The page is turning on Emmanuel Macron. After France went to the polls for the first round of snap parliamentary elections, the results last night were unequivocal: the president’s centrist coalition was relegated to a bitter third place, winning just under 21 percent of the vote according to tallies on Monday morning. That’s 4 percent lower than what Macronist candidates scored in the first round of the last such elections in 2022, as the president’s camp trailed behind both Marine Le Pen’s far right and the Left’s Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) alliance.

Sunday’s vote confirmed the dominant position of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), one month after its victory in the June 9 elections to the European Parliament that prompted Macron’s surprise dissolution of the National Assembly. Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, allied with a minority of the center-right Les Républicains, came in first place, winning 33 percent of the vote. In second, the candidates of the Nouveau Front Populaire won around 28 percent.

In a victory speech on Sunday night, the Rassemblement National’s party president and presumptive prime minister Jordan Bardella praised the results as “an unmistakable verdict, confirming the clear desire for change.” Pointing to the defeat of the president’s coalition, twenty-eight-year-old Bardella presented the July 7 runoff ballots as a choice between the far-right force and the “alliance for disaster: Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Nouveau Front Populaire, which would lead the country to disorder, insurrection and economic ruin.”