Emmanuel Macron took a gamble in calling a snap parliamentary vote following the far-right National Rally’s outperformance in European elections. His gambit was that the French may well have protested when voting in the EU but would vote more moderately for the National Assembly — thus stalling the rise of Marine Le Pen, France’s perpetual presidential bridesmaid.

Macron, to the surprise of many, may have been right. Rather than the National Rally (RN) winning the most votes, the left-wing New Popular Front coalition mobilised and took the largest share of votes (with 182 seats), assisted by a tactical deal with Macron’s centrist Ensemble (168 seats) to beat out RN’s 143.

French connection

The results mirror trends in much of the Western world.

Crudely put, the establishment voted for Macron. Educated cosmopolitans and migrants, especially in larger cities, voted left. People from rural areas and left-behind towns voted right — and in much higher numbers than the allocation of seats suggests.

In many ways, it’s a classic story of globalisation and its discontents. Those who have benefited voted for the status quo. Those who felt left out voted for radical change—whether on the left or the right.

France has undergone an economic transformation in Paris, but many in la France profonde of the provinces and small communes struggle to make ends meet. Inequality is palpable. And people are dissatisfied with political elites, with Macron representing this class par excellence.

As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote centuries ago: “the French want no-one to be their superior.” And so, like a tall poppy in Flanders, they have cut Macron down, albeit at the ballot box, not with a guillotine.

Like those in the UK who voted for Brexit, or the US wishing to “Make America Great Again”, a growing number of French feel their country has lost its way, requiring more attention be paid to the “forgotten” people and reinvigorating a sense of national pride.

Macron went about this in his own imperious way. But more than wanting a larger global presence, leadership in Europe and a muscular, even if largely rhetorical, approach to Russia, most simply wanted to be heard and to have living standards improved.

Frenemies within

Now, with a hung parliament, Macron will not face the classic “cohabitation” problem of predecessors like Jacques Chirac — that is, a president ruling with a government from another party — but the even more thorny challenge of having to live with not one, but two, hostile parties whose bases have wildly different worldviews, only united only in their dislike for the president.

The most talked about option to avoid complete gridlock — various coalitions between the leaders of the socialists and the Macron’s centrists — will likely fail in the short term.

The parties lack a common program, shared responsibility and trust. And while the most logical option would be for Macron’s Ensemble party to lead a coalition, both the left and the right parties were elected on an anti-incumbency platform, making a “resurrected Macronism” dead on arrival.

More likely is that in by mid-next year Macron will have appointed a consensual figure to lead a technocratic minority government largely devoid of ideology, and avoiding the more extreme positions of both left and right.

Carrying the flame

But in the meantime, there will be turbulence. Parliament will reconvene in September when, in all likelihood, the NLP will fail to form a government. By October, the liberal Republicans, which gained only a small number of seats, will form a government to manage essential and short-term budgetary questions. But the ultimate outcome — a Republican party prime minister leading a technocratic government — will only come about by mid 2025 after months of horse trading.

And the risk of course is that a messy compromise, even if competently administered, will deepen antipathy, setting the scene for an even more consequential showdown at the next election. And this may not just deliver an RN majority in the legislature, but perhaps Marine Le Pen’s long-aspired goal as France’s first female president.

In the meantime, and as thoughts slowly turn to the Paris Olympics and the long European summer to follow, the weekend’s result won’t necessarily be a bad outcome for France’s economy or democracy.

Compromise between different viewpoints and working across the aisle is exactly what parliaments are designed for. Democracy always involves a trade-off between representativeness and effectiveness. Bonne chance.

Damien Bruckard is CEO of Geopolitical Strategy in Sydney and the daily risk briefing geopoliticaldispatch.com. Clément Lamy is CEO of LB Advisory, a public policy advisory practice in Paris.