What France has just lived through can only be described by the words of Vladimir Lenin: “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”.

In just a month, the country's political landscape was upended by Emmanuel Macron’s shock decision to dissolve the National Assembly after his party, Ensemble, trailed behind the right-populist Rassemblement National by seventeen points in elections to the European Parliament on June 9th.

In the week that followed, the left managed to unite once again, as in the 1930s Front Populaire, despite having spent the European race trading barbs. The Gaullist centre-right imploded, with Éric Ciotti, the leader of Les Républicains, calling on his party's candidates to either support or be supported by Le Pen's, while most of the bigwigs opposing him in-house attempted to remove him, usurp the Twitter account from his faction—and shut him off the party's headquarters.

In the midst of that chaos, Macron’s very own allies were gobsmacked by a decision that could have eradicated not just the government's ability to rule, but their own parliamentary standing. Yet while the campaign was marked by the possibility of a Rassemblement National government led by the 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, the party has been met by a barrage of tactical voting against its candidates in Sunday's runoff. Whereas it stunningly surpassed the one-third (33%) mark in the first round, its parliamentary group, after the biasing effect of local a non-proportional voting system, will be of 143 MPs, up from 89 but far lower than initially forecasted.

This legislative snap race leaves Parliament in an unruly state, with three roughly equal blocs: the left, the centrists and the nationalists—none of them especially keen to make compromises. So what happened, and where do we go from here? This week, we ask Mij Rahman (Eurasia Group) and François Hublet (Groupe d'Études Géopolitiques) to walk us through the French chaos.

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