Having been repudiated at the ballot box in the second round of France's legislative elections on Sunday, Presidential Emmanuel Macron is now faced with an unprecedented political and institutional crisis. Without a working majority in the National Assembly, there looks to be no obvious solutions for him at the start of his second term, unless there is a major but improbable realignment of political groups. Analysis by political correspondent Ilyes Ramdani.

French voters have delivered a major setback to Emmanuel Macron and his  centre-right Ensemble coalition, which has failed to achieve an overall majority in the National Assembly in today's decisive second round legislative elections. This  is a huge blow for President Macron who cannot now be assured of Parliamentary backing for his planned reforms. His centre-right coalition has so far picked up 245 of the 577 seats, with 289 being the magic number to achieve an overall majority. This is well down on the number of seats it won in 2017 and means that for the government to have a working parliamentary majority it will have to seek the help of another party. That could be the rightwing Les Républicains who have 61 seats. Meanwhile the broad left and environmental alliance NUPES will be the main opposition party in the new Assembly, with  it and its allies winning 147 seats. This is a major achievement for the driving force behind NUPES, veteran leftwinger Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose La France Insoumise party only won 17 seats in the last parliament. But one of the biggest winners of the night is the far-right Rassemblement National who have won 89 seats. These dramatic results are now set to usher in a period of political uncertainty. Our live coverage of the second round results and reactions was by Graham Tearse and Michael Streeter.

In the decisive second round of voting in France's legislative elections this Sunday June 19th, a vote for the NUPES alliance of the Left and environmentalists is both ethically essential and a political necessity, argues Mediapart's publishing editor Edwy Plenel in this opinion article. To vote in this way, he writes, is to reject the duplicity of a divisive presidency and to embrace political change via a parliamentary route.

In next Sunday's decisive second round in France's legislative elections there will be nearly sixty constituencies where candidates from the broad left alliance known as NUPES will be in a head-to-head contest with far-right candidates. Yet rather than telling its voters to back the leftwing candidates against the far-right Rassemblement National, senior figures in Emmanuel Macron's ruling party have labelled both those on the right and many on the left as extremists. And they say they will advise their voters whom to back on a case by case basis. Mediapart's Ellen Salvi argues in this opinion article that this cynical approach amounts to bad faith on the part of the president's political movement. She says it goes against both political principles and political history – and also flies in the face of everything that the president claimed to be defending in his recent presidential campaign.

Shortly after winning the presidential election in 2017 Emmanuel Macron won a thumping majority at elections for the National Assembly, enabling him to push through his programme of reforms. Now, two months after his re-election as president in April, the head of state has suffered his first electoral setback at a national level. In the first round of voting in legislative elections on Sunday Macron's coalition of parties attracted only a handful more votes than the united left alliance known as NUPES. Though the head of state's centre-right Ensemble alliance is well-placed to win the support of other voters in the decisive second round next Sunday June 19th, his supporters are nonetheless worried he could lose his overall majority in the National Assembly. Ilyes Ramdani reports.

In its recent powerful investigation into the exploitation of Haiti by France in the colonial past, The New York Times highlighted the predatory role played by the bank Crédit Industriel et Commercial. In fact, reports Laurent Mauduit, all French colonial banks practiced this same pillaging system of exploitation in Asia, Africa and the Antilles.

A number of European governments introduced detailed energy conservation plans in the spring to tackle the energy crisis. In contrast, the French government has been happy simply to talk about the need for 'restraint' combined with vague calls for people to cut energy use, argues Martine Orange in this op-ed article. She says it has now taken the country's electricity grid operator RTE to spell out just how urgent the situation is.

France went to the polls on Sunday for the first round of legislative elections to elect the 577 members of the next parliament. The vote is crucial for the recently re-elected president Emmanuel Macron, who needs to retain a majority to push through his planned reforms of pensions and the welfare system. In the event, Macron’s centre-right coalition ended neck-and-neck with the newly formed NUPES alliance of the broad Left, which now represents France’s principal opposition, and all is now to play out in the second round next weekend. Follow our live coverage of the first-round results and reactions as they came in through the evening. Reporting by Graham Tearse and Michael Streeter.

Documents unearthed by Mediapart in France’s national archives, and never before published, reveal that the true horrific extent of the covered-up massacre by police of Algerian demonstrators in Paris on the night of October 17th 1961 was very quickly made known to then president Charles de Gaulle and his advisors. They show that de Gaulle had instructed in writing that those who perpetrated the crimes be brought to justice. But in the end, no-one would ever be prosecuted over the slaughter, which historians have estimated claimed the lives of several hundred people, many of who drowned in the River Seine. Fabrice Arfi reports. 

Amid galloping inflation, French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne this week announced that households with the lowest incomes will be given a one-off financial payment at the end of the summer in emergency aid. The government is also to study the feasibility of implementing a regular payment to the neediest which will be specifically for the purchase of food, what has been dubbed a “food cheque”, although exactly what form this might take is unclear. Humanitarian associations have greeted the moves with caution, among them the Secours Catholique which likened the ‘cheque’ to “a tree that hides the forest” of the crisis. Faïza Zerouala reports.