Many French voters are frustrated about inflation and other economic concerns, as well as Macron’s leadership, seen as arrogant and out of touch with their lives.
The RN has tapped into that discontent, notably via online platforms like TikTok, and led in pre-election opinion polls.
A new progressive coalition, the New Popular Front, also poses a challenge to the pro-business Macron and his centrist alliance.
It includes the French Socialists and Communists, the greens and the hardline France Unbowed party, and vows to reverse an unpopular pension reform law that raised the retirement age to 64, among other economic reforms.
There are 49.5 million registered voters who will choose the 577 members of the National Assembly, France’s influential lower house of parliament.
Turnout stood at an unusually high 59% with three hours to go before polls closed — 20 percentage points higher than turnout at the same time in the previous first-round vote, in 2022.
Some pollsters suggested the high turnout could temper the outcome for the RN, possibly indicating voters made an extra effort to cast ballots for fear it could win.
The vote was taking place during the traditional first week of summer holidays in France, and absentee ballot requests were at least five times higher than in 2022.
Early official results were expected later on Sunday.
France’s electoral system can make it hard to estimate the precise distribution of seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, and the final outcome will not be known until the end of the second round of voting on July 7.
“We are going to win an absolute majority,” Le Pen said in a newspaper interview on Wednesday, predicting her protege, 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, would be Prime Minister.
If the RN does win an absolute majority, French diplomacy could be headed for an unprecedented period of turbulence, with Macron — who has said he will continue his presidency until the end of his term in 2027 — and Bardella jostling for the right to speak for France.
France has had three periods of “cohabitation” — when the President and government are from opposite political camps — in its post-war history, but none with such radically divergent world views competing at the top of the state.
Bardella says he would challenge Macron on global issues.
France could lurch from a pillar of the EU to a thorn in its side, demanding a rebate of its contribution to the EU budget, clashing with the bloc over European Commission jobs, and reversing Macron’s calls for greater EU unity on defence.
