The 2024 French legislative elections were called by President Macron following the severe defeat of his coalition in the 2024 European elections. Held on 30 June and 7 July after a 3-week campaign, these snap elections were part of an unexpected electoral sequence. The first round confirmed the rise of the radical right Rassemblement National in the European contest: for the first time in the first round of legislative elections, a radical right coalition was the largest pre-election coalition by vote. However, the second round reaffirmed the radical right was still rejected by the majority of French people, finishing third in terms of seats, behind both the left-wing coalition and the presidential coalition. A centre-right minority government was ultimately formed with four parties (Les Républicains, Renaissance, Mouvement Démocrate and Horizons) and the parliamentary tolerance of the Rassemblement national. From the realignment perspective, the legislative elections were maintaining elections, confirming the tripartition of the votes, the tripolarisation of party competition and the end of majority governments - three key features of the new electoral order that emerged after the 2019 European elections.

This chapter proposes to distinguish between the concepts of tripartition and tripolarization, by associating them with different arenas: the electoral arena for the former, the parliamentary arena for the latter. On this basis, he shows that both concepts are relevant for describing French political life after the 2022 elections: there is tripartition in the electoral arena and tripolarization in the parliamentary arena, a configuration unprecedented in the Fifth Republic. These results enable us to better characterize the new electoral order that crystallized after the 2019 European elections (Gougou, 2022): tripartition and tripolarization could be its distinguishing features.