France has dodged a bullet. We have no idea how the country will be governed in the coming months with a hung parliament without any natural majority. But at least we know who won’t be in government for now, and that is an immense relief for millions of voters.

If the first round of this snap parliamentary election was a referendum against liberal centrist President Emmanuel Macron, the second round was a referendum against Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN), just when power appeared within the grasp of the far-right party.

In France, as in the UK, people voted massively for change and against the status quo. There was a big protest vote over the cost of living and Macron’s unpopular raising of the retirement age, as well as immigration and economic uncertainty.

Yet faced with the risk of hard-right national populists taking power with an agenda of discrimination against immigrants and dual-nationals, the electorate turned out in force to vote for any alternative to Le Pen’s candidates, producing a spectacular last-minute turnaround. Rejecting the temptation to abstain, Communists held their noses and voted for Macron’s centrists or conservative Gaullists. Centrists voted for Trotskyists. Anti-capitalists voted for economic liberals, and vice versa. Anything to stop the RN winning. And this so-called republican front paid off.

It’s not so much that the leftwing New Popular Front (NPF), a hastily cobbled-together alliance of opposites running on a Santa Claus electoral platform, won the election, even though it emerged as the surprise largest group in the National Assembly with at least 182 out of 577 seats.

Macron’s centrists won 168, down from 246 in the outgoing chamber, the RN and its allies won 143 and the centre-right........

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