207 candidates who would have qualified for the second round of elections in France have withdrawn. They want to prevent a victory for the extreme right.
“Bardella, we don’t want you” is written on the wall, but not everyone in France sees it that way Photo: Aurelien Morissard/ap
PARIS cup | It can be called solidarity of democrats or opportunistic damage limitation: the defensive front of left-wing parties with centrist and moderate right-wing parties against the far right, which they see and fight as a mortal danger to parliamentary democracy, and therefore as a common enemy.
In France, these electoral arrangements are known as “republican discipline.” He faces a second round of voting on Sunday after not taking part in the last round of parliamentary elections.
Thus, in 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen was the first candidate of the National Front to compete in the second round against the incumbent Jacques Chirac in the presidential election, voters on the left (almost) unanimously voted for Chirac against the far right. And the same in 2017 and 2022 for Emmanuel Macron against Marine Le Pen.
In each of these three precedents, the prospect of a far-right victory was rather slim or almost non-existent. And yet, it was easy for the leaders of the left-wing parties to recommend voting in favour of their political opponents Chirac and Macron.
Today, the electoral victory of Marine Le Pen in the National Assembly (RN) is not only possible, but highly probable. On the evening of the first round last Sunday, the left-wing parties of the Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front) announced without hesitation that they would withdraw their qualified candidates for the second round of the election in favour of the Macronists, the conservatives and the centrist democrats. The Popular Front decided not to participate in 89 of the 91 constituencies affected.
The conservatives of Les Républicains, on the other hand, do not feel obliged to do so. The motto “neither extreme right nor left” applies to them, since they obviously put both opponents on the same level as the extremes. LR candidates have only withdrawn in two situations where the left clearly has better chances.
Macron hopes for broad national unity
President Macron initially made no comment on the fiasco of the early elections. This despite the fact that in France everyone still wanted to know what he intended by his abrupt decision to dissolve the National Assembly following the results of the European elections.
Faced with the prospect that the far right could even achieve an absolute majority based on last Sunday's results, he finally managed to make a short statement. Macron expressed the wish for a broad national unity of the truly democratic forces of the republic. But who should meet with whom? The president did not specify that.
Leading Macronists such as former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe wanted to resolve this issue on a “case-by-case” basis. He himself supported a communist in the second round of elections against the RN candidate in his constituency. Others, such as current Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, were more in favour of not distinguishing between socialists, communists, greens and, above all, La France Insoumise (LFI) when making electoral arrangements in favour of the left.
Above all, the idea of having to withdraw their own candidacies in the interest of the left-wing LFI party, described as “left-wing extremist” by both the right and the political centre and by the Social Democrats, visibly caused stomach cramps for the Macronists. In the end, they decided to do so in several cases and maintained their candidacies in four constituencies. In this way, they hope to limit the foreseeable damage caused by the advance of the extreme right.
Thanks to this “disciplined” dispensation, there are now only 92 triangular elections instead of the original 299 (with three finalists) and two instead of five quadrilaterals (with four candidates). This change in electoral geometry means that the chances of RN obtaining an absolute majority become significantly lower.