After a promising first-round lead, France’s right-wing National Rally party came up short in the second round of the country’s legislative election. It ultimately came in third for seats in the National Assembly, France’s lower house, behind left-wing coalition New Popular Front (NFP) and French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance, Ensemble.
More than 300 contests in the first round proceeded to a three-way runoff involving National Rally, the NFP, and Ensemble. If those three-way races had gone ahead, National Rally had a decent chance of winning a majority in the second round. In response to that threat, more than 200 candidates from both Ensemble and NFP withdrew from those three-way races ahead of the second round to prevent splitting the vote and giving the victory to National Rally. In some instances, Macron had to pressure Ensemble candidates to drop out to give the advantage to NFP candidates.
So the leftists and centrists colluded to game France’s electoral system and ensure the right-wing party had no chance at power.
No single party won an outright majority in this election, so the nation will require a governing coalition. The National Assembly requires 289 seats for a majority. The NFP won 182 seats, Ensemble 163, National Rally 143, and The Republicans (France’s center-right party) just 39.
Even though National Rally improved 18-plus points over its performance in the 2022 legislative election, there’s almost no chance it makes it into the new government. The level of cooperation during the election makes an NFP-Ensemble coalition almost certain.
But that cooperation comes at a price, and that price will most likely result in far-left and even outright communist parties becoming part of the new government. The NFP’s program calls for ramping up government spending to the point of profligacy, implementing price controls on basic goods (because that always works as intended), and a new government agency to open the floodgates even wider for foreign migrants.
Meanwhile, National Rally’s economic positions don’t differ much from Ensemble and even some of the leftist parties. But, just as in many other Western countries, the massive influx of foreign migrants into France over the past decade — 2023 set a new record — represented the issue of this election. And that’s where the party has run afoul of the French elite.
Every other political party and media outlet has branded National Rally “right-wing extremists” simply because they don’t want hordes of migrants burdening their economy, fostering Islamic terrorism, unleashing a wave of violent crime, and slowly but surely eroding French culture.
Macron’s government did pass a bill late last year that placed a bare minimum of restrictions on chain migration and migrant access to welfare, yet his party remains within the bounds of “respectable” politics. Parties can tweak policy around the edges and remain “respectable,” but any real or sincere challenge to mass migration is delegitimized as “extremist.”
Western elites have imported millions of people for cheap labor, cheap votes, and the smug satisfaction that they’re helping “the oppressed.” They can’t admit that these policies have wrought disaster on their countries, so instead of heeding the mandate of the people and forming a government with National Rally, they’ll give the leftists a chance to run wild. Rest assured, the left won’t pass up the opportunity.
In the wake of their triumph, supporters of the new leftist alliance took to the streets of Paris to indulge in their favorite pastime — setting things on fire. Macron’s unholy alliance with the French far-left almost certainly dooms the once-sovereign nation to economic depredation at the hands of radical socialists and cultural annihilation due to mass migration that’s not only permitted but upheld as an absolute good.
The French election has illustrated more clearly than ever that elite technocrats will gladly form a cynical but highly effective alliance with radical left-wing ideologues rather than let the right have a victory. And they’ll let the left burn their country to the ground just so they don’t have to face the truth about their disastrous immigration policies.
Those same elites with those same pretensions to superiority reside here in America, too.
We’ve already seen so-called centrist Democrats, “neutral” government officials, and Never Trump Republicans actively empower leftist radicals just to hinder the efforts of the right for nearly a decade now. The specter of a centrist-leftist alliance doesn’t bode well for former President Donald Trump, even if he does end up winning, and it threatens the long-term viability of a conservative movement in America.
Hayden Daniel is a staff editor at The Federalist. He previously worked as an editor at The Daily Wire and as deputy editor/opinion editor at The Daily Caller. He received his B.A. in European History from Washington and Lee University with minors in Philosophy and Classics. Follow him on Twitter at @HaydenWDaniel
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