(Image: Gorkie/Private Media)

This weekend’s second-round top-two French presidential election looks set to be one of those sideshow alley games where every kid gets a prize: sitting President Emmanuel Macron likely to be returned for a second term while right-wing ethno-nationalist Marine Le Pen scores a record vote for her style of repugnant politics in post-war western Europe.

Macron gets to be leader, while Le Pen builds her legitimacy as the viable alternative.

Meanwhile, leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who placed third in the first round of voting a fortnight ago, gets  a springboard for the June National Assembly elections off the back of delivering enough nose-holding progressive votes to Macron. (In Australia: “strategic voting”; in France: le vote utile, “the useful vote”.)

Enough of a springboard, Mélenchon hopes, to deliver the French version of a hung parliament — cohabitation — where the popularly elected president comes from one party and the majority assembly comes from another (or, it being France, several others).

In imperfect translation, think of it as, say, Malcolm Turnbull narrowly defeating Pauline Hanson and then ending up with Anthony Albanese as prime minister with Greens support. Crazy, I know.

It’s an outcome the post-1958 Fifth Republic was designed (by Charles de Gaulle) to avoid, when he replaced the political instability of the post-war Fourth and pre-war Third republics with a strong popularly-elected president (with a seven-year term) supported by a loyal assembly.

After the left’s François Mitterrand (1980s) and the right’s Jacques Chirac (1990s) were faced with l’horreur of cohabitation as assembly elections became a tool to punish mid-term popularity slumps, the election arrangements were tweaked in 2002 to have the president elected for a five-year term, followed two months later by the assembly elections.

Guided by Duverger’s Law (the theory of French political scientist Maurice Duverger that political parties reflect the structure of the system that elects them) French political elites assumed that the use of single-member constituencies coupled with the presidential honeymoon effect would deliver a reliable presidential majority.

Trouble is, Duverger’s Law quickly compounded with the law of unintended consequences: the postmodern outcome of the historically weak hold French political parties had on their voters across two rounds of voting.

Historically, the two rounds held a fortnight apart suited the right: as the largest party on the left, the Communists could do well in the first round but be unelectable in a head-to-head fight in the second. Now, it’s flipped: it’s the extreme right-wing party of Marine Le Pen, the Rassemblement National, that dominates the right in the first round, while being (hopefully) unelectable head-to-head with the centre — left or right.

There is, however, a price: the steady legitimation of the extreme right as their vote jumps election by election. First time they broke through to the second round in 2002, it was a global shock. The result? Marine’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen scored just 17.8%. 

In 2017, Marine just about doubled that to 33.9%. This time, polling puts her support somewhere around 46.1% of the popular vote that Trump used to parlay Duverger’s Law (or the Electoral College as it’s called there) into victory in the 2016 US election. 

In the meantime, the traditional centre-right party (currently named Les Républicains) — the party of the president before last — all but collapsed with about 4.7% of the vote in the first presidential round, cannibalised by Macron’s La République en marche (LREM) in the centre as well as Le Pen on the right.

On the centre-left, it’s worse, with the Socialist Party — the party of two of the past four presidents — falling to 1.7%, with its left taken by Mélenchon’s left populist La France insoumise (France Unbowed) and the centre by LREM.

But can the three leading parties designed as vehicles for individual presidential ambition (there’s Duverger’s Law again) carry an electoral bounce into the June assembly elections? Sure, it worked for Macron with his recently formed LREM in 2017, but Mélenchon (and the Republicans and the Socialists) are betting that their nose-holders will come home in the assembly elections after casting their votes utiles to block Le Pen.

That’s what happened in the 2020 mayoral elections, in which Macron’s party won just two towns of any size (including Nouméa, in New Caledonia). It happened again in last year’s regional elections, with Macron’s only win being his ally on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.

Come the elections in June, the traditional parties — and the left — will be hoping third time’s a charm.