Episode 2624
2024 French legislative election
Tue, 2024-Jul-09 02:02 UTC
Length - 5:11
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Welcome to Popular Wiki of the Day, spotlighting Wikipedia's most visited pages, giving you a peek into what the world is curious about today.
With 426,630 views on Monday, 8 July 2024 our article of the day is 2024 French legislative election.
A legislative election was held in France on 30 June 2024, with a second round held on 7 July (one day earlier for some overseas voters), to elect all 577 members of the 17th National Assembly of the Fifth French Republic. The election followed the dissolution of the National Assembly by President Emmanuel Macron, who decided to call a snap election in the aftermath of the 2024 European Parliament election in France in which the National Rally made substantial gains against his Besoin d'Europe electoral list. The latter lost a considerable number of seats compared to the 2019 European Parliament election.
The legislative election featured four main blocs: Ensemble, the coalition of pro-Macron forces including Renaissance, the Democratic Movement, and Horizons; the New Popular Front (NFP), bringing together the main parties of the left, including La France Insoumise, the Socialist Party, The Ecologists, and the French Communist Party; the National Rally (RN), which also supported several dozen candidates backed by Éric Ciotti of The Republicans (LR) in addition to its own candidates, precipitating a leadership crisis within the latter; and the vast majority of other LR candidates, who were supported by the party's national investiture committee.
Pre-election opinion polls suggested that high turnout and the level of tripolarisation of the electorate between Ensemble, the New Popular Front, and the National Rally had the potential to lead to an unprecedented number of three-way runoffs in the second round of the election. Analysts also noted that the consolidation of the electorate behind these three main political forces could also result in total institutional deadlock after the elections in the event that no bloc was able to secure the votes of an absolute majority of members of the National Assembly, which could force Macron to call a second snap election as soon as a year after the 2024 election, as stipulated by the constitution.
In the first round of the election, the RN and their allies led with 33.21% of the vote, followed by the parties of the New Popular Front with 28.14%, those of Ensemble with 21.28%, and LR candidates with 6.57%, with an overall turnout of 66.71%, the highest since 1997. On the basis of these results, 306 constituencies were headed to three-way runoffs and 5 to four-way runoffs. A total of 76 candidates were directly elected in the first round, and RN-supported candidates qualified for the second round in 444 other constituencies, compared to 415 for the NFP, 321 for Ensemble, and 63 for LR (according to Le Monde's classifications of candidates). By the second round, after 134 NFP-supported and 82 Ensemble-supported candidates withdrew (of whom most did so in order to attempt to prevent the RN from winning), only 89 three-way and 2 four-way runoffs remained.
Contrary to pre-election projections, NFP-supported candidates won a plurality of seats after the second round, with Ensemble candidates also beating expectations by coming second ahead of RN-supported candidates in third, trailed by LR candidates in fourth place. According to candidate labeling by the Ministry of the Interior, candidates belonging to NFP parties received 180 seats (well short of the 289 needed for a majority), compared to 159 for those belonging to Ensemble parties, 142 for RN-supported candidates, and 39 for LR candidates, resulting in a hung parliament. Unofficial media classifications of candidates' affiliations may differ slightly from those used by the Ministry of Interior: according to Le Monde's analysis, 182 NFP-affiliated candidates were elected, compared with 168 for Ensemble, 143 for the RN, and 45 for LR. The turnout for the second round, 66.63%, likewise set the record for being the highest since 1997.
In the aftermath of the results, Gabriel Attal announced that he would tender his resignation as prime minister on 8 July but indicated his willingness to remain in his post as long as necessary, and leading NFP figures called for the appointment of a prime minister from the left. Macron refused Attal's resignation "for the time being" the following day.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 02:02 UTC on Tuesday, 9 July 2024.
For the full current version of the article, see 2024 French legislative election on Wikipedia.
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Until next time, I'm neural Joanna.
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