Legislative elections in France in the context of "2017 French legislative election"

The Fifth Republic (French: Cinquième République) is France's current republican system of government. It was established on 4 October 1958 by Charles de Gaulle under the Constitution of the Fifth Republic.

The Fifth Republic emerged from the collapse of the Fourth Republic, replacing the former parliamentary republic with a semi-presidential (or dual-executive) system that split powers between a president as head of state and a prime minister as head of government. Charles de Gaulle, who was the first French president elected under the Fifth Republic in December 1958, believed in a strong head of state, which he described as embodying l'esprit de la nation ("the spirit of the nation"). Under the fifth republic, the president has the right to dissolve the national assembly and hold new parliamentary elections. If the president has a majority in the national assembly, the president sets domestic policy and the prime minister puts it into practice. During a presidential mandate, the president can also change prime ministers and reshuffle the government. If there is a different majority in the national assembly, the president is forced to nominate a prime minister from a different party, which is called a cohabitation. In the beginning of the Fifth Republic, presidential elections were held every seventh year and parliamentary elections every fifth year. Starting in the year 2002, the presidential elections (in April) and parliamentary elections (in June) were synchronized to be held every fifth year, which ended in the 2024 French snap election.

Legislative elections were held in France on 30 June and 7 July 2024 (and one day earlier for some voters outside of metropolitan France) to elect all 577 members of the 17th National Assembly of the Fifth French Republic. The election followed the dissolution of the National Assembly by President Emmanuel Macron, triggering a snap election after the National Rally (RN) made substantial gains and Macron's Besoin d'Europe electoral list lost a significant number of seats in the 2024 European Parliament election.

In the first round of the election, the National Rally and candidates jointly backed by Éric Ciotti of The Republicans (LR) led with 33.21% of the vote, followed by the parties of the New Popular Front (NFP) with 28.14%, the pro-Macron alliance Ensemble with 21.28%, and LR candidates with 6.57%, with an overall turnout of 66.71%, the highest since 1997. On the basis of these results, a record 306 constituencies were headed to three-way runoffs and 5 to four-way runoffs, but 134 NFP and 82 Ensemble candidates withdrew despite qualifying for the run-off in order to reduce the RN's chances of winning an absolute majority of seats.

Legislative elections were held in France on 12 and 19 June 2022 to elect the 577 members of the 16th National Assembly of the Fifth Republic. The elections took place following the 2022 French presidential election, which was held in April 2022. They have been described as the most indecisive legislative elections since the establishment of the five-year presidential term in 2000 and subsequent change of the electoral calendar in 2002. The governing Ensemble coalition remained the largest bloc in the National Assembly but substantially lost its ruling majority, resulting in the formation of France's first minority government since 1993; for the first time since 1997, the incumbent president of France did not have an absolute majority in Parliament. As no alliance won a majority, it resulted in a hung parliament for the first time since 1988.

The legislative elections were contested between four principal blocs: the centrist presidential majority Ensemble coalition, including Emmanuel Macron's Renaissance, the Democratic Movement, Horizons, as well as their allies; the left-wing New Ecological and Social People's Union (NUPES), encompassing La France Insoumise, the Socialist Party, Ecologist Pole and the French Communist Party; the centre-right Union of the Right and Centre (UDC), including The Republicans, the Union of Democrats and Independents, as well as their allies; and the far-right National Rally (RN). The NUPES alliance was formed in the two months following the presidential election, in which the left-wing vote had been fragmented; it consisted of the first French Left alliance since the Plural Left in 1997.