After the parliamentary election run-off, the Left-Green coalition got (AFAICR from the telly news this morning) ~180 seats, Macron's Centre-Right coalition ~170, and the much-ballyhooed and feared National Rally (the Populist Right party that Marine LePen inhgerited from daddy Jean-Marie) only 143 (and the unspecified "others" looked, from the graph without a numeric label for them, to be somewhere between fifty and a hundred). This was a sharp contrast to polls and speculation before and after the first round of the election, where pundits were arguing mostly about whether the NR would get a supermajority or "just" an ordinary majority of their own.

Finnish news had speculated beforehand about this, and still today reported it, as "tactical voting" -- but from what I gathered this morning, it was just as much tactical withdrawals by candidates: I had thought this run-off works like the Finnish Presidential election (in which Conservative Alexander Stubb narrowly beat Green Pekka Haavisto in the run-off six months ago), where if no candidate gets over fifty percent in the first round, there's a runoff between the two front-runners. But apparently in French parliamentary elections, there are at least three candidates remaining in the run-off too, since what the news reported here this morning was that (a lot of) run-off candidates had stood down, bequathing their votes (by encouraging their voters, apparently; the votes are not the candidates' to distribute as they please) in favour of the front-runner among non-National-Rally candidates. Thus left in effect with a binary choice between National Rally and "anything else", in all but 143 voting districts voters went for the latter.

Thank you, French voters -- and above all, thank you, French candidates!

[Edited to fix numbers -- dunno where I got 280 / 270 from; either just a typo or misunderstood the morning TV news. Or maybe they got it wrong?]