France faced potential political deadlock after elections on Sunday threw up a hung parliament, with a leftist alliance unexpectedly taking the top spot ahead of the far right but no group winning a majority.

Voters delivered a major setback for Marine Le Pen’s nationalist, euroskeptic National Rally (RN) party, which opinion polls had predicted would win the second-round ballot but ended up in the third spot, according to pollsters’ projections.

The results were also a blow for centrist President Emmanuel Macron, who called the snap election to clarify the political landscape after his ticket took a battering at the hands of the RN in European Parliament elections last month.

He ended up with a hugely fragmented parliament, in what is set to weaken France’s role in the European Union and elsewhere abroad and make it hard for anyone to push through a domestic agenda.

The election will leave the National Assembly, France’s parliament, divided into three big groups — the left, the centrists and the far right — with hugely different platforms and no tradition at all of working together.

The leftist New Popular Front (NFP) alliance, which wants to cap prices of essential goods like fuel and food, raise the minimum wage to a net 1,600 euros ($2,363 Cdn) per month, hike wages for public sector workers and impose a wealth tax, immediately said it wanted to govern.

“The will of the people must be strictly respected … the president must invite the New Popular Front to govern,” said hard-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

The RN has worked under Le Pen — daughter of the party’s co-founder and its leader for a decade until 2021 — to shed a historic reputation for racism and antisemitism, but many in French society still view its France-first stance and surging popularity with alarm.

There were hugs, screams of joy and tears of relief at the left’s gathering in Paris when the voting projections were announced.

République square in central Paris filled with crowds and a party atmosphere, with left-wing supporters playing drums, lighting flares and chanting “We’ve won! We’ve won!”

The awkward leftist alliance — which the hard left, Greens and Socialists hastily put together before the vote — was far from having an absolute majority of 289 seats in the 577-seat assembly.

Official results were trickling in, with the tallies from most, if not all, constituencies likely in the early hours of Monday. Polling agencies — which are generally accurate — forecast the left would get 184-198 seats, Macron’s centrist alliance 160-169 and the RN and its allies 135-143.

Macron’s prime minister to resign

Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said he would hand in his resignation on Monday but would stay on in a care-taking capacity as long as needed.

In France, the prime minister is the head of the government, while the president is the head of state.

If the two figures are politically aligned, the French president can wield greater influence and power.

But in a case where they are from opposing parties — a scenario known as “cohabitation,” which has occurred in the past — power must be shared and that relationship can become fraught.

Macron’s office said Sunday that the president would “wait for the new National Assembly to organize itself” before making any decisions about a new government.

The constitution does not oblige Macron to ask the leftist group to form a government, though that would be the usual step as it is the biggest group in parliament.

Victory ‘merely delayed,’ says Le Pen

In France’s election system, parliamentary candidates must win more than 50 per cent of votes to be declared an outright winner in the first round.

If no candidate does so, the voting heads into a second round featuring the top two vote finishers and anyone who received at least one-eighth of the ballots cast in the first round.

The National Rally led following the first round — followed by a group of left-wing parties and Macron’s centrists in third place — and was consistently projected by opinion polls to win in the second round, but the party ended up third.

That was in part thanks to some limited co-operation by Macron’s centrist Together alliance and the left, designed to block the far right’s ascendancy to power.

National Rally rivals pulled more than 200 candidates out of three-way races in the second round in a bid to avoid vote splitting and to create a unified anti-RN vote.

In his first reaction, National Rally leader Jordan Bardella called the co-operation between anti-RN forces a “disgraceful alliance” that he said would paralyze France.

But Le Pen, who will be the party’s candidate for the 2027 presidential election, said that Sunday’s ballot, in which the RN made major gains compared with previous elections, had sown the seeds for the future.

“Our victory has been merely delayed,” she said.

Voters punished Macron and his ruling alliance for a cost-of-living crisis and failing public services, as well as over immigration and security.