Emmanuel Macron advances elections in France after victory of Marine Le Pen’s party in the European votes

(In context: European Parliament votes LIVE: the European People’s Party would win the European elections with 181 seats)

“In a few moments I will sign the decree calling for the legislative elections, the first round of which will take place on June 30 and the runoff on July 7,” Macron said in a televised message just an hour after the closing of the polling stations.

The French RN candidate Jordan Bardella, 28, obtained between 31.5% and 32.4% of the vote, followed far by the ruling party Valérie Hayer (15.2%) and the socialist Raphaël Glucksmann (14% to 14.3%), according to estimates by the polling institutes Ifop and Ipsos.

“This afternoon a wind of hope blew in France and it has only just begun,” Bardella, who had demanded from the president the dissolution of the National Assembly (French lower house) and early elections, celebrated in front of his supporters.

“Emmanuel Macron is tonight a weakened president” by this “resounding defeat” and “he cannot remain deaf to the message” sent with these results, added the far-right candidate. “This unprecedented defeat marks the end of a cycle,” he said.

The result of the European elections “is not a good result for the parties that defend Europe”, “the rise of nationalists and demagogues is a danger for our nation”, warned Macron, who decided to return the word to the “sovereign people”.

Bardella’s victory was a hard setback for Macron and his prime minister, Gabriel Attal, who were widely involved in the final stretch of the campaign with the aim of stopping the extreme right.which according to the French president could “block” the EU.

RN’s result, one of the best in its history, confirms the efforts of its leader, Marine Le Pen, to give a more moderate image to the formation that she inherited in 2018 from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, known for his comments racists and anti-semites.

And it could boost his chances for the 2027 presidential election. In 2022, Macron beat Marine Le Pen in the runoff of this election with 58.54% of the vote, almost eight points less than in 2017, when he beat his rival with 66.1% of votes.

But months after his re-election in 2022, the French president, who will no longer be able to run in 2027, lost his absolute majority in the legislative elections and RN became the first opposition party in the lower house.

Bardella was born into a family of Italian origin and grew up in the care of his mother in a social housing tower in the suburbs of Paris. In 2021, she became president of RN, although the de facto leader is Marine Le Pen.

The commitment to this young man with a careful image convinced the French from the beginning, according to the polls, where he hovered around 33% of the votes for weeks. His program was the traditional one of the extreme right against “mass immigration” and the “decomposition of France.”

Beyond the lists headed by Bardella, Hayer and Glucksmann, the rest of the parties that would achieve representation in the European Parliament for the second largest economy in the EU are La Francia Insumisa (radical left, from 8.3% to 8.7%) and Los Republicanos (LR, right, 7% to 7.2%), according to estimates.

Reconquest! (far right) and the environmentalists of EELV are around 5%, the limit to be able to obtain electoral representation. The sum of RN and ¡Reconquista! It means that the extreme right is close to 40% of the vote in France.

“We can see that Macronism is finished,” celebrated the leader of LR, Éric Ciotti, whose traditional right-wing party nevertheless supported Macron’s main laws such as immigration reform or the delay of the retirement age.