French Elections 2024: Could Le Pen's far-right seize control of parliament in 'seismic' election?

France on Sunday (July 7) votes in "seismic" elections that will decide the nation's political future and could see the far right for the first time become the largest party in the parliament.

The 2024 French elections are the most significant in years. This is the first time in years that the Anti-immigration National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella has had a realistic chance of not only running the government, but also grabbing outright control of the National Assembly.

In Mainland France, voting begins at 08:00 (06:00 GMT) and the first exit polls will be made public just 12 hours later.

A party must win 289 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly for an outright majority.

Battered by a defeat in Parliament Elections, Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron in June called for snap elections three years ahead of time — a decision many observers believe may backfire.

On June 30, the far-right party of Le Pen came out on top in the first round of polls. With this, the three-time Presidential candidate expressed confidence that the RN Party would win an absolute majority and crown party leader Jordan Bardella, 28, as prime minister.

However, as per AFP, last week saw over 200 tactical voting pacts between the centre and the left-wing candidates. Their goal? To prevent RN from winning. 

This marks the return of the anti-far right "Republican Front" which was first summoned when Marine Le Pen's father Jean-Marie faced Jacques Chirac in the run-off of the 2002 presidential elections.

With the emergence of the anti-far right "Republican Front" the latest polls projected that the RN would fall well short of the 289 majority. 

According to the last opinion polls from two organizations, the RN is projected to win 170–210 seats, followed by the NFP coalition with 145–185 seats, and Macron's centrists with 118–150 seats.

If the poll prediction comes true, Macron may yet build a broad coalition and quash RN to keep Gabriel Attal as the prime minister on a caretaker basis.

"Today the danger is a majority dominated by the extreme right, and that would be catastrophic," warned Attal in a final pre-election interview with French television on Friday (July 5).