High-stakes French election hits final stretch before first-round voting begins

Candidates standing in the snap French legislative election called by President Emmanuel Macron were making their last campaign pushes ahead of the first round of voting on Sunday.

It is a pivotal and polarising poll in which Mr Macron’s centrist government risks a potentially fatal beating at the hands of the surging far right.

With pollsters indicating that the anti-immigration National Rally could greatly increase its number of politicians in the National Assembly, the election could radically alter the trajectory of the European Union’s largest country and hamstring Mr Macron — who has been a driving force in EU decision-making — for the remainder of his second and last presidential term.

A far-right victory, coming on the heels of its surge in French voting for the European Parliament this month, risks saddling the president with a National Rally prime minister, Jordan Bardella.

This would take the EU’s second-largest economy into uncharted territory because the two men’s plans for France’s future are so sharply opposed.

Mr Bardella, a 28-year-old protege of National Rally leader Marine Le Pen and with no governing experience, says he would use the powers of prime minister to stop Mr Macron from continuing to supply long-range weapons to Ukraine.

He cites fears that their ability to strike targets in Russia could suck nuclear-armed France into direct confrontation with the nuclear-armed government in Moscow.

But France’s two-round system of voting — with initial balloting on Sunday to thin down the field for decisive follow-up voting on July 7 — means the election’s ultimate outcome is uncertain.

This allowed National Rally opponents to believe, as they canvassed for votes before Friday night’s campaign cutoff, that they could still lay the groundwork to prevent a legislative majority in the second round for the nationalist, far-right party with historical links to antisemitism.

Mr Macron dissolved parliament’s lower house and called the quick early election in hopes of shoring up support for his government in the wake of its humiliating defeat in the June 9 European Parliament vote.

His gamble triggered an unforeseen redrawing of France’s political map even before French voters overseas started casting ballots online this week.

If it backfires and ushers in France’s first far-right government since its Nazi occupation in the Second World War, Mr Macron risks being remembered for one of the most earth-shaking political decisions in Europe and misreadings of a nation’s mood since former UK prime minister David Cameron triggered the UK’s Brexit vote in 2016.

On the left of French politics, Mr Macron’s decision has had the effect of galvanising previously splintered parties into a new coalition that has coalesced behind promises of massive public spending, which opponents say would be ruinous for the economy, jobs and France’s debts, already criticised by EU watchdogs.

On the far right, the National Rally has been bolstered by defections from the traditional right that has shattered in the campaign shakeup.

It could also draw voters from far-right fringe parties.

Victory on July 7 would crown a years-long rebranding effort by Ms Le Pen to make the party, previously called the National Front, more palatable to mainstream voters since she inherited it from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has multiple convictions for antisemitic and racist hate speech, ultimately leading her to sideline him.

In the middle ground, Mr Macron and his candidates have been furiously arguing that the left/right blocs are both extreme and dangerous, hoping to rekindle the dynamic that saw him elected as president in 2017 and 2022 but which worked less well in the last legislative elections that followed his re-election, leaving his government without an absolute majority and weakened in the National Assembly.

In the final stretch before Friday night’s campaign cutoff, the National Rally faced renewed criticism for its plans to curtail the rights of French citizens with dual nationality by freezing them out of some security, defence and nuclear-industry jobs.

National Rally leaders have given conflicting information about how many people would be affected but said that it would be in the dozens, and on the exact scope of the restrictions.

Critics say the planned policy change would create an underclass of French citizens and reveals a discriminatory way of the thinking at the heart of the party, which has long been accused of stoking hostility toward immigrants, Muslims, Jews and people of colour.

“This is how it starts and then it goes further,” said Youssef Elkouch, 31, a scriptwriter, as he attended a rally against the far right in Paris on Thursday night.

“The only coherence in the National Rally programme is to attack Muslims or immigrants. I’m French, but I don’t think that matters to people who vote for them,” he said.