France Surrenders to Facism

The far-right National Rally has won 33% of the vote in the first round of France's parliamentary elections. You can view the results in each constituency in Le Monde's French elections: Map of the first round's results.

Le Monde's map is a sea of brown, revealing that the National Rally has managed to become the most popular party in electoral districts across the whole country. There is a degree of the non-equal representation of districts on the map over-egging the popularity of the National Rally. Generally the party performed better in the larger rural areas and not so well in the smaller inner-city districts.

Zoom in on many of France's largest cities and you can see that the National Rally is not quite so popular in the more multi-racial areas of the country. For example there is a distinct lack of support for the National Rally in most of the electoral districts in Paris, Lyon and Toulouse (although the National Rally were the most popular party in nearly every district in Marseille - the second most populous city in France).

However despite the fact that Le Monde's election map visually over emphasizes the scale of National Rally's success there is no denying that the far right party were the most popular party in the first round of the French parliamentary elections.

If you click on a district on the map you can view which candidates have qualified for the second round of the election. On Sunday France will hold the second-round of elections. In previous elections the center-right and center-left parties have often agreed to stand down candidates in order to avoid splitting the anti-National Rally vote. The left-wing alliance, the New Popular Front, has already announced that they will withdraw all their third-place candidates from the next round of elections. The French President Emmanuel Macron has also asked voters to support 'republican and democratic' candidates.

In The main lessons of the first round in six maps (paywalled) Le Parisien has mapped out the success of individual parties across the whole of France. For example the map above shows the rise and fall in support for Macron's 'presidential bloc' since 2022. Macron's bloc has seen a significant fall in support from 26% to 20% in just two years. Le Parisien has also mapped the high turnout in Sunday's election across the whole of France (almost up 20% since 2022). 

One result of the high turnout was that a number of candidates were able to be elected in the first round. The main winners were again the far-right National Rally, who already have 39 deputies elected to the French parliament from the 76 candidates directly elected in the first round of the French elections.

Bloomberg published an interesting map visualizing the surge of support for Le Pen's National Rally. In Le Pen’s Support Surges in Nearly Every City, Town and Village in France (paywalled) peak markers are used to show the rise in votes for National Rally at the municipality level. The map shows that the party increased its share of the vote across most of the country.