Two months ago, Emmanuel Macron won re-election with 58.55% of the valid vote. Last Sunday, French voters gave his political coalition only 245 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly, leaving it 44 seats short of the 289 required for an absolute majority.
France has therefore delivered two political messages within eight weeks.
Macron should remain president.
Macron should not automatically control parliament.
Those messages are not contradictory. In fact, they may be one of the clearest demonstrations this year of why democratic mandates should be interpreted narrowly rather than treating every election victory as approval for an entire political programme.
Macron remains by far the most powerful individual in French politics, but his second term will now operate under constraints his first largely avoided. His government can no longer assume that legislation will pass simply because the presidential coalition supports it. To reform pensions, change taxation, approve budgets or pursue other domestic legislation, the government will need support from parties outside its own bloc or construct different majorities for different proposals.
That will make governing slower.
It may also make parliament matter considerably more.
The immediate political reaction has understandably described the result as a setback for Macron. It is. He asked voters for a parliamentary majority and did not receive one. Several prominent figures associated with his government or coalition also lost their constituencies.
But describing the result simply as a failure for Macron misses what French voters have actually done.
They have redistributed political power.
That is different.
The presidency remains with Macron. The National Assembly has become fragmented among several blocs. The left-wing NUPES alliance has become a major opposition force, while Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has achieved an extraordinary parliamentary breakthrough, winning 89 seats, far beyond its previous representation.
France has not become ungovernable overnight.
It has become harder for one political coalition to govern alone.
Whether that is good or bad depends partly on what we think legislatures are supposed to do.
If the principal objective of parliament is allowing the government to implement the programme on which the president was elected, the result looks dysfunctional.
If parliament is supposed to represent political preferences independently and constrain executive power, the result looks considerably more defensible.
This tension exists inside almost every democratic legislature.
Governments want efficiency.
Legislatures exist partly to make government less efficient.
That sounds strange until we remember why.
A completely unconstrained executive could implement policy extremely quickly. There would be no need for parliamentary negotiation, committee scrutiny or opposition votes.
Political efficiency would be extraordinary.
So would the concentration of power.
Democratic systems deliberately introduce friction because friction forces governments to justify decisions to institutions they do not completely control.
The cost is delay.
The benefit is constraint.
France has spent much of the Fifth Republic leaning towards the executive side of that balance. The presidency is unusually powerful by European democratic standards, and when the president’s political coalition also controls the National Assembly, the legislature can appear secondary to executive politics.
Macron’s first term demonstrated this clearly. His parliamentary majority gave the government substantial capacity to implement legislation despite street protests and opposition criticism.
The second term may look very different.
That does not mean France is entering American-style gridlock automatically. Macron’s coalition remains the largest bloc. The centre-right Republicans hold enough seats that their support could allow the government to pass legislation in some circumstances. Other parties may support particular measures even while opposing Macron more broadly.
This creates the possibility of issue-by-issue majorities.
One coalition for a budget.
Another for energy policy.
Another for institutional reform.
That is normal in several parliamentary democracies.
France simply has less recent experience governing that way.
This distinction matters because political cultures adapt to institutions.
A system accustomed to majority government develops political habits around confrontation between government and opposition.
A system accustomed to coalition government develops habits around bargaining.
Germany is an obvious example. Parties campaign against one another and then negotiate coalition agreements because no single party normally expects to govern alone.
Compromise is built into the political expectation.
France’s presidential system creates a different expectation. Presidential elections are highly personalised and majoritarian. One candidate wins the entire presidency.
That encourages the language of mandate and political direction.
Now the parliamentary arithmetic is forcing a coalition-style political reality onto a presidential political culture.
The tension could become productive.
It could also become paralysing.
Much depends on whether French political parties interpret compromise as ordinary democratic bargaining or as ideological betrayal.
This is where polarisation matters.
Negotiation is easiest when parties believe they share enough underlying political legitimacy to exchange concessions.
I support your proposal on energy if you support mine on taxation.
That bargain becomes much harder when political competition is moralised.
If the other party is not merely wrong but dangerous, corrupt or illegitimate, cooperation becomes politically costly.
France’s increasingly triangular political system makes this problem particularly acute.
Macron’s centre presents itself partly as the responsible alternative to radicalism.
Mélenchon’s left presents Macronism as economically unjust and insufficiently democratic.
Le Pen’s National Rally presents both traditional and centrist establishments as disconnected from ordinary French citizens.
Each bloc derives some political identity from opposing the others.
That makes cross-bloc cooperation harder even when policy preferences overlap.
The Republicans therefore become particularly important.
Their presidential candidate received less than 5% in April, demonstrating the collapse of the traditional centre-right at the presidential level. Yet the party retains a meaningful parliamentary presence.
That gives it something it lacked during the presidential campaign:
pivotal power.
A party can become electorally smaller and institutionally more important simultaneously.
This is the same mechanism Turkey demonstrated during Finland and Sweden’s NATO applications. Turkey was one member among thirty but possessed a veto everyone else needed to overcome.
In France, the Republicans may possess enough seats that Macron needs their cooperation repeatedly.
Political power therefore cannot be measured only by vote share.
It depends on location inside the decision-making structure.
A party with 10% of seats can be more influential than one with 20% if the first is capable of forming a majority with several blocs while the second is isolated.
Coalition theory captures this through the idea of the pivotal voter or pivotal party.
What matters is not simply how many votes you possess.
It is how often other actors need them.
The National Rally presents almost the opposite case.
Its 89 seats represent a historic breakthrough. Under France’s electoral system, Le Pen’s movement has traditionally struggled to translate substantial national vote share into parliamentary representation because second-round coordination among other parties frequently blocked its candidates.
This time, that barrier weakened dramatically.
The result changes French politics even if no other party agrees to cooperate with the National Rally.
Eighty-nine MPs provide parliamentary speaking time, committee positions, public funding, institutional resources and a much larger national platform.
Representation creates organisational capacity.
That can help a political movement professionalise.
This is one reason electoral breakthroughs can become self-reinforcing. Winning seats does not merely reflect existing political strength.
It creates resources that can generate future strength.
Le Pen therefore accomplished something in June that she failed to accomplish in April.
She lost the presidency.
She transformed her party’s parliamentary position.
Again, different elections produce different kinds of political power.
This makes the language of electoral defeat increasingly inadequate.
A candidate can lose one contest while changing the political system through another.
NUPES faces its own version of this complexity. Mélenchon’s alliance has become the largest opposition grouping on the left, demonstrating that coordination among previously fragmented left-wing parties could translate presidential support into parliamentary representation.
But NUPES is an electoral alliance rather than a single ideologically unified party.
Its members disagree over Europe, foreign policy, economic strategy and other issues.
Opposition creates unity more easily than government.
The question is whether the alliance remains coherent once individual parties face incentives to differentiate themselves.
This is another recurring political problem.
Coalitions are often created by a shared enemy.
Once the enemy weakens or circumstances change, internal differences become more important.
Negative political identity is therefore powerful but potentially unstable.
“We all oppose Macron” can organise an election.
It cannot answer every policy question afterwards.
The same problem applies to Macron’s own coalition.
Ensemble contains parties and politicians drawn historically from both centre-left and centre-right traditions. Macron’s personal political dominance helped hold those groups together.
Losing the absolute majority increases the importance of their internal differences because every parliamentary vote becomes more valuable.
Scarcity increases bargaining power internally as well as externally.
One defecting MP matters more when the government has 245 seats than when it possesses 350.
This means parliamentary arithmetic can change party discipline.
Again, institutional structures affect political behaviour.
The legislative result also changes how we should interpret Macron’s April victory.
When I wrote after the presidential runoff that Macron’s 58.55% should not be read as 58.55% support for his programme, that was partly an inference from the structure of the election.
Now we have additional evidence.
Millions of people who helped elect Macron president did not subsequently give his coalition an absolute parliamentary majority.
Some voted left.
Some voted for the National Rally.
Some voted for other parties.
Many did not vote at all.
The French electorate therefore appears capable of distinguishing who should occupy the presidency from how much legislative power that president should possess.
That is politically sophisticated behaviour even if individual voters were not consciously trying to engineer divided government.
Aggregate outcomes can produce institutional balance without every voter intending the final balance.
This is an important point about democracy.
Political systems frequently produce emergent outcomes.
No individual voter chooses the parliament.
Each chooses one constituency candidate.
The national distribution emerges from millions of separate decisions.
Nobody controls the aggregate result.
That decentralisation is one of democracy’s strengths.
It is also why politicians should be cautious about claiming to know exactly what “the people” demanded.
There is no single French voter.
There are tens of millions of people making different choices for different reasons.
Democratic institutions aggregate those choices into authority without pretending they become one mind.
Populist rhetoric often does the opposite.
It imagines “the people” as a coherent political actor with one authentic will, usually represented by the politician using the phrase.
France’s election demonstrates how implausible that simplification is.
The same electorate gave Macron the presidency, Mélenchon’s alliance a large parliamentary bloc, Le Pen 89 MPs and the Republicans potentially pivotal legislative influence.
Which one represents “the people”?
All of them represent parts of the people.
That is what pluralism means.
The political system has to make those competing representations coexist.
There is also a turnout problem that should temper every sweeping interpretation of the result. Legislative-election participation was extremely low compared with the presidential election.
This means parliamentary outcomes reflect not only political preference but differences in mobilisation.
A highly motivated minority can exercise disproportionate influence when other voters stay home.
That is not undemocratic; abstention is itself a legal choice.
But it complicates claims of mandate.
Democracy requires counting those who participate.
Political analysis should still ask why so many did not.
Repeated low turnout can indicate that citizens consider certain institutions less consequential or less representative.
France’s highly presidential political culture may itself contribute to legislative abstention because voters perceive the presidency as the election that really matters.
Ironically, the fragmented Assembly produced this month may make parliament more politically relevant, which could increase attention to future legislative contests.
Institutions can change public behaviour through demonstrating their importance.
If parliamentary votes repeatedly determine whether Macron’s reforms survive, citizens may begin treating Assembly elections as more consequential.
This is how institutional cultures evolve.
The immediate challenge for Macron is therefore political adaptation.
His first term rewarded decisiveness.
His second may reward negotiation.
Those skills overlap but are not identical.
A president accustomed to defining compromise as obstruction may struggle in a parliament where compromise becomes necessary.
Opposition parties face the same test.
If every concession to Macron is described as betrayal, they may produce paralysis and then blame the government for failing to act.
Responsibility becomes distributed when power is distributed.
That makes accountability harder.
Under majority government, voters know roughly who passed a policy.
Under negotiated government, several parties can claim credit for popular measures and blame one another for unpopular ones.
Coalition systems therefore trade clearer accountability for broader participation.
Again, no institutional arrangement gives us everything.
The coming months will show whether French politics can operate effectively under that trade-off.
But I think the result should be understood less dramatically than some commentary suggests.
France has not become ungovernable.
It has become negotiable.
For a political system accustomed to powerful presidents and parliamentary majorities, that may feel like crisis.
For many democracies, it is simply Tuesday.
Germany negotiates coalitions.
The Netherlands negotiates coalitions.
Nordic governments frequently negotiate minority support.
Legislation does not require every governing system to begin with one bloc possessing an absolute majority.
France may have to rediscover that.
The more important risk is not the absence of a majority itself.
It is whether political actors possess enough mutual legitimacy to bargain.
If Macron treats opposition as irresponsible obstruction, negotiations will fail.
If opposition parties treat every agreement with Macron as capitulation, negotiations will fail.
If voters punish every compromise as ideological betrayal, politicians will stop compromising.
Institutions can create incentives for bargaining.
Political culture determines whether actors use them.
Perhaps this is the final lesson from France’s unusually long electoral season.
In April, voters decided who should lead.
In June, they decided that leadership should have limits.
The first decision created authority.
The second created friction.
We often talk about friction in government as though it is automatically a defect.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes friction is what prevents political authority from becoming political ownership.
Macron remains president.
He simply has to persuade more people now.
That may make government harder.
It may also be exactly what parliament is for.
