What's the French for "Time For Some Game Theory?"

Three plausible results from the chaos of the French legislative election

The Card Players, by Paul Cezanne

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Quick: what’s the largest party in the new French legislature? If you guessed the New Popular Front (NFP), you’re wrong. It’s the National Rally (NR). They increased their seat count by over 40% to 126 seats. The NFP isn’t a party at all—it’s an alliance of a whole host of parties, including the center-left Socialists, the far-left France Unbowed (LFI), the Communists, the Greens, and a motley crew of tiny parties. That alliance won the most seats in a surprise upset. But the NR has larger representation than any of those components.

Okay, but the second largest party is surely one of those parties, right? Nope: the second largest party is Macron’s centrist Renaissance party, which even after collapsing still has over 100 seats. It also ran as part of an alliance of centrist parties called Ensemble that together garnered 168 seats, but unlike the NFP, Ensemble is a cohesive bloc with a major party at the center around which the other member parties orbit. (The same is true of the RN, which also has allies, bringing their bloc’s effective seat total to 143.)

This is the most important fundamental fact about the French legislative election: yes, it gave the Left a plurality, but the Left isn’t a cohesive whole with unified views on policy or with party interests that clearly align. On foreign policy in particular—Ukraine, NATO, the Israel/Gaza war—the Socialists and LFI have strongly divergent views. The same is true of their views on the EU and France’s role therein; the Socialists are strongly pro-European, while the LFI is far more skeptical, and for more oriented around French sovereignty. Even on domestic policy, where they are better-aligned, the Socialists are far more moderate.

That’s why Macron and his party think they will ultimately wind up with a coalition government he can work with. If Ensemble (or even just Renaissance) refused to form a coalition under a prime minister from the NFP, then no majority is possible. At that point, the Socialists and Greens would logically consider joining a government organized around Ensemble. In the end, you’d have a grand coalition with Ensemble in the center, the Socialists and Greens on the left, and the Republicans (LR) on the right.

Which may well be where we wind up. But it won’t necessarily be so easy to get there, and it may not even be a good idea. Here’s why.

First, executing that plan not only requires breaking up the NFP, but doing so in a way that appears to LFI voters maximally like a betrayal by the Socialists (and Greens). LFI's participation was essential to the NFP's success, but LFI actually gained essentially no seats from the election. The gains went primarily to the Socialists and Greens—but they very plausibly only gained those seats because of the NFP, which kept the left from fighting itself, and because of strategic voting in the second round. That means that to LFI voters, it looks like they saved both the center-left and the center. If this is the thanks they get—the Socialists and Greens scrambling to get into power and ditch their allies at the first opportunity—then LFI would never trust the Socialists again.

Perhaps that’s ok—politics ain’t beanbag. But the Socialists have to be thinking about the next election when the LFI will be out for revenge. If they want a chance to maintain their position, or even continue their recovery, they need to show their voters that a vote for the Socialists wasn’t just a vote for Macron—that they got results that the NFP couldn’t have gotten. That means they need to make serious policy demands of Ensemble for joining a coalition—big splashy and expensive ones like reversing pension reform, which is what they are already asking for.

Ensemble might be inclined to consider such demands . . . except that they also need to attract the center-right Republicans, without whom they cannot form a majority even with the Socialists and Greens. If they joined a prospective Grand Coalition, LR would be playing a role equivalent to that of the Free Democrats in Germany's Traffic Light coalition. And where are they polling now? That’s right: just on the edge of not making the threshold for inclusion in the next Bundestag.

LR also needs policy wins to justify joining the government. So to win over both LR and the Socialists, Ensemble has to move both right and left simultaneously. I don't know quite how they do that. If they do manage it, though, then the entire range of establishment parties would be united in the government. It would be the grandest of grand coalitions, coming into existence just to allow Macron to continue to govern. But if the entire political system is part of the government, then what is an unhappy voter going to do in 2027? LFI and the RN will be the only major alternatives still standing.

This was already a problem when Macron seized the center and the other mainstream parties shriveled. In the first round of the 2022 presidential elections, Macron’s party won 28.5% of the vote, and no other mainstream party cracked 5%. The second round could have pitted the center against the far left or the far right, but no other mainstream alternative had a chance. In 2027, though, Macron won’t be able to run again; the 800-pound gorilla will be gone. Meanwhile, if a grand coalition has been governing, and that government is unpopular, then every mainstream party associated with it will be tainted by association. In that scenario, the odds that the top two candidates in the first round are Mélenchon and Le Pen would seem to be pretty good.

Preventing that outcome is probably more important than governing France effectively for the next year.

So what are the alternatives to a grand coalition?

The cleanest one would be to let the NFP form a minority government. I don’t know the French rules for this, but it’s happened before in other countries with parliamentary systems where there are parties who refuse to join the government but agree to support it from the outside. In those circumstances, the government can’t actually do very much because they don’t have the votes to pass legislation; everything has to be negotiated with parties who are not in the government to get a majority. Passing budgets is an incredibly painful exercise—more so than usual. But they can act in an emergency, and France could probably limp along that way for a year until they can call another legislative election.

I don’t know who would want to be Prime Minister of such a government—but if the NFP refuses to put anyone up, that in itself would cause the alliance to collapse, and the circumstances would be much better than if Ensemble was seen as actively trying to tear it apart. And if it did happen, then the NFP would have the accountability for actually governing to whatever limited degree they could. They would go into the next election asking for a real mandate—or the alliance would fall apart before the election, again under better circumstances than if Ensemble prized it apart now.

The other, more questionable possibility would be a coalition government between the NFP and Ensemble. Such a coalition would have an enormous majority, big enough that if some smaller parties either from the center or the left refused to join it would be ok. It wouldn’t need the Republicans; it would clearly be a left-wing coalition, but one that included the center. The Prime Minister would probably come from the center of that broader coalition—which is to say, from the Socialists—and keeping that coalition together would be extremely difficult. But would it be more difficult than holding together a grand coalition? I don’t know. I would expect, though, that LFI would be the most difficult member party, and this, again, would impose some accountability on them, either for compromising where their voters expect no compromises, or for refusing to compromise and thereby making governance impossible. Either way, in the next election, voters would have a record to reckon with.

So that’s three possible options going forward: a grand coalition, a minority left-wing government, or a coalition stretching from the center to the far left. None are likely to survive more than a year. All would place the National Rally and its allies outside the tent, giving it the opportunity to grow stronger in opposition. The difference is whether they would be joined in opposition by the extreme left, or by the center-right, or by the center and the center-right.

Your guess is as good as mine which represents the riskiest strategy for France. And your guess is as good as mine whether the major players who will decide are primarily concerned with that question.