Constituent session of the National Assembly

Thirty-nine days after the dissolution of the National Assembly, eleven days after the second round of the parliamentary elections, in which the presidential camp (Ensemble) suffered a defeat, the former Speaker of the National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet (Renaissance) was re-elected on 18 July. She prevailed in the third round of voting against the candidate of the left-wing electoral alliance New Popular Front, André Chassaigne (Parti communiste) and the candidate of the Rassemblement National, Sébastien Chenu. Although the election is secret, it is considered certain that Braun-Pivet was able to hold on thanks to the votes from the conservative centre-right camp. The left-wing populists of La France Insoumise described the election as stolen. In the meantime, they filed a complaint with the Constitutional Council against the fact that 17 former ministers who were still part of the caretaker government were also elected. However, one day after the defeat of the communist André Chassaigne in the election of the President of the National Assembly, the New Popular Front surprisingly won 12 out of 22 seats on the National Assembly's presidium. Rassemblement National, on the other hand, came away empty-handed: Marine Le Pen and the deputies of her parliamentary group were excluded from filling the posts in the Assembly's presidium; they were unable to provide any of the six vice-presidents, any of the three quaestor posts or even any of the twelve secretaries. The agreement between the presidential majority Ensemble and the conservative bourgeois camp also appears to have paid off when it came to filling the committee posts. Ensemble was able to retain the chairmanship of 6 of the 8 standing committees. However, the fact that the Macron camp no longer holds any of the key positions for budgetary decisions is considered a bitter setback: it lost the strategically important post of general rapporteur for the budget; the chairmanship of the finance committee remained in the hands of the left-wing camp. A new government is not expected to be formed before the end of the Olympic Games.