(Paris) The campaign for the first round of legislative elections experienced its last flares on Friday throughout France, before completely extinguishing at midnight. And faced with the comfortable lead given to the far-right National Rally party by the polls, the possible carryover of votes between the two rounds has mobilized minds.
As the campaign ends this Friday at midnight (6 p.m. Eastern time), all the polls give a very comfortable lead to the RN, credited with 35 to 37% of voting intentions and which thus far distances the left ( 27.5% to 29%) while the outgoing majority is relegated to third place (20% to 21%).
The leader of the Socialist Party in the European elections Raphaël Glucksmann expressed his concern about “this impression that a wave is forming and that on Sunday evening the entire country will have a hangover.”
“Macron dissolved the assembly, much too quickly, he will have lost everything, it’s over,” said Alain, 75, one of the 2,000 people who demonstrated Friday against the far right in Lyon.
RN leader Jordan Bardella, 28, will nevertheless have to attract more voters if he wants to obtain an absolute majority in the National Assembly at the end of the second round on July 7, a condition he himself set for accepting the post of prime minister.
Thursday evening, on the sidelines of a European summit in Brussels, Emmanuel Macron promised “great clarity” in the voting instructions for the second round in the event of a duel between the RN and the left.
And, while in recent weeks the executive has put the RN and La France insoumise (LFI, radical left) on an equal footing “and those who follow them” – to designate the New Popular Front (NFP), a coalition of left which also includes the Socialist Party, the Ecologists and the Communist Party – Mr. Macron seemed to qualify this position on Thursday evening in Brussels.
The socialist mayor of Lille and ex-minister Martine Aubry challenged him on X: “You cannot refuse the Republican withdrawal which allowed you to be elected for your 2 mandates. You deliberately run the risk of an absolute majority in the RN.”
“I obviously want to prevent the extremes, and in particular the extreme right, from winning these elections,” said Prime Minister Gabriel Attal on Friday on BFMTV/RMC media.
Mr. Macron also denounced the “arrogance” of the RN which intends to impose harsh cohabitation on it in the event of victory and has “already distributed” all government positions.
The party figure Marine Le Pen recently assured that the function of “chief of the armies” of the President of the Republic was only a simple “honorary title”. From this prerogative of head of the Armed Forces, enshrined in the Constitution, arise the powers in matters of foreign policy and defense that the presidents have retained during previous cohabitations.
On Friday, she also indicated that if Jordan Bardella were to become prime minister, he would oppose the reappointment of Thierry Breton as European commissioner, announced Thursday by Emmanuel Macron to his partners.
A high turnout, which could be the highest in 25 years, is expected on Sunday: nearly two in three voters plan to vote, compared to less than one in two in the 2022 legislative elections.
With the predictable consequence, “certainly those elected in the first round”, predicted to AFP the deputy general director of Ipsos Brice Teinturier, but also “a lot of triangulars”, “200 to 240”, according to the pollster.
The NFP announced that its third-place candidates would withdraw.
Gabriel Attal, for his part, accused the president of the RN of supporting “around a hundred candidates” who had made “racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic” remarks. His entourage distributed “a map of shame” where we find the controversial comments of 112 RN candidates.
Among them, outgoing MP Roger Chudeau, who considered that a member of the government could not be binational because it posed a “problem of dual loyalty”, taking the example of former socialist Minister of Education Najat Vallaud -Belkacem, a Franco-Moroccan whose appointment was “a mistake,” he declared.
These remarks have sparked a lively controversy. “We must fight with force and we must be outraged by these things,” declared Emmanuel Macron. For the outgoing president of the Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, the party is showing its “true face,” that of “uninhibited racism.”
This “personal opinion” of Roger Chudeau is “totally contrary to the RN project,” Marine Le Pen assured Friday.
The rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, Chems-eddine Hafiz, urged voters not to let “irrational hatred divide us”.
