France election: voters deliver a win for the left, a blow for Le Pen and a hung parliament

Shock poll shows French leftists win the most seats, President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance is second and the far-right comes third

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Scenes in Paris on Sunday after the second-round vote. Photo: EPA-EFE

Published: 3:04am, 8 Jul 2024Updated: 9:03am, 8 Jul 2024

France faced potential political deadlock after elections on Sunday threw up a hung parliament, with a leftist alliance unexpectedly taking the top spot ahead of the far-right but no group winning a majority.

Voters delivered a major setback for Marine Le Pen’s nationalist, Eurosceptic National Rally (RN), which opinion polls had predicted would win the second-round ballot but ended up in the third spot, according to pollsters’ projections.

The results were also a blow for centrist President Emmanuel Macron, who called the snap election to clarify the political landscape after his ticket took a battering at the hands of the RN in European Parliament elections last month.

He ended up with a hugely fragmented parliament, in what is set to weaken France’s role in the European Union and elsewhere abroad and make it hard for anyone to push through a domestic agenda.

National Rally leader Marine Le Pen. Photo: AFP

The election will leave parliament divided in three big groups – the left, centrists, and the far-right, with hugely different platforms and no tradition at all of working together.