Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) party leaped into a strong lead Sunday in France’s first round of parliamentary elections, bringing the party closer than ever to being able to form a government in round two and dealing a major blow to centrist President Emmanuel Macron and his risky decision to call the surprise polls.

Amid an unusually high voter turnout, the RN bloc secured 35.15 per cent of the vote, while the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) coalition came second with 27.99 per cent and President Macron’s centrist Ensemble alliance slumped to a third with just 20.76 per cent, according to the final results published by the French Interior Ministry on Monday.

When Macron dissolved France’s National Assembly on June 9 after a defeat at the hands of the RN in French voting for the European Parliament, he had gambled that the party, with its anti-immigration stance and historical links to antisemitism, wouldn’t be able to repeat that success with France’s own fate in the balance.

However, things didn’t work out that way, with French polling agencies projecting that the RN and its allies secured about one-third of the national vote on Sunday. Amid these projections, Macron’s prime minister, Gabriel Attal, warned that France could end up with its first far-right government since World War II, if French voters didn’t come together to prevent that scenario in round two of polling next Sunday.

“The extreme right is at the doors of power,” Prime Minister Attal said, while describing the National Rally’s policy pledges as “disastrous”. He added that in the second-round ballot, “not one vote should go to the National Rally. France does not deserve that.”