The coalition of left-wing parties garnered 28.1% of the vote, behind the Rassemblement National and its allies but ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s coalition.
Put together in a hurry, the Nouveau Front Populaire left-wing alliance, uniting the Socialists, the Communists, the Greens, La France Insoumise (LFI) and Raphaël Glucksmann’s party Place publique, outperformed its predecessor, the NUPES coalition in the June 2022 parliamentary elections. In the first round of the snap elections called by President Emmanuel Macron, the left won 28.1% of the vote, coming in behind the Rassemblement National (RN) and its allies but ahead of Ensemble, Macron’s coalition, according to initial estimates by the Ipsos Talan institute for France Télévisions, Radio France, France 24-RFI and LCP Assemblée Nationale. And this against a backdrop of high voter turnout – estimated at between 67.5% and 69.7% by the various polling institutes, compared with 47.5% in 2022.
On Sunday night, each party planned to hold their own watch party in their respective headquarters, before coming together at the Place de la République in Paris at 10 pm. Once again united, the left seems to be benefiting from the strong mobilization against the far right and the collapse of the presidential coalition. The picture is therefore very different from the 2022 elections. In the first round of the 2022 legislative elections, the NUPES, an alliance formed in 13 days and 13 nights of talks, whose slogan was “Jean-Luc Mélenchon as prime minister,” captured 25.7% of the vote and 5.8 million voters. It was hot on the heels of the presidential camp and its score of 25.8%. The RN was in third place (18.7%).
In the second round, the NUPES had won 31.6% of the vote (6.5 million votes). The left-wing coalition entered the Assemblée Nationale with 131 of the 577 seats. How far will the Nouveau Front Populaire get? Its momentum will depend on withdrawals in three- or four-way runoffs, and on Macron’s voting instructions. Up until now, Macron looked like he was heading for a “neither-nor” approach: neither RN nor LFI. But this position worried some even within his own camp. In an open letter in Le Monde, 220 political and civil society figures called on Macron’s candidates to accept to withdraw in three-way runoffs in favor of the best-placed candidate against the RN.
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