There were dancing, beers and embraces between comrades, but also tear gas and clashes with riot police, as Paris celebrated a rare victory for the left in French parliamentary elections.
The New Popular Front, a broad coalition from the more radical parties to the centre left, emerged as the largest group in what was one of the most high-stakes votes in French history.
The hastily assembled left-wing coalition won the most seats in the National Assembly, followed by French president Emmanuel Macron’s centrists and then Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party, which had been expected to come out on top but finished third, according to exit poll projections.
After the results came through on Sunday night thousands of left-wing activists and supporters flocked to Place de la République in central Paris. There was a party atmosphere in the air, as friends danced together, shared cigarettes and drank cans of beer and bottles of wine.
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“Everyone told us we were going to lose,” said Alia Pescheux, a 27-year-old working in the cinema industry. “We have hope now – before we didn’t,” she said.
A supporter of France Unbowed, the more radical left-wing party led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, said activists had spent the last week frantically campaigning to prevent the far right taking control of the National Assembly. “Not everything is won, but it is still a really good victory because the left in France was really scattered for many years but now [we] have finally made one group,” she said.
While the New Popular Front won the most seats, it fell far short of an outright majority, meaning France is likely heading for a hung parliament or an unstable coalition of some sort between parties of the left and Macron’s centrist alliance.
Liadan Ni Nunain (28), a lawyer working in Paris, said the rise of the National Rally in the polls had been hugely concerning. “It would be the first time in history since the second World War that this kind of politics would come to power,” she said.
Ni Nunain, who was born in Ireland but moved to France when she was eight, said recent weeks had been tense. “I didn’t think that we were going to win tonight, I thought it was going to be a very sad time for France,” she said.
Scores of left-wing supporters climbed the Monument to the Republic in the centre of the square, waving Palestinian flags and the French tricolour.
Several enterprising street vendors had set up camp selling cans of beer for €5, as well as bottles of water. People danced to music, chanting anti-fascist slogans, and at several points the crowd broke out into a rendition of La Marseillaise, the national anthem.
Karina Si Ahmed, a documentary producer who was among the crowd, said she had been frightened that a National Rally government coming to power would have cracked down on the freedom of the press. The four weeks since Macron had dissolved parliament and called a snap election had left her “exhausted”, she said.
“It is going to be very new for the French parliament to be so divided, because the coalition is not in our political culture, so it is going to be difficult,” she said.
There was a heavy police presence standing by at the demonstration, with lines of riot police set up at different points around the square. A small group of about a hundred protesters clashed with the police, setting debris on fire in the middle of one road and launching glass bottles and fireworks at police. At one point the police responded with tear gas, sending large numbers of the crowd running in different directions.
As the celebrations continued towards midnight, one corner of the euphoric crowd responded to a line of riot police in front of them with a simple chant over and over: “We won, we won.”
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