A hung parliament in Paris

On 7 July, French voters went back to the polls for the second round of a snap election that President Emmanuel Macron had called six weeks earlier, hoping for a fresh mandate, and came away with the opposite: a parliament in which no one commands a majority. The left-wing alliance, the Nouveau Front Populaire, won the most seats, roughly 180 of the 577 on offer. Mr Macron’s centrist bloc came second, with about 160. The far-right National Rally, which had led the first round comfortably on 30 June, finished third, on around 140 seats. None of the three is anywhere near the 289 seats required to form a government, and so the result is a hung chamber.

The story of the night is how the lead changed hands. In the first round the National Rally, or RN, was ahead, and the polls pointed to its best result since the party was founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Faced with that, the two established blocs did what their voters had been begging them to do: they stood their candidates down where it mattered, so that a left-wing or centrist challenger could run against the RN in a one-to-one contest. This Republican front, as the newspapers called it, worked. RN candidates who looked certain to win six days earlier lost run-offs to rivals from the left and the centre, and the party finished well short of its ambitions even as it added dozens of seats on its score from 2022.

For Mr Macron the election is a defeat by any measure. He called the vote after the European elections in June, when the RN outpolled his centrists by more than ten points, and he had hoped a national campaign would turn that around. Instead his bloc is now the smallest of the three forces on the political spectrum, and his government has no assured majority to pass a budget or a law. Gabriel Attal, the 35-year-old prime minister who led the centrist campaign, announced on the night of the vote that he would offer his resignation. Mr Macron is not obliged to accept it immediately, and Mr Attal may stay on in a caretaker role, but the signal was clear: the administration that took France into this election has no working majority to take it out of one.

What happens next is unresolved, which is the point of a hung parliament. The left alliance claims the right to form a government because it won the most seats, but it is a coalition of four parties, from moderate socialists to the hard-left around Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and it does not command a majority over the other two blocs combined. Mr Macron could invite a left-wing prime minister, which would give France its first woman premier and a cohabitation government of a kind it has not seen in years; he could keep Mr Attal on and try to govern by negotiation, bill by bill; or he could call another election, though nothing in the constitution forces one, and French voters have already been asked enough of late. Either way, the clear winner of 7 July was not a party but a deadlock, and the country that refined the term cohabitation is about to live with it through the summer.