This Sunday, June 30 evening, France will be focused on the qualified candidates for the second round of the legislative elections. A vote which could be marked by a multiplication of triangulars, due to the increase in participation.
The behavior of the main political camps will then be particularly scrutinized, whether for their voting instructions in the event of elimination or their possible withdrawal from three-way races that could favor the election of deputies from the National Rally, still largely ahead in the polls. Overview of the positions taken by the different parties on the eve of the first round.
In the presidential camp, the uncertainty remains
Two days before the first round, it is still difficult to see clearly the strategy and instructions of the presidential camp for the second round of these legislative elections. On Tuesday, the head of state and the executives of his majority seemed to be moving towards a slogan “neither RN nor LFI” during a videoconference, distinguishing Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s movement from the other parties of the left-wing alliance. “We will not vote for a candidate from the National Rally, nor for an LFI candidate,” François Bayrou, president of the MoDem, had also affirmed.
But Emmanuel Macron himself seemed to qualify his position, promising, Thursday evening, “great clarity” in the voting instructions for the second round. “I had the opportunity to say that on the far left people had made comments about anti-Semitism or violence, about anti-parliamentarianism that I disapproved of, which went outside the republican arc, but I do not don’t cause general confusion,” explained the head of state.
Same story with Gabriel Attal, this Friday June 28. “I know where my values are. I will always take responsibility. […] I obviously want to prevent the extremes, and in particular the extreme right, from winning these elections,” declared the Prime Minister who is leading the campaign of the outgoing majority, seeming to change his position of sending the “two extremes” back to back. But “if we want the extreme right not to win these elections, it is not with the extreme left of Jean-Luc Mélenchon that we will get there,” he added.
For socialists, communists and ecologists, an assumed withdrawal and pressure on the majority
The Socialist Party, the Ecologists and the Communist Party have been clear: they will call for a vote against the National Rally in the event of elimination in the first round, and will withdraw from three-way races where they come in third place. “Every constituency counts. In the second round, when a Republican candidate is opposed to a National Rally candidate, we will support the Republican candidate. In the event of a three-way race, if we come in third and the RN candidate is in a position to win, we will withdraw our candidate in favor of the candidate who upholds Republican values,” said the leader of the Ecologists, Marine Tondelier.
“In all duels pitting a candidate from a Republican force against a candidate from the far right, we will call for a vote for the Republican candidate. And if a PCF candidate finds himself qualified for the second round in third place in a three-way race, he will withdraw so that the best-placed Republican candidate has the best chance of beating the far right,” the Communist Party said in a statement. “We will do this without any expectations, without any expected compensation,” added PS leader Olivier Faure, inviting Macronists to “reciprocate” the calls to vote for Emmanuel Macron that the latter had made in the second rounds of the last two presidential elections.
In this way, the left-wing parties also want to put pressure on the presidential camp and push it to support them against the National Rally. “So that there is no far-right majority, Macronie has one thing to do, it is to get out of the neither-nor” and say “very clearly that the priority of priorities is to prevent the RN from having an absolute majority”, thus affirmed the Place publique MEP Raphaël Glucksmann. “On Sunday, we are going to corner them: we are going to withdraw everywhere, including in RN-LR duels (not Ciottists, Editor’s note)”, explained Pierre Jouvet, a socialist executive, to L’Express.
At La France Insoumise, not a voice in the RN… but still an “unknown”
Jean-Luc Mélenchon gave more details this week on the position of La France insoumise, which had not joined the calls of other left-wing parties to systematically withdraw against RN candidates in the event of three-way races that go badly. LFI will therefore ask its voters on Sunday evening not to vote for National Rally candidates in the second round, where left-wing candidates will no longer be present, Jean-Luc Mélenchon declared this week. “I am certain that no Insoumis voter will ever give their vote to the National Rally. And we will tell them that no one has to do this stupid thing, whatever their motive,” he said, specifying that voting instructions would be given this Sunday evening, after the first round of voting.
The Insoumis leader nevertheless considered that the only “unknown” on this question of withdrawals lay in the position of the Macronists who “have established a link between the National Rally and France Insoumise”. “In other words, not only are they committing an abomination which amounts to helping the National Front, but they also want to sort through the members of the Popular Front (the left-wing alliance) to say this one yes, that one no”, he added.
LR: between blank vote and roadblock to the New Popular Front
On the Republican side, who did not follow Eric Ciotti, the positions are divergent with regard to the National Rally. And as in 2022, the party should not give instructions for a united vote. The President of the Senate, Gérard Larcher, warned that he could “never vote for an RN or New Popular Front candidate”, targeting the entire alliance – including the socialists and not just LFI -, believing that “what they propose and what they represent is the opposite of the country’s interest”. Same position for the party’s vice-president, Florence Portelli, who, in the event of a duel between the New Popular Front and the RN, affirmed that she would “vote blank”.
However, some in LR have taken a more clear-cut position in favour of the National Rally against the left-wing alliance. This is particularly the case of the party’s head of list for the European elections, François-Xavier Bellamy, who indicated that he would “of course” vote for the RN against a candidate from the New Popular Front if he were in a constituency where LR was absent from the second round of the legislative elections. “I will do everything to prevent La France Insoumise from coming to power,” he said, explaining that he refuses to let “France fall into this far-left alliance”.
The mayor of Cannes, David Lisnard, president of the Association of Mayors of France and also head of his own micro-party New Energy, also called for a “barrier to the extreme left” in the event that the candidates LR were not qualified in the second round.