The French people’s decision to support Le Pen’s populists over the pan-left coalition in the first round of the parliamentary elections drew protests from thousands of people on Sunday night.
Results from this week’s first round of the parliamentary election began to trickle in across the entire country of France, mainly validating exit polls and opinion surveys conducted in the days preceding the election. With 33.15 percent of the vote, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National party is the largest party with the greatest turnout for a French election in decades. In these elections, the New Popular Front—a new pan-left coalition—got 27.99 percent of the vote, while the globalist-managerialist party of President Emmanuel Macron finished third with a meager 20.76 percent.
Even though they may have spoken at the polls, some French citizens were obviously quite unhappy with the outcome. Overnight, protests broke out in a number of French cities, with thousands of people gathering in Paris. A week remains until the second round of the election, which will determine the majority of seats and whether Le Pen’s RN can take a majority in the house, so it’s possible to anticipate more violence next week. The New Popular Front, which represents the spectrum of liberal parties from pro-EU centrists to full communists, had earlier threatened to “resist” the result if the RN won.
Le Soir reports that anti-right-wing demonstrators, who scaled the monument’s stones and unfurled banners, covered it in graffiti. The Monument to the Republic is a massive limestone and bronze statue in the heart of Paris that extols the country’s virtues and features a large lion protecting a vote box. In addition, the article reports that demonstrators detonated an explosive device at a McDonald’s restaurant in Lyon, France and that protesters and police in Nantes traded missiles.
Eight hundred people participated in the “against the extreme right” demonstration, according to police sources cited by TF1. The police described the demonstrators as a violent group of hooded and masked individuals, halting their attempt to approach the town hall of Lyon’s 1st patronage.
General Charles De Gaulle created the Fifth Republic in 1958 to replace the post-war Fourth Republic. Among its many shortcomings were the President’s increased power at the expense of Parliament and the voting system’s strong preference for centrist or uncontroversial parties. All candidates compete for a seat in a two-round voting process that begins with a knockout round and ends with a decider, in which only the top performers advance.
A really well-liked candidate can garner enough first-round votes to eliminate all of the opposition and avoid moving on to the second round in a matter of seats. With the help of 38 candidates, including their leader, Marine Le Pen, RN was able to win a majority of the 577 seats in the house, meaning that she will not be running for office again this week. For the following six days, she will be able to support her colleagues across the nation by making appearances, which will probably result in a lot of helicopter air miles.
This system allows every voter to cast their ballot for the party they genuinely support in the first round using their heart, and for the less harmful option in the second round using their intellect. This means that in every single seat where Marine Le Pen’s RN, the unquestionably most popular party in France right now, hopes to turn a first-place finish into a victory this coming Sunday, they will face opposition from voters of every other party working together to keep them out.
This means that the various French parties will engage in intense negotiations and horse-trading early this week to determine whom to advise their own supporters to support on Sunday, if not themselves, and even which seats to strategically withdraw from in order to give an ally a clear run to keep RN out as the ballots for the next round head to the printers expect a lot of exciting developments.
