movements like the Yellow Vest protests, experts said. They have also been unable to offer convincing alternatives to more radical forces like Ms. Le Pen.“It’s a constant, lasting failure to represent social conflict,” said Mr. Reynié, the analyst. For Mr. Foucault, of the CEVIPOF, “these parties haven’t understood what citizens are asking of them, in terms of renewing their platforms and their ideology.”Ms. Hidalgo, center, has been the mayor of Paris for more than eight years, yet only got 2.17 percent of the vote there in the presidential election.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesMr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen’s parties have issues too. Few see La République en Marche outlasting Mr. Macron’s political ambitions. The National Rally has been a Le Pen family affair for decades, marked by eight defeats in presidential elections.France’s traditional political forces still control many cities and other local or regional offices, where voters are more likely to trust familiar faces with day-to-day concerns.In 2021, Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen’s parties failed to win a single one of France’s 13 mainland regions, although Mr. Foucault said appearances were slightly misleading, because without American-style midterm elections, the French only have local elections to voice discontent with the government.Corinne Narassiguin, a top Socialist official, said that her party’s disastrous results at the national level marked “the end of a cycle” that started in 2017, after which the party was forced to sell its headquarters in an upscale Paris neighborhood and move to the suburbs.“Voters have made it clear that we’re no longer able to tell them why they should vote for the Socialists at the national level,” she said.The Socialists and the Républicains are now scrambling to shore up support ahead of the legislative elections in June, which will fill all seats in France’s lower house of Parliament. But both face serious challenges.The Socialists, whose strength in Parliament has already shrunk, could end up with even fewer lawmakers as Mr. Mélenchon’s party gains prominence. The Républicains are torn between those favoring an alliance with Mr. Macron’s party, those wanting to stay independent, and those leaning toward Éric Zemmour, an anti-immigrant pundit who also ran for president.Marine Le Pen, who battled Mr. Macron for the presidency, earlier this month in Paris.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesMarie Ronzevalle, 29, who works in event management in Aix-en-Provence, voted for Mr. Macron in 2017 — she liked his vow to “break with traditional codes” — but was disappointed by some of his policies and picked Ms. Hidalgo in the first round this year.She said that her family struggled to pick a candidate in this election — unlike her now-deceased grandmother and great-grandmother, loyal Socialists who worked for the party.One of her grandfathers, who always voted for the mainstream right but strongly hesitated this time, even briefly considered a blank ballot.“There is less of that feeling of belonging and automatically giving your vote to a party,” Ms. Ronzevalle said. “People are sick and tired of being asked to fit into a box.”“They want to see things change,” she added. “But maybe the old parties are no longer the solution.”Aurelien Breeden More

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      The Unsettling Warning in France’s Election

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      A record number of abstentions, and a strictly binary choice for voters — many of whom said they were picking the lesser of two evils — are trouble signs even within a mature democracy.You should know at least two crucial facts about the French presidential election, whose final round was held last Sunday.The first is that Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate known for her warm relationship with Vladimir Putin and her hostility toward the European Union and immigrants, lost the election — but with the best showing that her party has ever had, carrying 41.5 percent of the second-round vote.The second is that Emmanuel Macron, the incumbent president from the center-right En Marche party, won the election — but with the lowest share of registered voters of any candidate since 1969, because of historically low turnout and high numbers of votes that were cast blank or spoiled in a show of protest.Of those two facts, the first has garnered the most attention. But the second may be more important.Vote, or hostage negotiation?In the first round of the presidential election, Macron came in first, but with nowhere close to a majority. He got barely more than a quarter of the total votes, with 27.85 percent. Le Pen came next with 23.15 percent, and the leftist candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, got 21.95 percent. The rest of the votes were divided between smaller parties.That’s actually pretty common: Today, in many mature democracies, it’s uncommon for any party or ideological faction to get more than about a third of the votes. In the German federal election last year, the center-left party came first, but with only 25.7 percent of the vote — strikingly similar to the numbers for Macron in the first round. In multiparty parliamentary systems, that results in coalition governments in which two or more parties work together — take Germany, again, where a three-party coalition now governs.Ms. Le Pen had a strong showing in both rounds of the 2022 French presidential election.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesBut in direct presidential systems, the winner takes all. And for many voters, that means that elections are less a matter of who they want to support than of who they most want to oppose.So when Le Pen made the second round runoff of the French election, the contest took on the tenor of a hostage negotiation. Macron argued that Le Pen was an existential threat to France, and called for all other candidates’ supporters to unite behind him in order to prevent her from winning the presidency. Mélenchon, the leftist candidate, made a similar plea to his supporters. “We know who we will never vote for,” he said on April 10. “We must not give a single vote for Madame Le Pen.”In the end, enough voters aligned behind Macron to keep the far right out of the presidency. And it seems that many heeded the calls to hold their noses and vote for Macron, despite their aversion to him, in order to protect the country from the far right: According to one poll, about 45 percent of those who voted for him did so only to oppose Le Pen.But the same poll found that the opposite was also true: About 45 percent of Le Pen voters were more interested in opposing Macron than in supporting the far right. Other data bears that out: The overseas French territories Martinique and Guadeloupe supported Mélenchon in the first round, but then gave a majority to Le Pen in the second.Others withdrew entirely. Abstentions and blank ballots hit record highs in this election — a notable development in France, where turnout has historically been around 80 percent.A warning from historyExperts who study France’s history of revolutions and democratic collapse see signs of danger in a system that pushes a wide spectrum of voters into a binary choice between what some see as the lesser of two evils.So how do you tell the difference between normal political anger that can work itself out through a series of elections without leading to serious instability, and something dangerous enough to require structural change to the system itself?A woman voting at a polling station in Saint Denis, in the suburbs of Paris. The election saw a high level of voter abstentions.Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times“That’s the question of French history, right?” Terrence Peterson, a political historian at Florida International University, told me. “Historians have been asking that question about France for a long time, given its history of repeated revolutions.”He saw particular cause for concern in the rising levels of abstentions. “When voters express that they feel disenfranchised, if a majority of them do, then that’s a clear sign” of serious trouble, he said.Some in France have begun to call for an overhaul of the Constitution to make the system more representative. Mélenchon has called for a new Constitution to be drafted via a people’s constituent assembly. In an editorial last week in the French newspaper Le Monde, Frederic Sawicki, a political scientist at Pantheon-Sorbonne University, argued that the lack of proportional representation had brought the far right “to the gates of power” in France.Camille Robcis, a Columbia University historian who studies 20th-century French politics and institutions, said that she was not surprised to hear such calls. “You have a kind of disconnect between the representatives and the popular vote, the electorate,” she said. “The result is that these disenchanted, disenfranchised voters are moving to the extremes.”How am I doing?I’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to interpreter@nytimes.com. You can also follow me on Twitter.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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      Convincing Victory Disguises Challenges for France’s Macron

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      France’s runoff election was marked by a record level of abstention, and many cast a ballot only to keep the far right from power — a testament to a growing disillusionment.ROYE, France — There is no doubt that President Emmanuel Macron of France won a convincing re-election over Marine Le Pen, his far-right challenger, on Sunday. Mr. Macron scored a thumping 17 point margin of victory, becoming the first French leader to be re-elected to a second term in 20 years.In the view of many, the electoral system worked as it was intended to, with nearly 60 percent of those who voted joining together to defend against a xenophobic and nationalist far right widely regarded as a threat to French democracy.That is, perhaps, unless you are a supporter of Ms. Le Pen, who was blocked in the final round for a second consecutive time.“I think we’re heading into five more years of crisis, probably worse, because people are just fed up,” Sébastien Denneulin, 46, a Le Pen supporter, said on Monday morning in Roye, a northern far-right stronghold.Even as Ms. Le Pen has edged her party into the mainstream, ensconcing it firmly in the political establishment, her supporters say they are growing frustrated with a lack of representation in the political system.In the far-right stronghold of Roye, in northern France, two out of three voters backed Marine Le Pen in the runoff.James Hill for The New York TimesThe far right enjoyed its strongest ever showing at the ballot box on Sunday, as Ms. Le Pen widened her appeal with pocketbook issues important in parts of the country like this northern region, where in the past two generations voters have shifted to the far right from the political left along with deindustrialization.The challenge now for Mr. Macron will be how to lure back into the political fold the 41.5 percent of voters who cast ballots for Ms. Le Pen — and the roughly 28 percent who opted not to vote at all. Despite the president’s clear victory, the election results disguised myriad challenges that could make his next five years in office even more tumultuous than the last.As French news media organizations drew up maps of the nationwide breakdown of the runoff vote, they showed a widening and deepening fracture along the French equivalent of American blue and red states.In the reddest areas of France, there was frustration that Ms. Le Pen had been defeated once again and a strong sentiment that her supporters were continuing to be shut out of the political system.Supporters of Ms. Le Pen in Paris on Sunday. In the reddest areas of France, there is a strong feeling among them that they are being shut out of the political system.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesIn Roye, some people gathered at the QG brasserie voiced anger when they learned of the results on their smartphones on Sunday evening. One man set fire to his voter’s card.Tony Rochon, 39, a roofer, said he had voted for a Le Pen — either Marine or her father, Jean-Marie — all of his life. But each time, he said, other political parties had united to deny a Le Pen victory in the presidential race. Then the same thing had happened in legislative elections — also a two-round system — effectively marginalizing Ms. Le Pen’s influence in Parliament.In 2017, for instance, while Ms. Le Pen garnered 34 percent of the vote in the presidential election, her party secured only eight seats in Parliament — not even enough to form a parliamentary group.That year, Mr. Macron promised to introduce proportional representation in Parliament, which experts say would better reflect the population’s political beliefs. But he failed to fulfill his pledge.“That’s why the only option for us is to take to the streets,” said Mr. Rochon, who joined the Yellow Vest anti-government protests in Paris. “Macron has no legitimacy.”Tony Rochon, center right, holding his daughter, reached in frustration for his friend’s phone as news of Mr. Macron’s victory came in. He had voted for a Le Pen his whole life.James Hill for The New York TimesHe and his wife, Adelaide Rochon, 33, a dental assistant who has also always voted for Ms. Le Pen’s party, said they believed that the vote had been rigged.“We don’t know a single person around us who voted for Macron,” Ms. Rochon said. “It’s impossible that he won.”Not impossible, actually.In Roye, a town of 6,000 people, two out of three voters backed Ms. Le Pen in the runoff. But nationwide Mr. Macron drew many votes — 47 percent, according to one poll — not necessarily because people endorsed him, but because they joined the so-called Republican front against the far right, whose politics remain anathema to a majority of French despite Ms. Le Pen’s persistent efforts to remake and soften her image.For others, like Madeleine Rosier, a member of the leftist France Unbowed, a choice between Mr. Macron and what she deemed an unacceptable far-right candidate was no choice at all. She did not cast a ballot on Sunday after voting for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the veteran leftist who came in third place in the first round.“I didn’t want to grant Emmanuel Macron legitimacy,” she said.The abstention rate — the highest in a runoff since 1969 — reflected the widespread disillusionment with the political system that sent protesters from towns like Roye to the Champs-Élysées in Paris as part of the anti-government Yellow Vest movement in 2018, the biggest political crisis of Mr. Macron’s first term.Madeleine Rosier, a member of France Unbowed, did not vote on Sunday because she “didn’t want to grant Emmanuel Macron legitimacy.”James Hill for The New York TimesThat anger persists in many pockets of the country. In another measure of political disillusionment, more than three million people cast blank or null-and-void ballots — and that does not include the 13.7 million who opted not to vote at all.Étienne Ollion, a sociologist and professor at the Polytechnique engineering school, said the importance of such voters and those who reluctantly backed Mr. Macron to keep Ms. Le Pen from power, as well as the level of abstention give Mr. Macron “a relatively limited legitimacy.”The election results underscored a growing sense of “democratic fatigue and democratic fracture” in France, Mr. Ollion said.Given Mr. Macron’s unfulfilled pledge to reform Parliament, Chloé Morin, a political scientist at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, a Paris-based think tank, said there were doubts about Mr. Macron’s “capacity to take into account this extremely divided political landscape and opposition parties that will inevitably, in all logic, be little represented” in Parliament.Daniel Cohn-Bendit, an ally of Mr. Macron and a former Green member of the European Parliament, said in an interview that “an unfair French electoral system” had led to governing that ignores the political opposition and various actors of society.“To have a Parliament where someone who gets 42 percent of the votes only has about 20 lawmakers, that’s unacceptable,” he said, referring to Ms. Le Pen.Shortly after Mr. Macron was re-elected on Sunday, there were immediate signs that discontent surrounding French democracy would mark his second term.Demonstrators in Lyon, France, after Mr. Macron’s re-election on Sunday. The sign reads, “Down with Macron, the Robin of the bourgeoisie,” referring to Robin Hood.Laurent Cipriani/Associated PressHundreds of protesters gathered in Paris and other big cities to oppose Mr. Macron’s second term. The protests were marred by violent clashes with the police, who fired tear gas in Paris to disperse the crowd.Protesters in Paris converged from the city center to the large Place de la République, chanting a song originating from the Yellow Vest movement, “We are here, even if Macron doesn’t want it, we are here!”By midnight, the police had cleared the Place de la République of protesters. But they had scrawled, in red, a warning on the large statue of Marianne, an emblem of the French Republic, in the middle of the square: “Beware of revenge when all the poor people stand up.”Norimitsu Onishi More

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      Emmanuel Macron Tries to Reinvent Himself After Re-election

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      France seems in search of a kinder, gentler, greener President Macron. He says he will listen.PARIS — There have been many Emmanuel Macrons: the free-market reformer, the man who nationalized salaries in response to the pandemic, the provocateur who pronounced NATO brain-dead, the maneuverer ever adjusting his position, the diplomat and the disrupter.Now, having persuaded the French to re-elect him, something no president had achieved for two decades, which Mr. Macron will show up? To judge by his sober acceptance speech after his 17-percentage-point victory over Marine Le Pen, a chastened one.There was nothing triumphalist about his tone after vanquishing the extremist anti-immigrant far right and, for the second time, rebuffing the wave of nationalist jingoism that produced Brexit and the victory of President Donald J. Trump.Rather, Mr. Macron expressed a quiet determination to break with past habits, confront the “anger and disagreements” in the land, and to reach out to the many people who had only voted for him to keep out Ms. Le Pen.“He will want to democratize his authority and soften it,” said Alain Duhamel, the author of a book about Mr. Macron. “No metamorphosis in his personality, but there will be an adjustment in his methods.”Mr. Macron said his second term would not be “the continuation of the five years now ending”; it would involve a “reinvented method” to “better serve our country and our youth.” The years ahead, he said, “will not be tranquil, but they will be historic, and we will write them together for the generations to come.”Mr. Macron on the campaign trail in the French seaport city of Le Havre this month.James Hill for The New York TimesAmbitious words, and Mr. Macron, a centrist, is never at a loss for a fine phrase, but what they will mean is uncertain. It is clear, however, that the 13.3 million people who voted for Ms. Le Pen constitute far too large a group to be ignored.For now, the president’s priority is to display compassion. He wants to bury once and for all the image of himself as “president of the rich,” and show he cares for the working class and for all the angry or alienated people drawn not just to Ms. Le Pen’s nationalist message but also to her promise to give them economic helpThe numbers were clear. About 70 percent of affluent voters supported Mr. Macron; about 65 percent of the poor voted for Ms. Le Pen. The college educated voted for Mr. Macron; those who did not complete high school tended toward Ms. Le Pen.Among the measures that Mr. Macron may introduce early in his second term are a rebate on gasoline for people who have to drive long distances every day, substantial raises for hospital workers and teachers, and an automatic adjustment of pensions in line with rising inflation.“We have to listen better,” Bruno Le Maire, the economy minister, said in an interview with Franceinfo radio. That is, listen to those left behind in an economy with a growth rate of 7 percent.Among those Mr. Macron will need to listen to are the young. While some 70 percent of people aged 18 to 24 voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a leftist candidate with a bold green agenda, in the first round of the election, about 61 percent transferred their allegiance to Mr. Macron in the second round, after Mr. Mélenchon was eliminated.Watching the presidential candidates square off in a televised debate on Wednesday in Paris.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesIf Mr. Macron is serious about engaging with those whose support of him was reluctant — a second choice, a vote against something rather than for something — he will need to demonstrate a serious commitment to a post-carbon economy, having spent his first term on what often seemed like hesitant half measures.In his victory speech he promised to make France “a great ecological nation.” That will require major investment, a timeline and help for those transitioning to relatively expensive electric cars.The road ahead is full of potential obstacles. Legislative elections in June could deliver a National Assembly no longer fully controlled by his party, which would complicate any second-term agenda. In an unlikely worst case, Mr. Macron may have to endure a “cohabitation” — work with a prime minister from a rival party — and that is by no means a guarantee of happiness.Whether Mr. Macron can lastingly adopt a less abrasive manner is uncertain. Mr. Duhamel described the president as a self-invented man “in perpetual motion” and always on the offensive, someone who can “never be confined to a box,” a leader given to ever-changing balancing acts — not least between left and right.His opponents have often found this agility confounding; others have seen in it a malleability so extreme that it poses the question of what Mr. Macron really believes in.Macronism, as it is called here, remains something of a mystery. What cannot be disputed after this second victory is its political effectiveness.Mr. Macron visited a wind-turbine factory in Le Havre during a campaign stop this month. In his victory speech, he promised to make France “a great ecological nation.” James Hill for The New York TimesIf the restless energy of Mr. Macron seems certain to persist, the French electorate made clear that it needs to be redirected. They have had enough of an insouciant leader with bold plans to transform Europe into a real “power”; they want a president attentive to their needs as prices rise and salaries stagnate.Many of them also want a democratization of the top-down French presidential system that Mr. Macron had promised but did not deliver. He may propose introducing an element of proportional representation in voting for the National Assembly, or lower house of parliament, Mr. Duhamel said. This would happen after the June vote.The current two-round system has favored alliances of mainstream parties against extremist parties like Ms. Le Pen’s National Rally, formerly the National Front, resulting in a democratic disconnect: A party may have widespread support but scant representatives. This, too, has fed anger in the country, on the left and on the right.When it comes to listening, Mr. Macron may be obliged to extend that practice to his European interlocutors. The war in Ukraine has comforted Mr. Macron’s belief that a stronger Europe must be forged with its own military and technological capacities in order to count in the 21st-century world.Mr. Macron, center, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and President Biden in Brussels last month.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut his style — announcing dramatic goals for European “strategic autonomy” rather than quietly building coalitions to achieve them — has not pleased everyone in a European Union where a strong attachment to NATO and American power exists, especially in the countries closest to the Russian border.President Biden, in a congratulatory message to Mr. Macron, said he looked forward to working together “to defend democracy.” By defeating Ms. Le Pen, with her strong attachment to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the French president has just made a notable contribution to that cause.Mr. Macron will remain a firm supporter of multilateralism, the rule of law, the European Union and the NATO that he hopes to reform to allow more room for Europe to develop its own defense capacities. These are fixed points in his flexible beliefs.He will also continue to calibrate his message even as he redirects it toward the less fortunate. His goal, he said in victory, was a “humanist” France, but also an “entrepreneurial” one, a France of “work and creativity” but also “a more just society.”These code words to the right and left — entrepreneurship and justice — were Mr. Macron personified.The French electorate, while re-electing Mr. Macron, has made clear that it wants him to redirect his restless energy.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times More