What Would a Far-Right Victory Mean for French Foreign Policy?

Just three weeks ago, France was a strong voice for the trans-Atlantic alliance and European defense, personified by grandiose D-Day commemorations alongside U.S. President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Now, it’s a country in political meltdown over the possibility of the far-right National Rally winning the prime minister’s post and leading parliament in less than two weeks.

It was a foregone conclusion that President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition would be outperformed in the European Parliament elections. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) garnered 31.4 percent of the votes, more than twice the score of Macron’s camp (14.6 percent). This result further strengthened the National Rally’s status as the main opposition party in France, eclipsing the mainstream left and right.

But the real surprise came from the French president calling for snap legislative elections—to be held on June 30, with a runoff on July 7—less than one hour after suffering defeat. With this move, Macron’s position as president is not threatened, but his government’s is: The French will have to elect 577 members of the National Assembly, which will determine the orientation of France’s next prime minister and government.

Macron’s calculus remains unclear, prompting much speculation. The European election defeat may have been too hard a pill to swallow for the French president, whose entire political persona resides in his belief in the European project and his own ability to durably defeat the far right in France. He may also have considered that the best way to stymie the consistent rise of the far right was to put it to the test of government, which usually results in a rapid loss of popularity, ahead of the truly defining moment for French politics: the 2027 presidential election.

Over the next few weeks, Macron is likely to be consumed by domestic politics, weakening the voice of France for the many international summits ahead. It will be harder for him to advance initiatives that he personally champions, such as Eurobonds for defense at the European Council, a European pillar of NATO at the Washington summit, or a “new security architecture” for Europe at the next European Political Community summit in the United Kingdom. France’s partners and allies will be all too aware that his capacity to act, legislatively and budgetarily, will be much reduced if he has to share power with a prime minister from a rival party.

Indeed, much of the future of French foreign policy will rest on the results of the second-round of legislative elections on July 7. There are two likely scenarios: gridlock or cohabitation.

In the event of a hung parliament with no clear majority, the legislature will be split between the current three main blocs of French politics: the nationalist right led by the RN and allies, including a few defectors from Les Républicains; the Nouveau Front Populaire, which has brought together all parties on the left; and Macron’s loose centrist coalition, Ensemble pour la République, rallying all who refuse both ends of the spectrum.

Such a scenario would lead to further institutional inertia, with a hostile National Assembly in which opposition blocs would be strengthened. If unable to rally enough centrists into a coalition, Macron may then have to establish a technocratic government, with a reduced policy agenda, while keeping his hold on foreign-policy matters.

An alternative scenario is a victory by the RN and its allies, either with an absolute majority or close to it. In this case, Macron would have little choice but to appoint a prime minister from the new majority. The composition of the government would then be formally proposed by the prime minister for the president’s approval, resulting in negotiations between the two.

France would be confronted with the fourth “cohabitation” of the Fifth Republic, a power-sharing situation between a president and a prime minister from two different parties. Socialist President Francois Mitterrand suffered through two of them, notably with a Gaullist-right prime minister, Jacques Chirac, who, in turn, governed as president together with Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, after Chirac’s own fateful failure to gain a majority in the 1997 legislative election. In all three cases, the prime minister was defeated in the following presidential election.

As early as the first cohabitation, Mitterrand and Chirac had agreed, in principle, to construe their division of labor based on the Fifth Republic’s constitution, which stipulates that the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces, the guarantor of national independence, and the one who “shall negotiate and ratify treaties.”

The constitution also provides the prime minister with significant responsibilities, notably that he or she shall be responsible for national defense, “conduct the policy of the Nation,” and has “at its disposal the civil service and the armed forces.”

In practice, however, French presidents have strived to carve out what is now called a “domaine réservé” on foreign policy, security, defense, and intelligence. The three cohabiting prime ministers by and large respected this unwritten rule. The rare times when they expanded their roles, the president slapped them down.

When Chirac secretly assisted the former Republic of Congo President Denis Sassou Nguesso for a law enforcement operation, Mitterrand replied with a letter. When Jospin sparked outrage in the Middle East by calling Hezbollah actions against Israel “acts of terror” in 2000, it led to a phone call by Chirac to remind him that he was the one setting the tone on foreign policy.

These examples remind us that this potential cohabitation would exist in an entirely different universe. The free market-oriented and staunchly pro-European president would find his agenda in direct opposition to a nationalist, conservative, Euro- and NATO-skeptic prime minister. Ideology will imbue the RN’s approach to foreign policy: The National Rally believes in the idea of a sovereign France that rejects the tyranny of the U.S. hegemon and of the supranational power of the European Union, and that reclaims its national right to make independent choices regarding allies and partners, including Russia.

Although previous cohabitations have led to ministers agreeable to both the president and the prime minister, especially on defense and foreign affairs, the RN could be tempted to push through nationalist voices that Macron will find hard to stomach. These nationalist ministers might fight hard on key issues that are at odds with Macron’s policy, yet central to his legacy.

One is the enlargement of the European Union to include Ukraine, Moldova, and the Western Balkans—a cause of which Macron has become one of the most vocal advocates in Europe and that the RN forcefully rejects. On the Western Balkans themselves, RN members of parliament have defended a revisionist approach to Kosovo and Bosnia, blaming Muslim extremists for persecuting and pushing away Orthodox Christians in the region.

The RN would also oppose Macron’s efforts to structure European defense and to prop up France as a security provider for Europeans in the event of a U.S. retrenchment from Europe. This includes the idea, revived by Macron, of “Europeanizing” French vital interests, which could trigger the use of French nuclear weapons—an absolute no-go for the RN.

Cohabitation does not mean that French foreign policy will be fully paralyzed.

Experience will favor Macron, who has himself been a prime example of the “presidentialization” of French foreign, security, and defense policy, at the expenses of the prime minister and ministers of his own party. The lead contender to become prime minister, the 28-year-old head of the RN and Le Pen’s protégé, Jordan Bardella, has virtually no experience in international affairs.

A member of the European Parliament, Bardella has demonstrated on multiple occasions his lack of interest for European parliamentary life and the EU’s inner workings. Despite the RN’s good outcomes in France, its success at home has not translated into its European grouping, Identity and Democracy, becoming a significant political force in the European Parliament, and the group will not serve as a power multiplier to an RN-led French government.

In its quest for respectability and mainstreaming, the RN seems to have embarked on a process of toning down some of its more hard-line positions. Le Pen’s contacts with Russia already proved an embarrassment for the party in the 2022 presidential elections, which took place a few weeks after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, and during which Macron exposed Le Pen’s earlier statements in favor of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the fact that her party had taken a loan from Russian banks.

Recently, the RN scrubbed from the party’s website a previous manifesto that included sections advocating stronger diplomatic relations with Russia, ending military collaboration with Germany, and withdrawing from NATO’s integrated command structure.

The war in Ukraine will certainly be the most sensitive topic in a possible cohabitation. In a recent visit to Eurosatory, France’s main defense exhibition, Bardella declared that he would back military support for Ukraine, an evolution from the party’s earlier stance, but, unlike Macron, he would oppose supplying long-range missiles and sending troops to Ukraine, which he presented as a “red line.”

The party may remain passive on the issue, waiting for the mood to shift in Europe, as well as across the Atlantic, and limit its criticisms to sanctions and the cost associated with a protracted conflict.

On the war in Gaza, the RN has taken a clear pro-Israel stance, as a way of ridding itself of the taint of antisemitism, rooted in the history of the party, while accusing the far left of Jew hatred due to its support of the Palestinian cause. The party has no clear stance on China other than “economic patriotism” and no reason to oppose the current de-risking/engagement policy pursued by the current government. Despite the historical anti-Americanism of the French far right, Bardella stated recently that he would not promote a new French pullout from NATO’s integrated command “in a time of war” in Europe.

A wild card for this cohabitation scenario and for its impact on Europe is the potential bond that an RN government and other nationalists across Europe could forge with a reelected Donald Trump in the United States. A Trump-empowered grouping of nationalist leaders in Europe would be a welcome development from Moscow’s perspective, seriously complicating the emergence of coherent and consolidated European responses to Russian threats.

Macron’s decision has precipitated a moment of truth for France and Europe. Bringing the far right closer to power to reverse its rise is a highly risky gamble. The U.S. example shows us that a first experiment of far-right populism has not deterred voters, and the Italian one that it can even result in increased attractiveness. France is now becoming another laboratory and will be, whatever the outcome, profoundly transformed by this experiment.