The far-right Rassemblement National would fall short of winning an absolute majority in upcoming snap elections, according to a Harris Interactive poll that points to France returning a badly fractured National Assembly.
If the prediction for a hung parliament is confirmed by the second-round vote on Sunday, France will enter a period of turmoil with no single faction securing sufficient seats to form a government.
The Harris poll conducted for several French media organisations said that the RN and its allies would win 190 to 220 seats, which is far from the 289 needed for the far right to claim the premiership with a ruling majority.
The newly formed leftwing alliance known as the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) is projected to come in second with 159 to 183 seats. The ranks of MPs from Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Ensemble alliance are expected to shrink by half or more to less than 135 seats — a symbol of how the president’s decision to call the snap election has gone wrong.
Analysts have cautioned that it is difficult to reach accurate seat projections at this stage. But if the RN did record such a weak result then it would be a sign that their opponents strategy to band together to form a so-called front republicain against them has paid off.
After Sunday’s first-round vote, which the RN won by a wide margin, the centre and leftwing parties sealed agreements to tactically withdraw about 200 of their candidates in co-ordinated attempt to keep Le Pen’s camp from taking power.
With a narrower field in run-offs, leftist and centrist voters would be asked to hold their noses to vote for parties that they do not usually support — all in an attempt to reduce the size of the RN delegation to the next National Assembly.
The number of three-way run-offs has fallen from 306 to 89, according to data from the ministry of interior.
It remains to be seen if voters will follow the instructions from party chiefs. Turnout will again be a key factor, after particularly high participation in the first round. Some party officials fear turnout might be lower this time because of the summer holidays and a sense of frustration among voters whose preferred candidate was eliminated.
A key question for the RN will be if they can still mobilise their voters if they sense their chances of victory are receding.
Political gridlock and sluggish growth may dent France’s long-term attractiveness to foreign investors who hold around half the government debt of the second-largest country in the eurozone.
With the scenario of a National Assembly carved up into three blocs looking more likely, party chiefs have started sending signals about the possibility of working together.
Macron’s prime minister Gabriel Attal has admitted the centrists will not have an outright majority but called for building what he called “a pluralistic assembly” of parties willing to co-operate on specific policies.
“I hope that our Ensemble group will be as large as possible, and then we can forge agreements [on certain draft laws] to allow us to move forward,” Attal said on France Inter radio on Wednesday.
Green leader Marine Tondelier opened the door to such a move, but warned it would be on the left’s terms, not Macron or Attal’s. “We will surely have to do things that no one has ever done before in this country,” she told TF1 news channel.
The Harris Interactive poll was conducted with a panel of about 3,400 people on July 2 and 3.
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