According to the projections in terms of the number of seats in the National Assembly, a clear trend is emerging for the second round, the National Rally should obtain more elected representatives, can it envisage an absolute majority? The NFP, for its part, can envisage up to 200 seats.
The composition of the National Assembly will change significantly. According to the first projections from polling institutes, the National Rally would become the country’s leading political force in the hemicycle with 204 to 244 seats for the Lepéniste party, followed by the New Popular Front with 180 to 200 seats (including a majority for La France insoumise), then Macronie (presidential majority) with 90 seats maximum, which would therefore lose its relative majority status since the last legislative elections in 2022. Please note, these projections are subject to certain limits. While the campaign for the 2nd round has barely begun, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Gabriel Attal have, for example, already called for their candidates who came in 3rd positions to withdraw from the triangulars in which they are engaged to block the National Rally (RN).
Latest voting intentions poll (June 28)
Evolution of polls since June 10
Be careful, however: if the results of the polls on these legislative elections allow us to understand the trends and preferences of voters at a given time, they should not be considered as predictions. Especially since the legislative elections correspond to 577 local elections, one for each constituency, some of which lean more to the left and others more to the right. However, the polls are carried out on a national scale. The 2nd round surveys are therefore even more subject to caution, because qualified candidates and the game of vote carryovers are difficult to understand.
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08:20 – A National Assembly in turmoil
The composition of the National Assembly will change considerably after these early legislative elections. According to the first projections of the polling institutes, the National Rally would become the country’s leading political force in the chamber with 204 to 244 seats for the Le Pen party, followed by the New Popular Front with 180 to 200 seats (including a majority for La France Insoumise), then Macronie (presidential majority) with 90 seats at most, which would therefore lose its relative majority status since the last legislative elections in 2022.
What is the projection in terms of the number of seats in the second round of the legislative elections?
The polls relating to the second round of the legislative elections remained very favorable to the RN throughout this campaign. Beyond the voting intentions in percentages, it is the projections in number of seats this time which have focused attention. The Ifop-Fiducial poll for Le Figaro, LCI and Sud Radio, dated Friday June 28, gave the RN and its allies the possibility of obtaining between 225 and 265 seats. Enough for a victory, but insufficient to obtain the absolute majority of 289 seats out of the 577 in the National Assembly. But the last Elabe poll for BFMTV and La Tribune du Dimanche showed between 260 and 295 seats at almost the same time, when the Toluna Harris Interactive poll arrived at a projection of 240 to 295 seats.
On the left of the Hemicycle, the polls gave 120 to 200 elected officials for the New Popular Front (120 to 150 for Toluna Harris Interactive, 155 to 175 for Elabe and 170 to 200 for Ifop). The presidential majority would no longer have a majority in name only since it would go from 250 deputies elected in 2022 to around a hundred or less, with big drops in the estimates (70 to 100 seats for Ifop, 85 to 105 for Elabe and 80 to 130 for Toluna Harris Interactive).
In the week leading up to the vote, a Toluna Harris Interactive poll for Challenes and the M6 group suggested that the RN would be able to have an absolute majority with potentially more than 300 seats. The far right could then form a government with this in mind. The RN had 89 elected members in the Assembly dissolved on June 9. It had 8 in 2017. At that time, La République en Marche (now Renaissance) had 308 seats. After its fall in 2022 to 244 deputies, thus losing its absolute majority, the party founded by Emmanuel Macron would therefore continue its decline.
Other polls concerning the second round of the legislative elections reflect unexpected trends: the idea of the “Republican barrier” against the extreme right is no longer really defended by the French. The “barrage vote” is invoked more against other political forces. If 41% of French people plan to block the RN, 44% want to oppose the majority and up to 47% want to oppose the New Popular Front according to a survey of June 25 for Public Sénat. These trends will have an impact on the transfer of votes between the first and second round of the legislative elections. But this is a curiosity that is partly paradoxical, because according to an Ipsos poll of June 22, only 39% of French people want the RN to win (31% want the left to win, 29% want the presidential majority to win).
2nd round polls distorted by triangulars
The projections in terms of the number of votes are still very uncertain, due to the unique nature of each of the 577 legislative elections. One very important parameter completely escapes the pollsters and their models: the number of triangular elections in the second round of these legislative elections. With a high turnout, estimated at more than 60% by the institutes, it is likely that in many constituencies, 3 candidates will qualify for the second round. Why? Any candidate who obtains at least 12.5% of the votes of registered voters qualifies for the second round: the more people vote, the lower the qualification threshold.
However, we do not know what the candidates and parties will do in the event of a three-way race. Without the withdrawal of a competitor in a three-way situation, historically and mechanically it is the extreme right that has the greatest advantage, due to the dispersion of votes between the two other candidates. It is too early to know what the candidates involved in three-way races will do, what the voting instructions will be and how the vote transfers will then be carried out.
It is therefore important to keep in mind, when approaching all these projections, the limits of the polls on the legislative elections. National hypotheses sometimes come up against the realities on the ground, where the choice of vote is not always made according to one’s convictions. Some territories prove this. The most rural territories and constituencies made up of small municipalities seem more inclined to vote for the National Rally, this is also what emerges from the analysis of the results of the 2024 European elections. Rural municipalities with 2,000 to 20,000 inhabitants have largely opted for Jordan Bardella on Sunday June 10, as demonstrated by the Elabe investigation for La Tribune and BFMTV.
The fact remains that the polls highlight a dynamic for the extreme right which should be looked at carefully: the surveys on the voting intentions of voters carried out before the last elections (presidential, legislative, European) are less and less removed from the reality of the counting. The European results were particularly well anticipated by pollsters.