Macron is history, Le Pen is triumphant. What do ‘reasonable’ French voters like me do now?

Marine Le Pen with supporters in Paris, France, 1 July 2024. Photograph: Cuenta Oficial Marine Le Pen en/EPA

For all of my adult life, the Le Pen family has felt like a shadow hanging over my head. Jean-Marie, the father, used to make jokes about the Holocaust. He was a former French paratrooper in Algeria who was accused of torturing prisoners. Then along came his daughter, Marine, who looked less threatening but more ambitious. Then her niece, Marion, who proved even more reactionary.

The Le Pen influence appeared to be growing, but I always had the naive idea that “reasonable” people, from the right as well as from the left, would never let them win. It proved true in 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen made it to the second round of the presidential election: the French then voted massively for Jacques Chirac. It proved true again in 2017 and 2022, when Marine also reached the second round and was defeated by Emmanuel Macron, the promising young outsider who wanted to dismantle the left-right dividing line. It’s no longer true.

I woke up this morning to a different country, one in which the Le Pen clan is at the gates of power. For the first time ever in France, a political party on the far right could win an overall majority of seats in parliament through an election, and place its 28-year-old figurehead, Jordan Bardella, in Hôtel de Matignon, the prime minister’s office in Paris. The results of the first round of the snap legislative elections called by Macron were a clear victory for the National Rally, which is the renamed National Front created by Jean-Marie Le Pen.

The second round, scheduled for 7 July, is turning into a moment of truth for French politics, with huge consequences for the country, for Europe, for Ukraine and so many other issues in this troubled world. The only question for the second round is whether the National Rally emerges with an overall majority, which would force Macron into a humiliating and complex “cohabitation”: a very French phenomenon in which the president and the prime minister come from opposing parties.

The only way to prevent such a majority is for all other political forces to apply a simple rule: withdraw their candidate if it’s a three-way fight in their constituency. This would bring a hung parliament, political instability and possible chaos; but it would be less damaging than having the far right in power. At least that’s what “reasonable” people would think.

But politics is more complicated than that, in a polarised country where the united front of leftwing parties came second, leaving Macron’s centrist bloc a distant third. Some people, it seems, are more afraid of the left than of the far right.

Take Le Figaro, the grand old newspaper of the right, which belongs to the Dassault family of Rafale jets fame: on Monday morning, this broadsheet newspaper transformed the second round into a contest between Bardella and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the radical left movement France Unbowed (LFI), who is a major figure in the leftwing alliance, but not the only one.

Mélenchon is a scary figure for rightwing voters, and Le Figaro is clearly telling its readers who not to vote for by pushing the National Rally narrative on its front page. The former prime minister Édouard Philippe, and the finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, have said they want to oppose the National Rally, but have stopped short of calling their supporters to vote for any other candidate because of Mélenchon.

If voters next Sunday share the same apprehension, a boulevard opens up for the first far-right prime minister in recent French history, a leap into the unknown.

What went wrong? One can obviously wonder why Macron decided to gamble the country’s future on a snap election he had no chance of winning, opening the gate to the far right. We’ll leave that to historians, as the president is a spent force.

We can also wonder why this country, with its many assets, has generated enough anger and resentment among its citizens to produce an election result that is more likely to damage its economy and social cohesion than solve real problems. We can also question a French political elite that was so blind it let the far right prosper in large corners of a society that felt forgotten and despised.

All of this is true, and is being discussed everywhere now in France, among friends, colleagues and in our family circles. Everyone is looking in the mirror and wondering what to do next Sunday in the second round. At the very least, we’ll have to learn to live in a divided land where the National Rally controls small towns and vast areas of rural France, while the “reasonable” people have the upper hand in major cities including Paris. This is a real tragedy.

Pierre Haski is a former foreign correspondent and a former deputy editor of the French daily Libération. He is also president of the press freedom NGO Reporters without Borders