French election: Your guide to a vote that is set to shake the EU and NATO

PARIS — France is racing toward a snap parliamentary election with potentially massive implications for the country’s leading role in the EU and NATO. If you’re looking for a guide to how it all works, we’ve got you covered.

Why do I need to worry about France?

As elections go, this is as big they get. The far right stands a decent chance of being able to form a government in a nuclear-armed permanent member of the U.N. Security Council that plays a major role in global security from the North Atlantic to the Pacific. The far right is skeptical of France’s engagement with both the EU and NATO, while without an engaged France, both are significantly weakened.

On the financial side, traders across global financial markets fear these political tensions will roil the world’s seventh biggest economy and risk another bout of instability in the heart of the eurozone. All in all, this is Europe’s most consequential election in decades.

That escalated quickly …

How did such a defining political moment arise from nowhere? On June 9, French President Emmanuel Macron shocked the nation by calling a snap election after suffering a humiliating defeat at the hands of the far-right National Rally in the European election. His goal was to stop the advances of the right, but it’s a big gamble that may backfire.

It’s a parliamentary election, meaning that Macron should remain president until 2027. That said, he’s likely to have to work with a new government and prime minister who may well be hostile toward him, raising the specter of deadlock or chaos. Jordan Bardella is a leading candidate to take the PM job if the National Rally wins the election.

Since Macron’s bombshell announcement, the political landscape in France has been changing at lightning speed, with new alliances emerging overnight and nasty break-ups playing out in public. That makes it difficult to make reliable predictions about seats and coalitions.

Emmanuel Macron goal was to stop the advances of the right, but it’s a big gamble that may backfire. | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images

So let’s start at the beginning …

How does the election work?

For starters, French members of parliament are not elected on the basis of proportional representation, but instead through a complicated two-round vote across 577 constituencies where local dynamics play a big role.

France will go to the polls on June 30, with runoffs planned for July 7. In each constituency, if no candidate wins 50 percent of the vote in the first round, the top two candidates advance to the second round, as does any other candidate who got the support of at least 12.5 percent of registered voters. The candidate with the most votes in the second round wins the seat as a member of parliament.

In order to get through the first round, parties that share a political hue — such as the country’s four main left-wing parties — tend to club together and agree to not run candidates against each other.

Sounds easy, right? But here’s the rub: Turnout really matters. In 2022, when turnout was close to 50 percent, parties had to get approximately a quarter of the votes cast to reach that magic figure of 12.5 percent of registered voters. Voter turnout is expected to be higher in this heavily scrutinized election, which will make it easier for candidates to advance to the second vote. That means we’ll probably see more three-way contests than usual in the July 7 round.

A big caveat about opinion polls ahead of the first round: It’s a two-round vote, so the percentage of overall votes doesn’t translate directly into seats. For now, the National Rally and some if its allies from the fracturing center-right have about 37 percent support, while the left wing New Popular Front grouping is at 28 percent and Macron’s liberals have about 18 percent.

The far-right National Rally is closer to power than ever

The question on everybody’s mind is whether the anti-immigration National Rally will be ruling the country as of next month.

Marine Le Pen’s party needs at least 289 seats to command a majority in the French parliament, and at the moment the far right looks likely to make big gains on the back of a successful campaign in the European election. Again, opinion polls must be taken with a pinch of salt, but the National Rally could get between 195 and 245 seats, according to current projections. That would be a record increase from the 89 MPs they currently have.

If the far right gets a majority in the parliament, the French president would have to enter into a “cohabitation” arrangement with the National Rally and appoint a far-right prime minister. Bardella, the president of the National Rally, has said he would not seek to lead a government unless he had a majority. That presumably means he will need coalition partners — or it’s an electoral strategy to bag a big turnout.

To boost its numbers, the far right has struck a deal with Éric Ciotti, leader of the center-right Les Républicains, to support some like-minded conservatives so they don’t compete against each other in specific constituencies.

This center-right/far-right tie-up is a big ideological win for the latter, but has also triggered a massive backlash among other conservatives who are aghast that the party of presidents such as Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Chirac is doing deals with the far right. Only 62 candidates are backed by the National Rally-Les Républicains alliance; center-right heavyweights are now trying to oust Ciotti.

In polls, support for the National Rally is about 33 percent while support for the small group of Les Républicains allied to Ciotti is about 4 percent. A similar 3 percent or so support the Reconquest party, which is also on the far right but whose leader is hostile to Le Pen.

Marine Le Pen’s party needs at least 289 seats to command a majority in the French parliament. | Denis Charlet/AFP via Getty Images

Another question is how much effort Le Pen will invest in coalition talks, given her desire to keep her political capital intact ahead of the 2027 presidential election. If her party leads a government that has a bumpy ride in office, it could reduce her chances of seizing the big prize.

Macron’s coalition risks being wiped out

Ensemble, the coalition backing the French president, includes his Renaissance party, the centrist Modem and the center-right Horizons party.

While Ensemble currently controls a workable 250 seats in the parliament, it faces devastating losses in the election. A recent IFOP poll predicted Renaissance would win 18 percent of the vote in the first round of voting; the key question is whether centrist candidates will get enough votes to qualify for the second round in many constituencies. If turnout is high, the threshold might be closer to 20 percent of votes cast, which is above what Ensemble is expected to secure nationwide.

That means the first round could see many of Macron’s candidates fall at the first hurdle.

Current projections have Ensemble MPs falling to less than 100 seats in the 577-strong assembly, squeezed by both the left and the far right.

For the first time, Macron’s coalition is not running as a single party. Horizons, the party led by former PM Édouard Philippe (who has presidential ambitions), is going it alone, but may rejoin a coalition after the election.

That, in turn, leads to another puzzle. In constituencies where the centrist candidate is wiped out in the first round, will centrist voters cross the Rubicon and vote National Rally, or will they side with a leftist alliance that includes the far-left France Unbowed, led by the firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon?

The centrists, in other words, could still play kingmakers.

The left is resurgent, challenging Macron and the far right

With unexpected speed, France’s left-wing parties have put aside their squabbles and united ahead of the vote.

Following a deal struck last week, the far-left France Unbowed (LFI), the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the Greens are running single candidates in 546 constituencies across France. The alliance, called the New Popular Front, is a rebooted version of the 2022 Nupes alliance, which was masterminded by Mélenchon. This time, however, the Socialists are a far more powerful partner following the successful campaign of Socialist-backed candidate Raphaël Glucksmann in the European election.

Of the 546 candidates who will be representing the new alliance, 229 will be backed by LFI compared to 175 for the Socialists, 92 for the Greens and 50 for the Communists.

The New Popular Front is definitely striking a chord with voters; current projections have the alliance winning 190-235 seats. That’s still some distance from the 289 seats needed for a majority, and the left would need to form a coalition if it aimed to put forward a prime minister who would win parliamentary approval.

But such calculations will come to nothing unless the moderate Glucksmann and the radical Mélenchon — at odds both personally and politically over key topics such as Ukraine and Gaza — are able to set their differences aside.

With Glucksmann having said he will never accept Mélenchon as prime minister, that may be a bridge too far.

Jason Wiels contributed reporting