European elections 101
Who's running, what the polls are saying, and why it matters.
April is here, which means the European elections are less than two months away! Voting doesn’t happen as often in France as in the United States: unlike the House of Representatives, which is recycled every two years, elections to the National Assembly take place just once every five years, in alignment with the presidential election. After voters select their representatives in Strasbourg on June 9, the next poll (the municipal elections) won’t be held until 2026.
This means that any opportunity voters have to express their will takes on heightened significance. The upcoming European elections are a rare chance to read the tea leaves of the national mood. For politicians, political parties and observers (like me and you!), this year they serve, in effect, a similar function as the U.S. midterm elections. Though President Emmanuel Macron won’t be on the ballot, the results will be read as a validation — or condemnation — of his record, two years into his second (and final) term, and three years before the next presidential election.
Even if the complexities of European Union (EU) governance put you to sleep, you can’t ignore the June elections if you want to stay up-to-date with French politics. But you’re in luck! I’m here to break down everything you need to know: how it works, the major candidates, and what’s at stake.
How it works
The European Parliament is an exceptional institution — it’s a transnational legislative body directly elected by EU citizens. As the Union’s co-legislator (along with the Council of the EU), the Parliament wields real power over the crafting and passage of EU laws, many of which are binding on member states.
While the Council of the EU and the European Council (which are two different institutions!) have an intergovernmental character — their decisions being made through negotiations between high-level officials representing the interests of each member state — the Parliament has its own supranational political logic. Though elected by their national constituents on lists organized by national political parties, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) coalesce into transnational political groups. Thus, while each MEP always attends to the interests of their constituents, negotiations within the Parliament take on a uniquely European flavor. When I spent a week observing parliamentary activities at its seat in Strasbourg in July 2019 (scroll to the bottom for evidence!), upon entering the building I no longer felt like I was in France — I was simply in Europe.
The Parliament’s 720 members are divided among the member states according to their population, with a minimum of 6 members and a maximum of 96 members per country. As the second-most-populous member state, France will elect 81 members in June. While each member state is responsible for managing its own elections, all must use a proportional system, meaning that “the number of MEPs elected from a political party is proportional to the number of votes it receives.”
In practice, this means that each party in France puts forward a list of 81 candidates, and voters throughout the country select their preferred list. Seats will then be allotted based on the proportion of votes received by each party. For example, if a party received one-third of the vote in France, it would send 27 MEPs to Strasbourg. (This is somewhat of a simplification of the rules — but you won’t need to know more to follow the election.) One interesting feature of the election in France is that each list must respect gender parity, with an equal number of men and women.
Who to watch
Each party’s list is led by a candidate who incarnates the party’s values and platform and participates in televised debates. Le Monde counts 22 candidates, while Libération focuses on the eight principal candidates. (We’re a long way from the United States’ two-party system!) But you really only need to keep three names in mind:
Raphaël Glucksmann (Place Publique/Socialist Party): Having served as an MEP since 2019, Glucksmann is seen as the left’s best chance to overcome the rightward tilt that has come to define French politics. Libération notes that during this campaign, he has “denounced austerity and defended an ecological protectionism,” and that Ukraine is “his obsession,” at a time when the country’s fate is closely tied to the future of European sovereignty. (Glucksmann’s life partner, the prominent journalist Léa Salamé, is refraining from conducting political interviews or debates during the campaign to avoid a conflict of interest.)
Valérie Hayer (Renaissance): Stéphane Séjourné was widely expected to lead Macron’s party in the elections, but the deck was shuffled when he was named to the Quai d’Orsay as part of Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s government. Valérie Hayer — well known in Strasbourg and Brussels since she took over the leadership of the centrist parliamentary political group Renew from Séjourné, but almost unheard of by the French electorate — has taken over the task. Her primary political goal in this election is to lose as few votes as possible relative to the 9.7 million who chose Macron in the first round of the 2022 presidential vote — as good a sign as any of the fragility of Macronism and of the president himself.
Jordan Bardella (Rassemblement National): At just 28, Bardella is the youthful president of the far-right party of Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen. He is leading the RN in the European elections for the second time — in 2019, his list came in first, just ahead of Macron’s party. Bardella has explicitly framed the poll as a referendum on Macron’s leadership — “I only have one opponent in these European elections: Emmanuel Macron” — and minimized the role of Attal in the race, even though the young prime minister was thought to have been chosen as a bulwark against Bardella.
Where the race stands
Since the beginning of the campaign, polls have shown Bardella’s RN trouncing Hayer’s Renaissance and Glucksmann’s socialists. An Ipsos poll conducted on April 10 and 11 for Le Parisien and Radio France confirmed this dynamic, with Bardella’s list favored by 32% of those surveyed, Hayer’s by 16% and Glucksmann’s by 13%. No other list received more than 7%.
63% of those polled said that they were certain of their choice, including four-fifths of RN and Renaissance voters and three-fifths of Place Publique/Socialist Party voters. Of the top three candidates, Bardella is the most popular (38% have a favorable opinion of him, compared to 22% for Glucksmann and 12% for Hayer) and also the most well-known (just 16% had no opinion of him, compared to 50% for Glucksmann and 61% for Hayer). This lack of name recognition for Glucksmann and Hayer despite the relative strength of their respective party lists highlights the extent to which voters consider this election through the lens of national politics, rather than weighing the merits of the candidates themselves.
Why it matters
Think of the stakes of the European elections on two levels: European and French. At the European level, the elections matter because the Parliament plays an important role in determining the direction of the EU, and at a critical moment. As the war in Ukraine has dragged on for more than two years, and as the potential reelection of former U.S. President Donald Trump calls NATO’s commitment to defending Europe into question, the EU’s common foreign and security policy is gaining in importance. The Parliament also influences other Europe-wide matters that weigh heavily in politics and the media, such as agricultural regulations and immigration and asylum policy.
At the French level, the European elections will provide a clear response — the clearest yet — to a question: How is Macron’s second term going? The top three issues for voters surveyed in the Ipsos poll in April were purchasing power, the health system and immigration — all of which dominate domestic politics and are top-of-mind for Macron and Attal.
This newsletter has chronicled some of the trends that have shaped national politics since the president’s reelection in April 2022: the rightward shift of the government, the normalization of the RN within the Republic, and the instability of the coalition of parties on the left. The results of June 9 will confirm, contradict or nuance these observations, and they’ll shape how political actors approach the final three years of Macron’s presidency.
Thanks for reading! I will write at least one more letter about the European elections before the vote on June 9, so let me know in the comments what you’d like to learn more about.
Thanks for this explication of the EU elections process. Since I don't live in the EU, I had never looked into it closely. As someone accustomed to a Westminster parliamentary system with it's first-past-the-post stakes, I find proportional representation fascinating.