Cohabitation is the situation where a French president has to deal with a prime minister and parliament from some different political side. It’s happened three times before, with a Socialist president and center-right prime minister, or vice versa. Now, it may occur again: but with nominally liberal president Emmanuel Macron standing atop a government potentially dominated by the far right.

Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) was the big winner of Sunday’s first-round votes for the National Assembly, which picked candidates for the final ballot on July 7. With 33 percent, Le Pen’s list came first in 297 of 577 constituencies, as against 159 for the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (28 percent) and just seventy for Macron’s Ensemble (21 percent). If a humiliating setback for the president, this doesn’t yet guarantee a majority for Le Pen. In the runoffs her opponents could bloc together. Her candidates, for their part, may expect to add on the support of mostly rather weak right-wing losers.

But early calls for second-round deals (or not) show how much Le Pen has conquered the right-wing space already. Before this election, Éric Ciotti, president of the conservative Les Républicains (LR) — heir to the main Gaullist party — allied with Le Pen. Almost all his colleagues refused. Yet last night, even the Gaullist opponents of Ciotti’s LR-RN alliance declared they wouldn’t take sides in the runoff ballots. Macron and various ministers called for a “republican front” but often more or less explicitly said this didn’t involve backing France Insoumise (the biggest left-wing force) against Le Pen.