Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National will narrowly fail to achieve an overall majority in the National Assembly. France will be plunged into a year of confusion and immobility with a lower house of parliament dominated by two angry, mutually-detesting blocs of Far Right and Left.

President Emmanuel Macron called the early election to restore “clarity”. Instead, he has created perilous uncertainty.

He has reduced his own parliamentary camp by up to two thirds. He has shown that the great majority of the country does NOT want a Far Right government. But he has left France perilously close to rule by an anti-European, pro-Russian party which seeks to return the country to a divisive and fake vision of a contented past.

It is evident that Le Pen COULD win a majority in the second round; but I believe that she will fail and that she will also fail to attract enough centre-right quislings to install her scary de facto Number Two Jordan Bardella as Prime Minister.

READ ALSO What next as far-right leads in first round of French elections?

Here are my reasons for cautious optimism – if wishing at least 12 months of drift and turmoil on France is optimism.

Sunday’s voting numbers suggest that the country looked into the abyss of a Far Right government and drew back. Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella vastly increased their support compared to the 2022 parliamentary election. But final opinion polls which projected a combined 36 percent or 37 percent for the Far Right and their centre-right collaborator Eric Ciotti proved exaggerated.

The RN alone won just under 30 percent of the vote – bad enough but less than its score in the European elections last month. Ciotti candidates added another 3 percent. Since Eric Zemmour’s alternative far right party, Reconquete!, was all but wiped out, this is NOT quite the populist-nationalist tsunami that some feared or forecast.

The vote for one iteration or another of the anti-European, anti-migrant, pro-Moscow nationalist Right has been around 30 percent for some time. Marine Le Pen took 13,208 686 votes in Round 2 of the Presidential election in 2022. Her party took 9,337,185 votes on Sunday.

All the same, the RN looks certain to expand its parliamentary party by 200 percent from 88 to at least 250 and maybe as many as 270. The new Assembly will be packed with Putin-fanciers, climate-change-deniers, anti-Semites, Islamophobes and conspiracy-theorists. Pauvre France.

Why do I believe that the RN will fail to achieve the 289 seats it needs for an overall majority?

After the first round results, there are potentially over 300 “triangular” or three-candidate second rounds out of 577. There are even four constituencies where four candidates have qualified for round two.

This is an all-time record for the present, convoluted parliamentary election system in which the first two candidates plus anyone who takes 12.5 percent of the registered first round vote qualify for a second round run-off. The high number of three-way second rounds has two explanations: the high turn-out 66.7 percent and the relatively small number of minor candidates in a surprise election.

The mass of three-way races offers an opportunity to the Left alliance and Macron centre to combine to support single anti-Far Right candidates in Round Two.

You can listen to John discuss the first round and what will happen next in the latest episode of our Talking France podcast.

READ ALSO Will parties withdraw candidates to block the far-right in round two of French elections?

Will they? In many cases, yes. Even the Far Left La France Insoumise – ambivalent in 2022 – has called on its third place candidates to withdraw in favour of better-placed Macron candidates.

The Presidential camp is foolishly divided on this question but its position is changing all the time and may become clearer soon. Macron’s party is up for a broad deal for mutual withdrawal of Centre and Left candidates. The other centrist parties, Modem and Edouard Philippe’s Horizons are saying that they will not  withdraw for the more extreme or allegedly anti-Semitic candidates of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s LFI.  

Could this ruin the so-called Republican Front against the Far Right next Sunday? It will weaken it, I believe, but not ruin it. The final decision, in any case, is that of individual voters, not party leaders.

There are many other variables. It will be a new election on Sunday. The turnout may be lower. Or it might be higher. A different cast of electors might turn out.

There is also the question of the non-quisling centre-right – the great majority of Les Républicains deputies who refused to betray their party’s Gaullist past and follow Eric Ciotti last month into the ample arms of Le Pen. They did pretty well on Sunday and can hope to retain around 50 of their 61 deputies.

Will some be tempted to ally with Le Pen and Bardella if they are just short of a majority? Very few, I think. They will see their battered party’s resilience as a sign that they could still recover their past glories and could yet produce a serious presidential player in 2027. That will be impossible if they ally with the Far Right.

Centre-right voters are a different question. Some will go to Le Pen, others to the Centre or even moderate Left to block the Far Right. It was shameful but not surprising to see the once moderate-conservative-Gaullist but increasingly Lepennist newspaper Le Figaro suggest to its readers that they should support the Far Right in Round Two to avoid the confusion of a blocked parliament.

Much will shift and swirl in the next week. I may prove to be foolish rather than brave. But my gut feeling is that Le Pen and Bardella will be stranded on 260 or so seats and will be unwilling or unable to form a government.

President Macron might try to carve a new ad hoc majority out of the centre-left, centre-right and centre. He will also fail. The most he can realistically hope for is for a working minority to support some kind of technocratic, caretaker government until new elections are legally possible in 12 months’ time.

Is it inevitable that Le Pen and Bardella will then claim the outright victory that I think they will be denied on Sunday? Maybe.

But let’s be optimistic. The country has looked into the abyss and recoiled once. It could well do so again.