🇫🇷First legislative election poll shows 34% Le Pen Tsunami
🇫🇷First legislative election poll shows 34% Le Pen Tsunami
Having announced the dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale after a disastrous European campaign, Emmanuel Macron and his team may soon regret this more than they ever thought they would
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Following Emmanuel Macron’s chaotic announcement last night, acting the Assemblée Nationale’s dissolution and calling French legislative elections for 30 June and 7 July of this year, things look like they’re about to get worse.
Everyone was waiting for the first set of polling for this election, with barely 20 days for the candidates to campaign and somehow pass through the first round, and it seems that Challenges was the first off the starting line.
And while polls should always be taken with a grain of salt: wow, this is going to make for some sober reading in the Elysée
If the legislative election took place today, we would see a catastrophic repeat of the European Elections results, with the Rassemblement National storming ahead and winning between 235 and 265 seats, up from 88 seats.
With a majority requiring 289 seats out of the 577 deputies, Marine Le Pen would fall just short of this but could potentially run a minority government.
Following them in a distant second place would be Ensemble, also known as Renaissance & friends, who would win between 125 to 155 seats, dropping from their current 249 seats and falling into either second or third place.
While this next part is dubious, with ongoing discussions regarding a potential popular front, this poll has used the NUPES coalition as the option for a unified left. In this circumstance, they would win 115 to 145 seats, either coming in second and dislodging Renaissance or staying in third place.
Finally, Les Républicains would win between 40 to 55 seats, leaving themselves as potential king-makers who could crown Marine Le Pen. The remaining parties would win between 5 to 20 seats, with this number including Eric Zemmour’s Reconquete.
Moving on to the voting intentions, this first poll indicates that the Rassemblement National is leading the pack with 34% of the voting intentions, while the theoretical left-wing NUPES coalition is in second with 22% of the vote.
Trailing in third place, Ensemble has 19% support, which is admittedly much higher than its EP2024 score.
Next, Les Républicains and the diverse left both hold 9% of the French electorate's voting preferences, while Reconquete currently wins 4% of the vote. Finally, the Far Left holds a modest 3% of the voting intentions.
But does this mean anything?
Ultimately, this first poll may not mean all that much, with another 20 days to go before the first round. It does not show any tactical voting strategies or electoral agreements as part of a poplar front, republican front, or cordon sanitaire that could occur.
Plus, the inclusion of the NUPES coalition (which may not exist for much longer), changes in leadership across the parties, and the fact that Stéphane Séjourné has said that they would stand down candidates as part of a republican coalition would potentially have a big impact on these numbers.
Plus, we simply don’t know how the parties will coordinate between themselves, how candidates will be received by their constituencies, or how everyone reacts to the expected increase in Presidential presence.
Ultimately, Emmanuel Macron announced that he was doing this due to the danger that the far-right poses to the French nation, and that he was doing this in order to break the deadlock that had hampered his second quinquennat.
But the sad reality is that he may have just made things much worse for himself.
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Wow. Definitely a gamble on Macron's part. He's presumably hoping that his base was so spooked by the far right's success yesterday that they will come out to vote in droves, perhaps joined by centre-left voters in general. Let's hope this hope is justified.
I think that you could start a separate blog just to cover this cold shower shocking development