After the presidential elections, French politics is preparing for the “third round”, the legislative elections of 12 and 19 June which will close the electoral sequence with the choice of the members of the National Assembly. The legislative ones are, in fact, 577 mini-presidential elections: the territory is divided into as many single-member constituencies that elect their deputy in a double-round majority system, with rules that reward the strongest parties.
In fact, the first two candidates by number of votes and all the other candidates who exceed 12.5% of the members qualify for the ballot (with an abstention traditionally of 50%, which means 25% of the votes). This makes possible “triangular” or even “quadrangular” ballots, which help to strengthen the first party, which in such cases only needs the relative majority to win the seat.
The mechanism is designed to deliver a solid majority to the newly elected president’s party, thanks to the electoral system and the physiological demobilization of the opponents, who were defeated in the main election and therefore less able to bring their supporters back to the polls. However, the context of great division into three blocs that emerged from the first round of 10 April seems to have given some more hope to the opponents of Emmanuel Macron, who would like to exploit the laws to overturn the result of the presidential elections and obtain a political majority capable of imposing the president a “cohabitation”, or obtain a result such as to prevent him from achieving an absolute majority of seats, and therefore forcing him into a coalition government.
The leader of the France insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, points to the first scenario: on April 19, in an interview with the television network Bfm Tv, he asked the French to elect him prime minister, voting for a left-wing majority. With his 22% obtained in the first round, Mélenchon is indeed in a good position to aspire to a major result in the legislative, but must be able to hold together the four parties that make up the galaxy of the left today and negotiate unique candidacies in all the constituencies. . It will not be easy to succeed, nor does this in itself guarantee victory.
Marine Le Pen, on the other hand, seems to favor the second scenario: the leader of the Rassemblement national has no intention of retiring from political life, and will most likely be able to conquer several colleges. However, it is unlikely that this will make her party decisive, also because the distribution of consensus is not homogeneous in the national territory. In any case, compared to 2017 when Mélenchon and Le Pen had results comparable to 2022 in the first round, then obtaining respectively 17 and 8 deputies, the situation is very different, and for Macron it will not be a walk in the park.
That is why one of the first important choices that the president will have to make is the appointment of the new prime minister and the government. The current one, Jean Castex, will not be reconfirmed, also because the role will change profoundly: Castex had the function of collaborator without great political weight within a rather cohesive presidential majority, while his successor will have two crucial and more political tasks. In the first place he will lead the electoral campaign for the legislative elections, in which it is tradition that some ministers are also candidates. It is not a simple exercise, as the statements by Le Pen and Mélenchon demonstrate, and it requires a certain familiarity with the electoral contest.
Thereafter, and this will be the second function, the prime minister will have to deal with keeping the macronist parliamentary group and its allies together politically, a more complex task than in 2017, when discipline was ensured by the fact that the president-in-office would seek a second term, and therefore no one had an interest in disregarding the orders of the majority. This time it will not be like this: Macron will no longer be able to reapply, and within his party, heterogeneous from the point of view of partisan origins, the battle for succession will open, a true political revolution of the next five years.
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