‘This could end up ugly’: after Macron’s gamble, will the far right seize power in France?

Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella are gaining momentum across France, but have not yet published a manifesto. Photograph: Christian Hartmann/Reuters

It is 8pm on Sunday 7 July. Polling stations have just closed after the second round of snap French parliamentary elections – the country’s most momentous ballot in living memory – and the first estimations flash up on the nation’s TV screens.

President Emmanuel Macron has lost his gamble. The National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen has more than trebled its tally of deputies in the assemblée nationale to just over 290: an absolute majority. France’s next government will be far right.

According to current polling, this may not – by a whisker – be the most likely outcome of the vote taking place less than three weeks before the start of the Paris Olympics, when the eyes of the world will be on France. But it certainly could be.

RN has the momentum, and Macron is on the ropes. After scoring a record 31%, more than double the president’s list, in EU elections, early polls suggest the party could win up to 265 seats. It would not need much at all to push it over the line.

“Across huge swaths of France, especially outside big cities, in almost every segment of the population – sex, age group, profession – RN is now booking record high scores,” said Jérôme Fourquet of pollsters IFOP. “For a great many voters, it’s just a party like any other.”

Rym Momtaz, Paris-based Europe expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, noted that the far-right party’s performance had improved in every election since 2017, and broken records in the most recent two: “This could end up really ugly.”

Even a near majority would give RN considerably more influence, forcing the president to seek almost impossible alliances, in a far more hostile and fractured parliament, to form a government perennially vulnerable to no-confidence votes.

Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, the party’s telegenic, TikTok-friendly 28-year-old president, have not yet published a manifesto, hoping to hold the door open for as long as possible for potential rightwing electoral alliances in the run-up to the vote.

But a policy statement has been circulated to candidates, and officials have hinted the programme will probably be a cross between its European election manifesto and the platform it campaigned on in the 2022 national elections that gave it  89 seats.

The one-page candidates’ leaflet outlines its priorities, led by the cost of living, immigration and security. Apart from a promise to slash power bills and cut VAT on electricity, gas and heating oil, most of the pledges are non-specific.

On immigration, it says an RN-led government will “drastically reduce legal and illegal immigration”. On security, it will aim to “put a stop to judicial lenience towards delinquents and criminals” .

It also promises to “fight unfair competition” for farmers, boost ­public health support, “end red tape for families and businesses”, “cut the costs of immigration” and “cut benefit and tax fraud”. Abroad, it will “defend France’s sovereignty and interests”.

“Obviously, the RN’s programme will be applied,” Le Pen said this week. “Our road map will be the series of proposals we have made in the past to the French people, and which appear essential to us, on purchasing power, security, and immigration.”

So far, so vague. The party’s 2022 pledges, however, were more specific: expel more migrants, stop family reunification, give French nationals preference in jobs, benefits and social housing, and kick out immigrants unemployed for more than a year.

It promised to privatise French public radio and television (a pledge repeated last week) and install a “presumption of legitimate self-defence” for officers involved in cases of alleged police violence aimed at “restoring authority and boosting morale”. It aimed to return the retirement age from 64 to 62 (60 for those who started work at 16 or 17), offer a zero-interest €100,000 (£84,600) loan to boost home ownership, axe inheritance tax for many and exempt the under-30s from income tax.

Together with RN’s planned VAT cuts on energy and other measures such as the renationalisation of France’s motorways, economists in 2022 costed the hit to public finances at €120bn a year, for just €18bn in savings.

RN proposed funding this mammoth public spending hike by taxing corporate super-profits and life insurance savings as well as withholding some EU budget contributions, but the Institut Montaigne thinktank put the likely net cost at more than 3.5% of GDP.

Industry associations have said RN’s plans are “incompatible with competitiveness and prosperity for our nation” and would further increase France’s $3.2tn debt. The current finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, warned of a “Liz Truss scenario”.

Le Pen acknowledged last week that there would be “constraints” on what the party can do in government without a sympathetic president, while Bardella said “choices will have to be made” and pension reform may have to wait for “a ­second phase”.

RN saw the coming years as “preparation” for its entry to the Élysée Palace in 2027, Le Pen told TF1, recognising that some measures – including an immigration referendum to allow many of its “national preference” rules – would not yet be possible. Crucially, several of the proposed measures – including most of its “national preference” plans and possibly its under-30s income tax break – are likely to be judged unconstitutional and would require constitutional reform.

That would be problematic in a “cohabitation” with an unwilling president: changing France’s constitution requires a three-fifths majority in the lower and upper houses combined, or approval in a referendum that can only be initiated by the head of state.

By convention – and because they do not want to see their government overturned by a no-confidence vote or a motion of censure by parliament - the president appoints a prime minister and cabinet that will have majority support in the lower house.

France has undergone several “cohabitations” – when the president is in a different camp from parliament and government – in the past. “But there has never been one between two politicians so ideologically opposed as Macron and Le Pen,” said Mujtaba Rahman of the Eurasia Group consultancy.

“France’s constitution is ambivalent and untested in such a situation. In previous cohabitations, both parties respected the same fundamental principles. Le Pen’s programme, if she tried to impose it, would conflict with Macron almost across the board.”

Macron is centrist, pro-business, pro-European, pro-Ukraine. Le Pen is nationalist, populist, anti-EU, Moscow-friendly. Le Pen’s migration plans would violate European human rights laws, Rahman said, and her national preferences are incompatible with membership of the EU’s ­single market.

France’s constitution states clearly that the prime minister “directs the action of the government and ensures the execution of laws”, with the government running most of the domestic ­policy, and foreign and defence policy largely the preserve of the country’s president.

That means key policy areas such as pensions, unemployment benefit, education, taxation, immigration, nationality, public employment, law and order and labour legislation would all fall, in principle, under a far right-dominated parliament and government.

While French presidents enjoy considerable powers compared with many other heads of state, if RN has a stable majority, it would have plenty of scope to implement many of its policies: previous “cohabiting” prime ministers have passed measures opposed by presidents, including the 35-hour week and the reprivatisation of state companies.

And even if Macron would, in ­theory at least, retain control over ­foreign policy, such as continued French support for Ukraine, he would still need parliament’s backing in order to finance future aid to Kyiv as part of France’s budget.

There is a certain amount the president could do to constrain an RN-led government’s actions. “He has no veto per se,” noted Rahman, but could refuse to sign government decrees and delay them by referring them to an independent constititional council.

Legal experts believe, however, that the council would probably uphold the government’s right to put into practice many parts of its domestic agenda – and governments can, as Macron’s has – also use special constitutional powers such as article 49.3 to push through laws.

The president also, of course, has the right to address the nation on live TV, and could use it to constantly hammer an RN-led government – although, as many analysts point out, his popularity is now so diminished that it is doubtful how much influence that would have.

There is, of course, no certainty the RN will win a majority, or even be able to form a majority in alliance with others. The most likely ­outcome, ­opinion polls and most experts assume, is another hung parliament. But either way, France is in for rough few years.