French election: Your guide to the final round of voting

PARIS — France is voting Sunday in the final round of a parliamentary election that has potentially massive implications for the country, the EU and NATO.

There is little doubt as to the result for Emmanuel Macron. After his snap election gamble spectacularly backfired, the French president faces, at best, a hung parliament with no workable majority where his camp will be relegated to third place behind Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and a left-wing alliance of Socialists, greens and radical leftists.

All eyes will be on the far-right vote. While an unlikely alliance between centrists and the left has cut the chances of the far right gathering enough seats for the majority, that scenario cannot be excluded, potentially leading to France having a far-right government for the first time in the modern republic’s history.

First estimates are expected at 8 p.m. sharp. Official results will be pouring in throughout the night. 

Here is what’s at play and how it all works.

Why do I need to worry about France?

As elections go, this is as big as it gets. The far right stands a decent chance of being able to form a government in a nuclear-armed permanent member of the U.N. Security Council that plays a major role in global security from the North Atlantic to the Pacific. That same far right is also skeptical of France’s engagement with both the EU and NATO, while without an engaged France, both are significantly weakened.

On the financial side, traders across global financial markets fear these political tensions will roil the world’s seventh biggest economy and risk another bout of instability in the heart of the eurozone. All in all, this is Europe’s most consequential election in decades.

How did such a defining political moment arise from nowhere?

Well, that escalated quickly. On June 9, French President Emmanuel Macron shocked the nation by calling a snap election after suffering a humiliating defeat at the hands of the far-right National Rally in the European election. His goal was to stop the advances of the right, but it’s a big gamble that may backfire.

It’s a parliamentary election, meaning that Macron should remain president until 2027. That said, he’s likely to have to work with a new government and prime minister who may well be hostile toward him, raising the specter of deadlock or chaos. Jordan Bardella is a leading candidate to take the PM job if the National Rally wins the election.

Since Macron’s bombshell announcement, the political landscape in France has been changing at lightning speed, with new alliances emerging overnight and nasty break-ups playing out in public. That makes it difficult to make reliable predictions about seats and coalitions.

French members of parliament are not elected on the basis of proportional representation, but instead through a complicated two-round vote across 577 constituencies where local dynamics play a big role.

How likely is a far right victory ?

The question on everybody’s mind is whether the anti-immigration National Rally will be ruling the country as of next month.

While the National Rally placed first in the first round last Sunday, the chances of an outright victory for the far right fell this week, as centrist and left-wing candidates reluctantly banded together to try to stop Marine Le Pen’s party from taking power for the first time. Hundreds of candidates across the 577 electoral constituencies in France withdrew from the races this week to prevent a split in the anti-RN vote.

The latest polls published on Friday ahead of the weekend’s campaign hiatus still projected a win for the National Rally, with 170 to 205 seats in the new chamber (compared to 88 in the outgoing chamber) according to Ipsos, placing them ahead of other forces but below the absolute majority threshold set at 289 seats.

The left alliance, dubbed the New Popular Front, was projected to get 145 to 175 seats, with Macron’s centrist coalition lagging behind at 118 to 148 seats (compared to 250 in the outgoing chamber).

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that a far right government is out of the picture. Polls could, of course, get it wrong. It is also possible that the National Rally will convince disenchanted MPs from other parties to break ranks and secure enough support to form a viable government.

So what happens next ?

Political custom dictates the president should pick a prime minister from the party or coalition with the most seats in the parliament. With the far right projected to obtain the largest share of seats in the National Assembly, Macron may be forced, however reluctantly, to tap its leader Jordan Bardella to form a new government.

Bardella might refuse to govern without his specified majority in order to avoid being tarnished by a chaotic period at the helm before the National Rally’s Marine Le Pen makes her push for the presidency in 2027.

If Sunday night’s results do not make a National Rally government viable, other parties could engage into something largely unfamiliar to the country’s political forces: coalition forming between parties with widely different views on crucial matters, chief among them the economy.

Political heavyweights have floated the idea of building a broad coalition including moderate lawmakers from the left and the right — but this is unlikely in such a bitterly polarized political landscape, and the legislature could instead end up paralyzed.