France is heading to the polls in the second round of the country’s legislative elections, which will determine 501 seats in the National Assembly and the election of the next prime minister.
The far-right National Rally (RN), led by Marine Le Pen, is seeking power but is “likely to fall short of a majority, raising the spectre of a chaotic hung parliament”, Reuters has said.
After the first round on 30 June, interior ministry figures had RN with 33 percent of the vote, ahead of the leftist New Popular Front alliance at almost 28 percent. The ruling coalition led by President Macron was in third place, with 20 percent. RN had previously received a record 37.4 percent of votes in the 2024 European elections, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call this snap election.
Thousands of trade unionists and others gathered in central Paris on Wednesday 3 July to protest the far-right’s participation in France’s elections, ahead of the second round.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin has said that 30,000 police will be deployed across France ahead of Sunday’s voting. Tensions are high ahead of the elections, as Prisca Thevenot, a member of President Macron’s Renaissance Party, was attacked while on the campaign trail on 3 July – with one member of the party sustaining a broken jaw.
There has been a major uptick in political violence during the three-week campaign, with the Interior Minister saying more than 50 physical assaults on candidates and campaigners were recorded.
In response to the rise of the far-right, the radical Paris Luttes website published an article entitled ‘For an anti-fascist uprising’, by ecological group Les Soulèvements de la Terre (The Earth Uprisings Collective), a group which emerged out of France’s Zone à Defendre (ZAD) autonomous zone in Notre-Dame-des-Landes.
“The RN is a neo-fascist party. It fantasises about the purity of a nation closed in on itself. A ‘white and Catholic’ nation that excludes and discriminates. It promotes a war of civilisation. It exalts virility, toxic masculinity and brute force. It perpetuates the most rancid colonial racism,” the collective wrote.
The collective is calling for people to organise at a grassroots level against the RN. They wrote: “It’s not enough to block the Rassemblement National at the ballot box; we have to physically block its path. It must not come to power.”
Europe is currently witnessing a dramatic move to the right in politics, with the Netherlands electing the far-right Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in November 2023. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) received 15.9 percent of the vote in the recent European Parliament elections, making it the second strongest party behind the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
