About this election
The 2024 French legislative elections were a snap vote, held on 30 June and 7 July 2024, after President Emmanuel Macron unexpectedly dissolved the National Assembly in response to the Rassemblement National's crushing win in the June European election. The gamble backfired: instead of clarifying the majority, the election produced a parliament split into three roughly equal and mutually hostile blocs, with no group anywhere near a majority — the most fragmented Assembly of the Fifth Republic.
As in every legislative election, the 577 deputies were chosen by two-round voting in single-member seats, with a 12.5%-of-registered-voters threshold to reach the run-off. With turnout surging, an unusually large number of constituencies produced three-way run-offs. The decisive dynamic was the revival of the "republican front": after the first round, hundreds of third-placed candidates from the left and centre withdrew to concentrate the anti-Rassemblement National vote behind a single rival.
The three-week campaign was frenetic. The left rapidly reconstituted its alliance as the Nouveau Front populaire (NFP), uniting La France Insoumise, the Socialists, the Greens and the Communists. Macron's Ensemble defended a shrinking centre. The Rassemblement National, led in the campaign by the 28-year-old Jordan Bardella as candidate for prime minister, stood on the brink of power, while a faction of Les Républicains under Éric Ciotti broke away to ally with the RN, an unprecedented rupture on the mainstream right.
The Rassemblement National and its allies won the most votes — 33.21% in the first round — and the most seats of any single party, but the tactical withdrawals held them to 142 seats, third place in the chamber. The Nouveau Front populaire emerged as the largest bloc with 180 seats; Macron's Ensemble, defying predictions of collapse, took 159; and Les Républicains around 39. With the majority threshold at 289, no bloc came close. Turnout was 66.71% in the first round and 66.63% in the second — the highest legislative turnout since 1997 and more than nineteen points up on 2022.
The hung parliament produced months of paralysis. Macron left a caretaker government in place through the Paris Olympics before appointing the veteran Gaullist Michel Barnier as prime minister in September 2024; Barnier's government was toppled by a no-confidence motion in December, the first such fall since 1962, and was succeeded by François Bayrou. The instability underscored how the dissolution had deepened rather than resolved France's governing crisis, with the budget and the future of the pension reform left hostage to shifting parliamentary arithmetic.
The first-round map showed the Rassemblement National leading the vote in almost every region of mainland France — its broadest geographic advance ever, extending well beyond its north-eastern and Mediterranean strongholds into the rural west and centre. The Nouveau Front populaire led in Île-de-France, the south-west and the big metropolitan cores, while Ensemble's first-round lead was confined to a handful of areas. The contrast between the RN's first-round dominance and its third place in seats illustrates how the two-round system and tactical voting translate votes into seats.
Official results from the French Ministry of the Interior — interieur.gouv.fr. The map shows the leading political tendency (nuance) by region in the first round, built from the ministry's results-by-region files.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.