France is heading towards an election almost nobody expected to be taking place this summer. After Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won roughly 32% of the French vote in the European Parliament election on 9 June, more than twice the roughly 15% received by President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist list, Macron responded within hours by dissolving the National Assembly and calling legislative elections for 30 June and 7 July. The decision does not place Macron’s presidency itself on the ballot; his term continues until 2027. It does, however, place the government and domestic legislative agenda at risk. If National Rally converts its European-election momentum into a parliamentary majority, Macron could be forced into cohabitation with a prime minister from a political movement fundamentally opposed to much of his programme. The extraordinary feature is that Macron created this possibility himself. Faced with evidence that voters had moved sharply away from his political coalition, he chose not to insulate the presidency from that signal but to ask voters immediately whether they wanted to reproduce it at the national level. The decision is either an unusually confident act of democratic accountability or one of the largest political miscalculations of Macron’s presidency. It may be both.
The distinction between the European election and the coming parliamentary election is essential because voters do not necessarily use different elections to communicate the same preference. European Parliament contests frequently function partly as opportunities to punish national governments because voters know the immediate domestic consequences are limited. Turnout, party competition and strategic voting differ from national elections. A French citizen can vote for National Rally in a European election to express dissatisfaction with immigration, living costs or Macron while still deciding that handing the party control of the French government is too large a risk. Macron’s decision appears partly designed to test exactly this distinction. Instead of allowing National Rally to spend three years claiming that its European victory represented the authentic national majority, he has forced the party to demonstrate that claim under the much higher stakes of a legislative election. In game-theoretic terms, Macron has converted a low-cost protest signal into a high-cost choice. The strategy works if enough voters who used National Rally to punish him become more cautious when the consequence could be an RN government. It fails catastrophically if the European result was not protest at all but an accurate measurement of a deeper electoral realignment.
This is what makes the dissolution more than an impulsive response to electoral humiliation. Macron faces a deteriorating strategic position even without an early election. His centrist alliance lost its absolute parliamentary majority in 2022, leaving the government dependent on negotiation and controversial constitutional mechanisms to pass important legislation. Macron cannot seek another consecutive presidential term in 2027, while Le Pen is already positioned as one of the strongest potential successors. Waiting three years therefore contains its own risks. National Rally could remain in opposition, criticise every unpopular government decision and arrive at 2027 without having been forced to demonstrate whether its programme can actually govern France. Calling an election now potentially changes that trajectory. If RN performs worse when government itself is at stake, its momentum breaks. If it wins and governs, it inherits responsibility for budgets, migration, public services and economic trade-offs before the presidential election. One interpretation of Macron’s gamble is therefore that he is attempting to bring the political risk forward in time, when he still occupies the presidency and possesses constitutional authority capable of constraining what an RN-led government could do. Reuters reported precisely this possibility among analysts assessing his decision.
That strategy, however, depends on an assumption politicians make at their peril: that giving an opponent responsibility will expose the inadequacy of the opponent’s programme rather than demonstrate its competence. Political establishments repeatedly convince themselves that populists will collapse when confronted with government. Sometimes they do. Sometimes governing normalises them. Giorgia Meloni provides an obvious European warning. Her Brothers of Italy movement entered office amid predictions that ideological radicalism and economic constraints would produce instability; instead, Meloni has become a more established European political actor while retaining substantial domestic support. The European elections strengthened her position rather than destroying it. If National Rally entered government and administered France without the catastrophe predicted by its opponents, the experience could make Le Pen more rather than less credible in 2027. Macron would then have given the far right exactly what it previously lacked: a national executive record.
The gamble therefore illustrates the difference between political risk and expected political risk. Keeping RN outside government is not risk-free because its support may continue increasing. Allowing it the possibility of governing is not necessarily reckless if Macron believes opposition itself is protecting the party from accountability. The decision depends on probabilities that cannot be known confidently: the probability RN wins now, the probability it governs badly if it wins, the probability voters blame RN rather than Macron for governmental conflict, and the probability all of this changes the 2027 presidential election. Macron has effectively placed several uncertain political variables into one enormous bet. Calling that irrational merely because it is dangerous would confuse risk with bad strategy. Calling it brilliant before observing the outcome would make the opposite mistake.
France’s two-round electoral system makes those probabilities especially difficult to estimate. The National Assembly contains 577 constituencies, and parliamentary power depends not simply on national vote share but on who reaches and wins constituency runoffs. A party can dominate the first round nationally and still lose many seats if opponents coordinate behind whichever candidate is best positioned to defeat it in the second. Historically, French parties used a “republican front” against the far right, with left and centre-right voters supporting one another’s candidates when necessary to prevent National Front or National Rally victories. Whether that barrier still functions is uncertain because the mainstream party system that sustained it has weakened dramatically. Macron’s own rise helped destroy the old Socialist-Republican alternation, and National Rally has spent years attempting to make itself appear like an ordinary governing party rather than an anti-system movement. The electoral system therefore creates an institutional barrier against plurality becoming majority, but institutions work through political behaviour. If voters no longer coordinate, the barrier weakens without one line of electoral law changing.
This is why Le Pen’s long-running strategy of “de-demonisation” matters. National Rally did not reach its current position simply because French attitudes moved rightwards. The party deliberately changed how the political market perceives it. Le Pen softened parts of the party’s economic and European programme, expelled or distanced figures whose rhetoric created obvious reputational costs, abandoned previous ambitions to leave the euro and increasingly emphasised purchasing power, immigration and national preference through the language of ordinary government. Her young protégé Jordan Bardella, who led the European-election campaign, has helped present a newer generational image of the movement. The underlying nationalist programme remains highly controversial, particularly around immigration and distinctions between citizens and foreigners, but the party’s strategic objective has been to reduce the psychological cost of voting for it. That strategy appears to have worked sufficiently that National Rally can no longer be analysed as a permanent protest party existing outside plausible government.
The economic mechanism resembles risk-premium compression. A voter may agree with 70% of a radical party’s diagnosis but refuse to support it because the perceived probability of catastrophic government is high. If the party becomes more professional, moderates rhetoric and governs municipalities without obvious collapse, that perceived risk falls. The voter does not need to become more radical ideologically; the discount attached to the radical party merely becomes smaller. Electoral normalisation can therefore occur even without enormous changes in underlying policy preferences. The establishment’s problem is that repeatedly warning voters about extremism becomes less effective once voters observe the supposedly impossible party participating normally in institutions. Eventually the warning itself can appear exaggerated, which further reduces the credibility of those issuing it.
This is why simply describing National Rally as “far right” is analytically insufficient even if the classification is defensible. Labels locate parties ideologically; they do not explain demand. The more important question is why millions of French voters believe RN provides answers unavailable from the centre. Immigration is central, but the coalition also reflects purchasing-power pressure, distrust of political elites, insecurity, regional economic decline and frustration with European regulation. Across the EU elections, nationalist parties benefited from concerns involving migration, inflation, green-transition costs and the war in Ukraine, while liberal and Green parties suffered substantial losses. These grievances are not all produced by one cause, and National Rally’s solutions may not solve them. Their political existence does not depend on whether established parties consider the proposed solutions economically coherent.
The immigration issue demonstrates this especially well. France contains a large immigrant population and one of Europe’s largest Muslim communities, while repeated terrorist attacks and debates over integration, secularism and national identity have made immigration politically salient for years. National Rally argues that immigration places pressure on public services, wages, security and cultural cohesion and advocates much stricter controls alongside forms of “national preference” giving French citizens priority in areas such as welfare. Opponents argue that these policies would discriminate against minorities, conflict with constitutional or European obligations and ignore immigrants’ contribution to the economy. Both sides frequently compress several separate questions into one moral argument. How much immigration should France accept? Which categories? How should asylum work? How should labour-market integration operate? What obligations should citizenship create? How much cultural assimilation can the state legitimately demand? Treating every restriction as xenophobia or every concern as proof of failed multiculturalism prevents those questions from being answered institutionally.
The same analytical mistake occurred in the Netherlands before Wilders’ victory. When mainstream parties leave a politically salient issue unresolved for long enough, an outsider can acquire issue ownership. Voters begin believing that only one party is willing to discuss the problem in terms they recognise. Once that occurs, copying the outsider’s rhetoric shortly before an election may strengthen rather than weaken it because voters ask why they should purchase the imitation when the original exists. Macron has moved rightwards on immigration and security during parts of his presidency, but RN can claim that this shift validates its diagnosis while arguing that only it will implement the policies fully. Established parties therefore face a difficult choice: ignore the issue and appear unresponsive, imitate the challenger and legitimise it, or develop a distinct policy capable of acknowledging voter concerns without accepting the challenger’s entire framework.
Economic geography reinforces this political divide. France’s largest metropolitan areas contain many of the winners from European integration, higher education and globally connected service industries, while smaller towns and peripheral regions can experience weaker employment opportunities, declining public services and a sense that national institutions are geographically distant. National Rally has increasingly built support outside the affluent urban cores. This resembles political changes across many advanced economies where globalisation creates aggregate gains while losses become concentrated geographically. A country can become richer while particular communities experience relative decline, and relative decline is politically powerful because citizens compare themselves with both the national average and their own expectations.
Macron’s political identity makes this problem sharper. He entered office in 2017 presenting himself as neither left nor right, pro-European, technocratic and reformist. That coalition attracted educated urban voters, moderates from both traditional parties and citizens exhausted by the old partisan system. It was extraordinarily successful at destroying the Socialist and Republican duopoly. The unintended consequence was removing much of the moderate political infrastructure between Macron and the extremes. Once traditional centre-left and centre-right parties weakened, dissatisfied voters increasingly faced a choice among Macron’s centre, Le Pen’s nationalist right and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s radical left. Centrism became powerful electorally while making itself the establishment almost by definition.
This is the centre-collapse paradox. A centrist movement wins by absorbing moderate voters from both sides. Its success weakens the traditional parties that previously channelled dissatisfaction without threatening the entire political centre. When the centrist government later becomes unpopular, voters have fewer moderate alternatives available. Discontent therefore flows towards parties further from the centre. The political system becomes more polarised partly because the successful centrist previously consolidated the centre too effectively. Macron did not create every force producing French polarisation, but his restructuring of the party system changed the channels through which those forces now move.
The rapid formation of the left-wing New Popular Front after the dissolution demonstrates the response. Socialists, Greens, Communists and Mélenchon’s France Unbowed agreed to coordinate candidates despite major disagreements over Europe, economic policy, Ukraine and Gaza. Their incentive is generated by the electoral system: fragmented left-wing candidates could eliminate one another and allow RN to dominate runoffs, while coordination increases the probability that one left candidate survives into the second round. Political actors who disagree substantively therefore cooperate because the institutional rules change the payoff to unity. The coalition may look ideologically incoherent from a governing perspective while remaining completely rational from an electoral perspective.
This is another example of institutions manufacturing coalitions. Electoral systems do not simply translate pre-existing political preferences into seats; they influence how parties organise before citizens vote. Proportional representation encourages multiple parties because smaller movements can win seats independently. Two-round constituency systems encourage pre- or inter-round coordination because fragmented blocs risk elimination. France’s coming election therefore cannot be predicted simply from opinion-poll percentages. The geographical distribution of support, candidate withdrawals and second-round voter transfers will determine parliamentary arithmetic.
Macron’s dissolution compresses all of this strategic coordination into only three weeks. That is another part of the gamble. Opposition parties have very little time to negotiate candidates, finance campaigns or resolve ideological disputes. A president controlling an established national organisation might reasonably expect surprise to disadvantage fragmented opponents. Yet urgency can also force compromises that parties would spend months failing to negotiate under normal conditions. The New Popular Front emerged within days precisely because the perceived threat of an RN government made the cost of division unusually high. Political pressure can solve coordination problems by raising the price of disagreement.
The centre-right Republicans face an even more existential problem. Party leader Éric Ciotti shocked colleagues by advocating an alliance with National Rally, producing an internal revolt. The episode demonstrates how far Le Pen’s normalisation strategy has advanced. The old conservative barrier against RN is no longer structurally secure. Some politicians now calculate that cooperating with the nationalist right offers a better path to influence than remaining inside a shrinking traditional conservative party. Once politicians begin defecting, voter perceptions can change further because elite cooperation itself signals that the formerly unacceptable party has become acceptable.
This is elite normalisation feeding mass normalisation. Voters infer information from politicians’ behaviour. If mainstream conservative figures refuse any cooperation with RN, citizens may interpret that as evidence that important institutional differences remain. If those politicians begin forming alliances, the reputational boundary weakens. The same process occurred historically as radical parties entered coalition politics elsewhere in Europe. Institutional inclusion can moderate parties, but it can also legitimise them before moderation occurs fully.
France therefore faces a genuine argument over the cordon sanitaire. Should democratic parties cooperate to keep RN out of power even if it becomes the largest electoral force? One side argues that liberal democracy is entitled to defend itself against movements threatening minority rights or constitutional norms. The other argues that permanently excluding a party supported by millions creates an increasingly serious democratic legitimacy problem. The correct answer depends partly on conduct. Democracy does not require parties to enter coalitions with opponents whose policies they reject. Every elected representative retains their own mandate. But exclusion becomes politically difficult to sustain if it appears to rest only on the identity of RN rather than specific policies other parties refuse to support.
The stronger democratic principle is therefore no entitlement to office, but no exemption from ordinary competition. RN should be allowed to campaign, win seats and attempt to construct a majority. Other parties should be allowed to coordinate against it. If a majority of elected representatives oppose RN, keeping it out of government is not inherently anti-democratic. If RN wins a parliamentary majority under the same electoral rules, refusing to allow it to govern simply because established elites dislike the result would raise a fundamentally different constitutional problem. Democracy protects the right to compete, not a guarantee that the largest minority always governs.
This is why Macron’s decision can be defended democratically even if it proves strategically disastrous for him. He received a powerful negative signal from the European election and responded by returning authority to voters rather than finding an institutional mechanism to avoid them. Critics reasonably argue that European and national elections concern different offices and that France was not constitutionally required to dissolve Parliament. The decision therefore was not necessary democratic accountability. But it is difficult to describe asking citizens to vote again as inherently anti-democratic simply because they may choose an outcome Macron dislikes. Democracy includes the government’s right to gamble and the electorate’s right to make it regret doing so.
The possibility of cohabitation makes the stakes unusually interesting because France’s Fifth Republic contains both a powerful directly elected president and a government responsible to Parliament. When the president’s political camp controls the National Assembly, presidential authority appears dominant. When the parliamentary majority belongs to another party, power shifts substantially towards the prime minister on domestic policy. France experienced cohabitation under Mitterrand and Chirac, and most recently from 1997 to 2002, when President Jacques Chirac governed alongside Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. The constitution therefore already contains a mechanism for divided political legitimacy rather than requiring one side to eliminate the other.
If RN wins a majority and Jordan Bardella becomes prime minister, France could therefore have Macron representing one electoral mandate and an RN government representing another. Macron would retain important powers, particularly in foreign affairs and defence, while the government would control much of the domestic agenda. Political conflict would move inside the executive itself. That can produce paralysis, but it also demonstrates constitutional flexibility: voters can change domestic government without prematurely removing a president elected separately for a fixed term.
The arrangement would become particularly complicated over Ukraine and the European Union. Macron has become one of Europe’s strongest advocates for supporting Ukraine and strengthening European strategic autonomy. National Rally has historically maintained a much more sceptical relationship towards some aspects of European integration and previously had significant political and financial links with Russia, although it has moderated several positions since the invasion of Ukraine. A cohabitation government could therefore generate disputes over how France exercises power internationally. The constitution provides the president with significant foreign-policy authority, but budgets and legislation still involve government and Parliament. France could speak with more than one political voice at exactly the moment Europe needs coordination over Russia, defence and industrial competition.
This illustrates why domestic elections in major states create international externalities. French citizens vote according to French preferences, but France is a nuclear power, permanent UN Security Council member and central EU state. Their electoral decisions affect Ukrainian security, European fiscal rules, migration policy and the balance of power inside Brussels. Democracy remains national while many consequences are international. There is no obvious democratic solution to that mismatch because giving foreigners votes in French elections would violate French political sovereignty. International institutions therefore need to absorb policy changes produced by national electorates they cannot control.
The European election itself revealed this tension.
