The first round of elections for all 577 seats in the French National Assembly have been held and, as expected, the National Rally party led by Marine Le Pen captured the most votes nationally with 33% of the vote. In second place with 28% was the New Popular Front, an alliance of center-left Socialists, greens and far-left parties. President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance placed third with 21%.

In the French system, a candidate who gets more than 50% of the vote in the first round gets elected to the seat. Failing that, anyone who gets the support of 12.5% of registered voters in the first round qualifies for the second. Hence the second round can have two, three, or possibly even four candidates competing in an electorate compete.

In the first round, 78 seats were won outright, including 38 by the National Rally, leaving 499 to be decided in the second round.

So now there is serious negotiating among the second, third, and fourth place finishers to drop out so as to give the remaining candidate a better chance of defeating the NR candidate. The deadline for dropping out was 6:00pm (Paris time) today.

The left-wing New Popular Front (NPF) – which comprises everyone from centre-left social democrats to far-left anti-capitalists – issued instructions to all of its third-placed candidates to step down and let a centrist reap the anti-RN vote.

The NPF is thus helping two senior pro-Macron MPs – former prime minister Elisabeth Borne and Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin – to win in their constituencies in Normandy and the north.

Conversely a pro-Macron candidate has stood down in order to help radical left-winger François Ruffin defeat the RN candidate in the northern city of Amiens.

The RN’s 28 year-old president – and hopeful for prime minister – Jordan Bardella condemned these arrangements as the fruit of an “alliance of dishonour” between parties that until now have been at each other’s throats.

Instructions to candidates from Mr Macron’s centrist bloc have been more ambiguous than the NPF’s.

Though Mr Macron himself and Prime Minister Gabriel Attal have called for “no vote for the RN”, some in his camp believe its far-left component makes the NPF equally unpalatable.

Senior figures like Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire and former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe – both originally from the centre-right – are refusing to issue instructions to vote systematically against the RN.

Ten minutes before the 6:00 pm deadline, 218 qualified candidates had dropped out in response to the calls by their parties, including 130 from the NPF and 82 from Macron’s alliance. Before this spate of withdrawals, there were only 190 two-person races. That has now risen to 404 while the number of three-way races has dropped from 306 to 95. The number of four-way races has dropped from five to one. (The numbers are still tentative.) That link also analyzes how this might play out in the second round of voting.

UK prime minister Rishi Sunak’s gamble in calling early elections will be tested on July 4th while Macron’s will be tested on July 7th. At present, prospects do not look good for either of them.