Did Macron Really Win in France? You’ll Know in June

On the evening of May 7, Emmanuel Macron took the stage at a boisterous celebration in the courtyard of the Louvre in Paris. At 39, he’d just become the youngest person to win the French presidency, and with Beethoven’s Ode to Joy blaring from loudspeakers, he thanked thousands of supporters for backing him in the hard-fought campaign. A few hours earlier, his far-right, nationalist rival, Marine Le Pen, stood before a more somber—but raucously defiant—crowd at a restaurant on the eastern flank of Paris to concede the race. Then well before midnight, both Macron and Le Pen went off the radar. The election was finally over, and the candidates looked drawn and exhausted after months of interviews, speeches, debates, and rallies.

The next morning, the first order of business for the two camps: more campaigning. On June 11, French voters will return to the polls for legislative elections, followed by a runoff a week later for districts where no candidate wins outright—typically most of them. While the president’s party often gains a majority or a strong plurality in the National Assembly, this year things look different. For the first time, France’s two main parties were absent from the second round of the presidential election, and they’re seeking to use the legislative vote to bounce back. Macron, meanwhile, has never held elected office. He founded his party just over a year ago and has little on-the-ground infrastructure to field candidates or get voters to the polls. “Macron’s biggest challenge is to win the battle for Parliament,” says Dominique Reynié, a politics professor at Sciences Po university in Paris. “Without a majority, he’d have only limited power.”