France voted last Sunday, and the result looks familiar in one sense and extraordinary in another.
Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen will face each other in the second round of the presidential election on 24 April, repeating the runoff of 2017. Macron finished first with 27.85% of the vote and Le Pen second with 23.15%. Jean-Luc Mélenchon came remarkably close to reaching the runoff himself, finishing third with 21.95%. Together, those three candidates received almost three-quarters of the votes cast.
The parties that governed France for most of the Fifth Republic were almost absent from the result. Valérie Pécresse, representing the centre-right Republicans, received 4.78%. Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor of Paris, received only 1.75%.
Those numbers are more politically important than the fact that Macron and Le Pen reached the runoff again.
France has not merely experienced an election in which established parties performed badly. It appears to have undergone a structural reorganisation of political competition.
For decades, French presidential politics was broadly organised around a centre-left bloc and a centre-right bloc. Socialists and Gaullists, under different party names and leaders, competed for power while smaller parties operated around them. Governments alternated. Presidents changed. The basic political architecture remained recognisable.
That architecture has largely collapsed.
Macron helped destroy it from the centre in 2017 by creating a movement that attracted moderate voters and politicians from both left and right. Le Pen has built a powerful nationalist alternative on the right. Mélenchon has consolidated much of the radical and anti-establishment left around his own movement.
The result is not simply a left-right spectrum with new names.
It is a political system in which the old intermediary institutions have become much weaker.
That matters because political parties do more than win elections.
They organise political disagreement.
A party takes millions of people with different priorities and attempts to combine them into one programme. Trade unionists, professionals, socially conservative voters, business owners, young activists and retirees may disagree on dozens of issues but still operate inside a broad party coalition.
That process moderates politics because parties have to reconcile internal differences before reaching government.
When large parties weaken, those differences do not disappear.
They reorganise elsewhere.
Macron’s movement has absorbed much of the liberal and moderate centre. Mélenchon has become dominant among important sections of the left. Le Pen has normalised a nationalist and anti-immigration politics once kept much further from executive power.
The electorate therefore appears more fragmented ideologically even while the presidential system compresses the final choice back into two candidates.
That creates a paradox.
France has more political differentiation in the first round but less choice in the second.
A Mélenchon voter now has to choose between Macron, Le Pen, abstention or a blank ballot.
A Pécresse voter has to make the same kind of calculation.
The second round therefore becomes less about choosing the candidate who best represents you and more about deciding which remaining candidate you consider less unacceptable.
That is a very different democratic experience.
It is also one reason turnout and abstention matter. First-round abstention was 26.31%, higher than in 2017.
A democracy can technically offer competitive elections while large numbers of citizens feel none of the available candidates represents them well.
That does not make the election illegitimate.
It does mean electoral legitimacy and political satisfaction are different variables.
The French two-round system is designed partly to solve this problem. The first round allows ideological diversity. The second forces consolidation around one of the two strongest candidates.
In theory, this produces both representation and governability.
In practice, it can produce an increasingly strange political coalition in the runoff.
Macron will almost certainly receive votes next Sunday from people who strongly dislike his economic policies but consider Le Pen more dangerous.
Le Pen will receive votes from people whose principal motivation may be rejection of Macron rather than enthusiasm for every element of her programme.
The winner can therefore receive a majority of second-round votes without receiving majority support for their positive agenda.
This is the difference between a mandate to govern and a coalition against the alternative.
Politicians often blur the two after elections.
If Macron wins with a clear majority, he may claim France endorsed his programme.
Some of those votes may actually mean only: I preferred you to Le Pen.
If Le Pen wins, the same problem applies.
An electoral majority can be real without being ideologically homogeneous.
This makes governing after highly polarised elections difficult.
The coalition required to win may be broader than the coalition supporting any specific policy afterwards.
Macron’s rise is partly responsible for this transformation. His 2017 campaign successfully argued that the old left-right division no longer described French politics well. He positioned himself as liberal, pro-European and reformist, drawing politicians and voters from both traditional camps.
That worked electorally.
But destroying the old centre-left and centre-right parties did not eliminate the social conflicts those parties had previously mediated.
It may instead have created a political system organised increasingly around the centre versus its challengers.
This has consequences.
When one large centrist bloc dominates government, opposition becomes concentrated at ideological edges because moderate alternatives have fewer independent institutions through which to organise.
A voter dissatisfied with Macron cannot easily choose a strong traditional centre-left or centre-right alternative if those parties have become electorally weak.
The available protest vote moves further away from the centre.
That does not mean Macron caused extremism or that all opposition to him is extreme.
It means political structure affects where dissatisfaction goes.
Parties function partly as containers for discontent.
If the containers disappear, the discontent flows elsewhere.
This resembles the broader argument I made about repression and political channels in Myanmar, although obviously France is a functioning democracy and the comparison should not be pushed beyond the mechanism. Political systems need institutional channels through which opposition can be expressed.
In France, those channels still exist fully.
But the weakening of traditional parties changes which channels are electorally competitive.
Le Pen has benefited from that transformation.
Her political strategy over the last decade has been particularly important. She has tried to make the National Rally appear more electorally acceptable than the National Front led by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The process is often described as dédiabolisation—de-demonisation.
The party has softened parts of its image, changed its name and attempted to emphasise purchasing power and economic concerns alongside immigration and national identity.
That does not mean the ideological differences between Le Pen and Macron have disappeared.
They remain substantial, particularly over immigration, European integration, national identity and foreign policy.
But perceptions of political acceptability matter enormously in a two-round system.
A candidate does not necessarily need most voters to love them.
They need enough voters to stop believing that voting for them is unthinkable.
That threshold can change slowly and then produce dramatic electoral consequences.
Le Pen’s 23.15% first-round result is therefore significant not merely because it placed her in second.
It demonstrates how far a political movement once treated as almost automatically excluded from executive power has moved into the ordinary structure of presidential competition.
The concept of a cordon sanitaire, in which mainstream parties cooperate to prevent far-right parties entering power, becomes harder to sustain when the party outside the cordon repeatedly receives more votes than most parties inside it.
There is a democratic tension here.
Mainstream politicians have every right to refuse cooperation with a party whose policies they oppose.
But permanently treating millions of voters as politically beyond consideration can strengthen exactly the anti-establishment narrative the excluded party uses.
The answer cannot be simply to normalise every position because it attracts votes.
Popularity does not determine democratic legitimacy.
The better response is to understand why those voters are moving and contest the underlying issues more effectively.
This is particularly important with Le Pen’s emphasis on purchasing power.
The election occurred during a period of rising energy and food prices, worsened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Inflation changes political priorities quickly because it affects people directly and repeatedly.
A voter may care abstractly about European integration or institutional reform.
They experience the price of petrol every week.
Economic insecurity can therefore reshape political competition without voters changing their deeper ideological identity.
This is one reason populist parties often combine cultural issues with economic protection.
Nationalism alone appeals to one group.
Economic insecurity alone appeals to another.
A political movement that connects the two can build a much broader coalition.
Le Pen’s politics increasingly presents globalisation, immigration, European integration and household insecurity as parts of the same problem: elites benefited from open systems while ordinary French citizens bore the costs.
That narrative is powerful because it transforms several separate policy debates into one conflict between people and establishment.
Macron represents almost the perfect opponent for that narrative.
He is highly educated, strongly pro-European, economically liberal and associated with technocratic competence. Supporters see those characteristics as strengths.
Opponents can interpret the same characteristics as evidence that he represents an elite detached from ordinary economic concerns.
Political identity often works through these mirrored interpretations.
Competence becomes technocracy.
Internationalism becomes loss of sovereignty.
Reform becomes attack on social protection.
National protection becomes xenophobia.
Each side describes the other’s policy through the moral category most damaging to it.
This is why elections increasingly become contests over interpretation rather than simply competing policy programmes.
Mélenchon’s result complicates the story further.
At 21.95%, he finished only around 420,000 votes behind Le Pen.
That means the French left is not simply electorally disappearing.
It is reorganising.
The Socialist Party collapsed, but millions of left-wing voters remain. Many have migrated towards a more confrontational political movement critical of economic liberalism, presidential power and aspects of European economic governance.
Again, the centre has weakened the traditional moderate parties without eliminating their electorates.
Those voters have moved towards alternatives that more sharply reject the existing political model.
This makes the election less a story of France moving rightwards than of France becoming politically triangular.
Macron represents a liberal and pro-European centre.
Le Pen represents a nationalist right.
Mélenchon represents a radical left.
The traditional centre-right and centre-left have become much smaller.
A triangular electorate being forced through a two-candidate presidential runoff creates a structural problem.
One of the three large political blocs must be excluded from the final choice.
This year it is Mélenchon.
In another election it could be Macron’s political successor or Le Pen.
The excluded bloc then becomes pivotal because its voters determine the second-round result.
Mélenchon has told supporters not to give a single vote to Le Pen, but he has not simply instructed them to vote Macron.
That ambiguity reflects the genuine political distance between Macron and much of Mélenchon’s electorate.
Some will vote tactically against Le Pen.
Some will abstain.
Some may even vote Le Pen because anti-Macron sentiment outweighs ideological differences on other issues.
That last possibility demonstrates why left-right labels cannot explain every voter.
People have several political dimensions simultaneously: economic preferences, cultural identity, attitudes towards institutions, distrust of elites, geography, education and class.
Two voters can support the same candidate for completely different reasons.
Election statistics aggregate those motivations into one number.
Analysis has to unpack them afterwards.
There is also a geographical divide beneath the national result. Large cities, affluent metropolitan areas, rural communities, deindustrialised regions and overseas territories do not vote identically.
This matters because politics increasingly reflects differences in how people experience globalisation.
A highly educated professional in Paris may experience European integration, immigration and global trade primarily through opportunities.
A worker in a declining industrial town may experience the same processes through competition, insecurity or cultural change.
Neither experience alone describes the entire economy.
Political conflict emerges because national policies distribute benefits and costs unevenly across places.
This is why aggregate economic growth can coexist with intense anti-system politics.
The country can become richer while particular communities feel they are losing status, opportunity or control.
Chile demonstrated a similar distinction between aggregate performance and perceived fairness.
France adds another variable: geographical and cultural distribution.
Politics is not only about who receives income.
It is also about who believes their way of life remains represented in the national story.
The collapse of the old parties may partly reflect their failure to translate those different experiences into credible programmes.
For decades, broad parties could contain internal contradictions because voters possessed strong partisan identities and political institutions linked parties to unions, churches, local government and social organisations.
Those loyalties have weakened.
Voters have become more electorally mobile.
That gives politicians greater opportunities to construct new coalitions.
It also makes political systems less predictable.
The same phenomenon is occurring across many democracies.
Traditional social-democratic parties have weakened in parts of Europe.
Centre-right parties compete with nationalist alternatives.
New movements emerge rapidly around charismatic leaders.
Political competition becomes more personalised.
This can increase responsiveness because voters are no longer permanently attached to old parties.
But parties also provide institutional memory and internal constraints.
A political movement constructed primarily around one leader may become less durable when that leader disappears.
Macron’s movement will eventually face that problem because he cannot remain president indefinitely.
Mélenchon’s political bloc faces a similar question.
Le Pen’s party has become more institutionalised, but her personal role remains enormous.
France may therefore have replaced an old party system with a new system that is simultaneously more dynamic and more personalised.
That has implications for democratic stability.
Institutionalised parties survive electoral defeats.
Personal movements can weaken dramatically when the leader loses relevance.
A democracy needs competition that persists beyond individuals.
Otherwise every election becomes a struggle among personalities rather than organised political programmes capable of governing over time.
We will not know the second-round result until next Sunday, and we should resist writing as though Macron’s victory is guaranteed simply because he defeated Le Pen comfortably in 2017.
The political environment has changed. Le Pen’s electoral position is stronger, the cost-of-living issue is more important, and many voters who supported eliminated candidates are deeply dissatisfied with Macron.
At the same time, Macron finished first and still possesses a broad reservoir of voters who may support him specifically to prevent a Le Pen presidency.
The correct position is therefore uncertainty.
But the first round has already revealed something regardless of who wins.
France’s old political order has not simply been disrupted temporarily.
It has been replaced.
The Socialists and Republicans once organised most presidential competition. Together their candidates received barely 6.5% this time.
Macron, Le Pen and Mélenchon together received almost 73%.
That is a systemic change.
The institutions of the Fifth Republic remain.
The presidency remains.
The electoral rules remain.
The constitution remains.
What has changed is the political structure operating through them.
This is a useful reminder that political systems can transform dramatically without constitutional change.
A democracy does not need a coup or new constitution to become politically different.
Voters can reorganise the party system themselves.
That may be what France has done.
The question for the next decade is whether new political institutions emerge strong enough to organise this new competition, or whether France increasingly becomes a contest among large personal movements centred on individual leaders.
The first possibility could create a new stable party system.
The second could produce repeated volatility once those leaders leave.
Either way, the French election is already about more than whether Macron or Le Pen occupies the Élysée Palace.
Presidents come and go.
Political systems are harder to replace.
France appears to have replaced one almost without noticing.
