France voted today in the first round of a snap parliamentary election that President Emmanuel Macron called after Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) decisively defeated his coalition in the European Parliament elections earlier this month. Early projections tonight place the RN and its allies first with roughly one-third of the vote, ahead of the newly assembled left-wing New Popular Front, while Macron’s centrist alliance appears a distant third. The second round next Sunday will determine the actual composition of the National Assembly, so tonight’s percentages cannot simply be translated into seats. Yet the political direction is already unmistakable: a party that spent decades at the margins of French politics is now competing seriously for national governing power, while the political centre that dominated the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections is struggling to preserve enough parliamentary representation to remain decisive.
The immediate temptation is to interpret this as another story about the rise of the European far right. That description is accurate but incomplete. France presents a more interesting structural question: what happens when a political centre survives elections partly because voters repeatedly use it to block alternatives they fear, rather than because they remain positively attached to the centre itself? Macron defeated Marine Le Pen in both 2017 and 2022 after large numbers of left-wing and moderate voters supported him in the presidential runoff to prevent an RN presidency. That strategy can defeat a radical challenger repeatedly. It does not necessarily eliminate the grievances producing support for that challenger. If anything, each repetition can weaken the centrist coalition by making tactical voters feel they are being asked indefinitely to choose the lesser risk rather than a government they actually want.
This is the difference between positive legitimacy and defensive legitimacy. Positive legitimacy exists when citizens support a government because they approve of its programme or performance. Defensive legitimacy exists when citizens support it principally because the alternative appears worse. Both produce valid votes, and democracies cannot distinguish them mechanically at the ballot box. Their political durability differs enormously. A government supported enthusiastically can absorb unpopular decisions while retaining some reservoir of trust. A government assembled from voters principally trying to block somebody else begins with much less political capital. Every unpopular reform can remind tactical supporters that they never particularly wanted the government in the first place.
Macron’s presidency has increasingly confronted this problem. His original political achievement was extraordinary: he disrupted the traditional Socialist-Republican party system in 2017 and constructed a new centrist movement combining economically liberal policies, social moderation and strong European integration. That coalition initially appeared capable of replacing the old left-right division. Seven years later, the disruption has produced a different equilibrium. The traditional centre-left and centre-right remain weakened, Macron cannot run for a third consecutive presidential term in 2027, and the RN has become the principal beneficiary of anti-government dissatisfaction. Destroying the old party system proved easier than constructing a durable replacement for it.
This is a recurring danger when political movements become highly personalised. Macron’s Renaissance party developed around a presidential candidate rather than emerging from a century-old political organisation with deep local structures and a clear succession mechanism. Personalisation initially produced enormous efficiency because voters knew exactly what the movement represented: Macron. The same structure becomes vulnerable when the founder’s popularity declines or constitutional term limits approach. Political parties need to convert charismatic authority into organisational authority if they want to survive their creators. Otherwise electoral success can disappear when the individual around whom the coalition was constructed leaves.
The RN has spent the same period doing almost the opposite. Marine Le Pen inherited a party founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose history included overtly extremist rhetoric and antisemitic controversies. She has spent years attempting to “de-demonise” the party: moderating parts of its programme, changing its name from the National Front to National Rally and presenting it increasingly as a normal governing alternative rather than a permanent protest movement. The ideological transformation should not be exaggerated; the RN remains strongly nationalist, anti-immigration and substantially more sceptical of European integration than Macron’s coalition. The political transformation is nevertheless real. Millions of voters who once considered the party beyond acceptable politics now treat it as a plausible governing option.
That process demonstrates how political boundaries move. Democracies contain an informal Overton window defining which policies and parties voters consider legitimate. Electoral success can expand that window because visibility creates familiarity. A party wins 10%, then 20%, then governs municipalities, then sends large delegations to parliament. Each stage makes the next stage less psychologically extraordinary. Eventually the argument shifts from whether the party belongs inside democratic politics to whether excluding the largest party from government is itself undemocratic.
This is where France now encounters the same coalition dilemma the Netherlands faced after Geert Wilders’ victory. Other parties can cooperate to prevent the RN winning constituencies in next Sunday’s second round. Candidates finishing third may withdraw so that anti-RN voters consolidate behind whichever remaining candidate has the strongest chance of defeating the National Rally. This strategy, historically described through versions of the “republican front”, is constitutionally legitimate. Voters supporting left-wing or centrist candidates remain free to coordinate against a party they consider dangerous. Democracy does not require political factions to compete inefficiently.
Yet repeated coordination against one party creates a long-term legitimacy problem if the underlying electorate continues expanding. RN supporters can argue that parties disagreeing on almost everything else suddenly cooperate whenever their movement approaches power. Every successful republican front can therefore reinforce the RN’s claim that the political establishment forms one cartel whose ultimate objective is preventing its voters from influencing government.
This is the cordon-sanitaire paradox. Exclusion can prevent a radical party exercising power today while strengthening its anti-establishment narrative tomorrow. The more heterogeneous the coalition required to stop it, the easier the narrative becomes. A far-left voter and a Macron supporter may share little economically or socially, yet if both vote tactically against RN, Marine Le Pen can present their temporary coordination as evidence that the conventional left-centre distinction is superficial compared with the divide between her movement and the establishment.
That does not mean other parties should stop coordinating merely to avoid giving the RN rhetorical ammunition. If politicians genuinely believe particular policies threaten constitutional principles or minority rights, they have no obligation to facilitate those policies for the sake of appearing neutral. The deeper issue is that electoral blocking cannot substitute permanently for political competition over the grievances producing RN support.
Immigration is one of those grievances. France has experienced decades of political conflict over immigration, integration, Islam, secularism and national identity. The RN offers an unusually clear causal narrative: immigration places pressure on public services, increases security risks, weakens cultural cohesion and disadvantages French citizens economically. Some individual claims are supported more strongly than others, but the narrative succeeds partly because it connects several different sources of dissatisfaction into one political explanation.
This is what successful populist movements often do. Complex systems contain many causes. Political communication rewards simple causal models. Housing shortages can involve construction constraints, interest rates, urban planning and demographic demand. A nationalist party can connect part of the problem to immigration. Crime varies by geography, age, income and social conditions. A nationalist party can connect it to immigration and integration. Wage stagnation reflects productivity, trade, bargaining power and labour-market structure. Immigration can again become one visible component.
The analytical mistake would be either claiming immigration explains everything or insisting it explains nothing. Additional population does increase demand for housing and public services. Labour migration affects labour supply. Integration policy affects social cohesion. The magnitude and distribution of those effects need empirical analysis rather than ideological denial. When mainstream parties refuse to discuss a real trade-off because they dislike the political actors emphasising it, they surrender the issue to those actors.
This is one reason Denmark’s centre-left has adopted much stricter immigration policies while maintaining a social-democratic economic programme. The strategic calculation is that voters concerned about migration need not be surrendered automatically to the right. Whether one agrees with the policy direction, the political mechanism is clear: mainstream parties can reduce populist monopoly over an issue by responding substantively rather than morally delegitimising the concern itself.
France’s challenge is harder because immigration has become connected to laïcité, colonial history, terrorism and the place of Islam in the Republic. The French state formally emphasises universal citizenship rather than extensive recognition of ethnic or religious communities. In theory, this means citizens are French before they are members of particular communal categories. In practice, socioeconomic outcomes and political identities remain influenced by ethnicity, religion and neighbourhood. The gap between universalist constitutional language and unequal lived experience can produce frustration from several directions simultaneously.
Some Muslim citizens experience secularism as being applied selectively against visible Islamic practices. Some non-Muslim citizens believe republican secularism is being weakened by religious accommodation. The RN can therefore frame itself as defending a universal French identity while critics argue that its policies would make citizenship substantively less equal for minorities.
This is the majoritarian universalism problem: a political movement can describe the majority’s cultural norms as neutral national norms and therefore treat demands from minorities as special interests. The opposite problem exists when every policy disagreement is interpreted primarily through group identity, making shared citizenship harder to sustain. Liberal democracy needs a civic framework broad enough that people can retain cultural differences without believing the state belongs more authentically to one group.
Economic geography reinforces these divisions. RN support has become particularly strong across many smaller towns, deindustrialised areas and parts of northern and southeastern France, while metropolitan centres such as Paris often vote differently. The divide therefore is not simply ideological. It reflects different experiences of globalisation, public services and economic change.
France demonstrates the spatial distribution problem of economic policy. National GDP can grow while particular regions lose factories, young people and public services. A Parisian professional may experience European integration through career mobility, international companies and cultural openness. A worker in a former industrial town may experience the same economic system through factory closure and declining local opportunity. Both live inside one national growth statistic.
This is why populist voting cannot be explained simply through ignorance or prejudice. Identity matters, and xenophobia exists, but material geography matters too. Political movements become durable when they connect cultural grievances with economic experiences voters already possess.
Macron’s economic programme has often emphasised competitiveness, labour-market reform and attracting investment. France has indeed become more attractive for certain forms of business investment, while unemployment improved substantially from earlier levels before recent softening. Yet reforms such as raising the pension age from 62 to 64 produced enormous protests because aggregate fiscal logic does not determine how households perceive distributional fairness.
The pension reform is an example of technocratic legitimacy colliding with democratic legitimacy. Economists can argue that ageing populations require people to work longer or pay more taxes if pension systems are to remain sustainable. Citizens can simultaneously object that the burden falls disproportionately on workers who entered employment younger or perform physically demanding jobs. The policy debate therefore concerns not only whether reform is necessary but how the adjustment is distributed.
Macron’s government used constitutional mechanisms to pass the reform without a final parliamentary vote after struggling to secure a majority. The procedure was legal. Politically, it reinforced the perception among opponents that the government governs around public resistance rather than through it. Again, legality and legitimacy are related but not identical.
A government can possess constitutional authority to implement a policy while spending political capital every time it does so against intense opposition. Eventually that capital becomes scarce. Elections reveal the accumulated cost.
This may explain part of Macron’s extraordinary decision to dissolve the National Assembly immediately after losing the European election. Constitutionally, the president possessed the authority. Strategically, he appears to have calculated that forcing an immediate national choice would clarify the political situation, potentially exposing contradictions inside the RN or mobilising voters who had treated the European election as a low-stakes protest.
Instead, the first round suggests the gamble may have strengthened the RN’s route towards government.
This is a reminder that political leaders optimise under uncertainty. Calling an election is not inherently irrational simply because the result later looks bad. Macron had to estimate how voters, parties and turnout would respond. If his assumptions were wrong, a legally valid strategic gamble can produce enormous political costs.
The decision resembles corporate real-options logic. Leaders sometimes accelerate a decision because uncertainty is itself costly. Macron could have continued governing with a fragmented parliament until 2027 while RN support grew. Dissolution forced information to arrive earlier.
The problem is that information can be unpleasant.
Democracy gives leaders the right to ask voters a question.
It does not guarantee they like the answer.
The New Popular Front demonstrates another response to the crisis: rapid coalition formation across the French left. Socialists, Greens, Communists and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed have coordinated despite significant differences over economic policy, Europe, foreign affairs and political strategy. Their shared objective is partly preventing an RN majority.
This is coalition formation before rather than after voting. Parties sacrifice some ideological autonomy to prevent vote fragmentation. France’s two-round constituency system makes this rational because coordination can determine which candidates reach or survive the second round.
Again, electoral institutions shape political organisation.
Under proportional representation, the left-wing parties could run independently and negotiate afterwards. Under France’s system, fragmentation during constituency voting can eliminate candidates before coalition bargaining begins. The electoral rule therefore encourages temporary blocs.
This means today’s vote shares should not be interpreted as stable ideological identities. Many voters are choosing coalition labels containing parties they dislike because the electoral system makes strategic coordination valuable.
This is instrumental voting.
Democratic ballots record choices.
They do not always record first preferences.
A voter supporting the New Popular Front may prefer the Socialists but accept a France Unbowed candidate because defeating RN is more important. A centrist voter next Sunday may support a left-wing candidate they strongly dislike for the same reason.
Election results therefore need contextual interpretation.
The French second round will become an enormous exercise in strategic voting.
That raises another question: if the RN wins the largest national vote share but fails to obtain a parliamentary majority because other voters coordinate against it, is that democratic?
Yes, procedurally.
A democracy counts every vote according to established electoral rules. Voters are allowed to care about preventing one party winning. Tactical voting is itself a political preference.
But the legitimacy problem does not disappear simply because the process is lawful.
If the RN repeatedly receives the largest bloc of support while being excluded from government, its supporters may become less attached to institutions they perceive as designed against them.
This is why the long-term solution cannot be procedural exclusion alone.
Either the RN eventually demonstrates it can govern within constitutional constraints, or other parties need to persuade enough of its voters to leave.
Those are the sustainable democratic mechanisms.
Permanent quarantine becomes harder as support rises.
The Italian experience provides one possible comparison. Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy emerged from a post-fascist political tradition and generated substantial concern before taking office in 2022. Her government has subsequently operated more conventionally on several foreign-policy and European issues than some critics expected, particularly regarding NATO and support for Ukraine. That does not erase ideological concerns or prove every radical-right party moderates in office.
It demonstrates one mechanism through which responsibility can constrain populism.
Campaigning allows parties to promise simple solutions.
Government forces budgets, treaties, courts and markets into the calculation.
If the RN eventually governs France, it would encounter the same constraints at vastly greater scale. France is a nuclear power, permanent UN Security Council member, eurozone economy and central actor in the European Union. Decisions affecting EU law, fiscal policy or NATO would produce immediate international consequences.
The party could moderate.
It could attempt to change the institutions.
Which occurs depends partly on how strong those institutions remain.
This is why liberal democracies should not depend solely on keeping radical parties permanently outside power. They need constitutional systems robust enough to survive when voters eventually put those parties inside.
Courts.
Independent administration.
Parliament.
European institutions.
Media.
Civil society.
These should constrain every government, not only governments elites expect to like.
A system that remains democratic only while centrists win is not institutionally secure.
This is the stress-test conception of democracy. Institutions demonstrate strength when someone hostile to parts of the existing order acquires legitimate political authority and still cannot remove every constraint instantly.
France may be approaching that test.
The possibility should not produce complacency about policies affecting minority rights or European integration.
It should produce institutional preparation rather than panic.
The EU itself provides another layer of constraint. France cannot unilaterally rewrite many economic and legal arrangements without negotiating with European institutions and other governments. The euro constrains monetary policy. EU law shapes migration, competition and trade. Fiscal rules influence budgets.
Nationalist parties describe these constraints as losses of sovereignty.
They are also commitment devices.
Governments voluntarily pool authority partly to make certain policies harder to reverse domestically.
This is one reason populists frequently conflict with supranational institutions: both claim democratic legitimacy from different electorates.
A French government says French voters chose a policy.
The EU says France previously agreed to rules with twenty-six other democracies.
Which democratic mandate dominates?
There is no simple answer because sovereignty has been pooled rather than eliminated.
The tension becomes especially sharp on migration. France cannot control all movement independently while participating in Schengen. Border policy becomes partly European. An RN government promising dramatic reductions would therefore confront constraints that campaign rhetoric can understate.
Again, government converts slogans into institutional trade-offs.
Leave European arrangements and recover more national discretion while sacrificing some integration benefits.
Remain and accept constraints.
Sovereignty has opportunity costs.
The RN’s rise therefore should force mainstream parties to discuss those trade-offs more honestly rather than assuming European integration is self-justifying. Citizens are entitled to ask which powers should remain national and which should be European.
The strongest argument for integration is not that scepticism is illegitimate.
It is demonstrating where shared sovereignty produces greater effective power.
Trade negotiations.
Climate policy.
Defence procurement.
External borders.
Technology regulation.
In each area, a country of 68 million can sometimes exercise more influence through a bloc of 450 million than independently.
This is sovereignty through scale.
The price is accepting decisions France would not always choose alone.
Democratic politics should decide whether the exchange remains worthwhile.
The election therefore represents a much larger transition than one French parliamentary contest. Across Europe, parties once described as fringe have become increasingly normal participants in government or parliamentary support. The political centre cannot respond indefinitely by declaring every election the final defence of democracy.
Emergency rhetoric suffers diminishing returns.
If every election is existential, voters eventually stop believing the emergency.
Worse, they may conclude that democracy means voting correctly according to establishment preferences.
The better strategy is competitive.
Take migration seriously.
Take regional inequality seriously.
Take public-service decline seriously.
Take security seriously.
Defend minority rights through constitutional principle rather than pretending every concern about integration is prejudice.
Give voters reasons to choose alternatives to the RN rather than simply reasons to fear it.
This is the difference between defeating populism procedurally and defeating it politically.
The first prevents office.
The second changes preferences.
Only the second is durable.
Marine Le Pen’s movement has spent years trying to become less frightening.
Macron’s coalition has spent years relying partly on voters remaining frightened enough.
Those strategies are converging.
As the RN becomes more normalised, the anti-RN coalition needs increasingly positive reasons to exist.
