Year after year, the navy blue wave continues to grow. This Sunday, the National Rally and their allies achieved a historic score in the first round of the legislative elections with exactly 10,625,662 votes. Such a score allows the party to place itself at the top of the poll and hope for Jordan Bardella to form a potential absolute majority in the National Assembly.
A historic score
If we do not count the votes obtained by the candidates supported by the president of the Republicans Éric Ciotti who are part of the alliance, the RN obtains 9,377,297 of the votes. But such a number of votes has never been so important. During the last legislative elections, in 2022, the National Rally gathered 4,248,626 votes in the first round and 3,589,269 in the second, winning 89 seats. That is a number of votes multiplied by 2.5 between 2022 and 2024, something never seen before for Marine Le Pen’s party.
In 2017, the party, also called the National Front, obtained 13% in the first round and 9% in the second round, allowing them to obtain 8 seats in the lower house. The best score was in 2012, when the party obtained 14% of the vote in the first round, but plummeted in the second round with 4% of the vote, obtaining two seats in the National Assembly. A first for the National Front.
For Samuel Hayat, political scientist and research fellow at the CNRS, the rise of the National Rally in the legislative elections has an explanation. “What has changed (and changes everything) is that the extreme right has completely eaten up the votes of the right,” he believes on his X account.