Politics
Analysis: 'Dodged a bullet.' In France, voters deny far right a win. But what now?
Strangers in Paris cafes raised joyful toasts to one another. In tight-packed crowds, people hugged and wept. A speeding bicyclist trailed a flapping French tricolor. Fireworks hissed and popped.
In Sunday’s parliamentary election, the French far right made a thunderous knock at the gates of power — but one that seemingly dwindled at the last moment into insistent tapping.
The National Rally, whose ascendancy was widely feared after it topped the field in first-round voting a week earlier, fell back to a third-place finish, as vote tallies pointed to a divided Parliament, with no bloc achieving a clear majority.
The uncertainty of what would come was not lost on the revelers in Paris, but they were for the moment thrilled that voters had staved off what had been the specter of France’s first far-right government since the dark Nazi-collaborationist days of World War II.
People celebrate election results in Paris on July 7, 2024.
(Aurelien Morissard / Associated Press)
A newly formed coalition of leftist and environmental forces was the night’s surprise success story, deemed to have garnered the largest share of parliamentary seats, ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrists. A final official tally was not expected until later Monday.
“C’est Ouf,” was the headline in Monday’s early editions of the left-leaning Liberation newspaper — crazy, in slang usage — superimposed on a photo of a gigantic gathering in the Place de la Republique, a historic central Paris square.
The political disarray comes less than three weeks before the start of the Summer Olympic Games, although visitors to Paris were unlikely to experience much in the way of disruptions beyond the obstacle course that already exists in the city center.
On election day, many among the throngs of tourists navigating the barricades and blockages were unaware of the vote, or had heard about it only in the vaguest of terms.
For the French, though, the contest was all-consuming.
Into the wee hours of Monday, long after the last late-summer evening light had left the sky, there was widespread rejoicing — but already, a dawning sense of the deadlock and instability that will almost surely follow the divided result.
“I think you can say ‘dodged a bullet,’ yes?” said Leslie Laurent, a Parisian retail manager in her 50s. She said she had supported Macron’s bloc, but was relieved that the far right had not managed a decisive triumph.
The vote’s stakes were reflected in unusually high tensions surrounding the race — and by a turnout that authorities described as the highest in decades for a parliamentary contest.
The government sent 30,000 police officers into the streets on election day, and dozens of candidates reported having been physically attacked during the run-up to the balloting.
Macron, whose term does not expire until 2027, can remain in his post, although some opponents were already calling on him to step down.
His handpicked prime minister, Gabriel Attal, announced almost immediately after the release of the first solid projections that he would turn in his resignation — although Attal left open the prospect of remaining in his post until a new government can be formed, which could be a long and difficult process.
The National Rally — a successor party to the National Front, a xenophobic grouping that for decades was relegated to France’s political fringe — had high hopes heading into the vote, expressing confidence that it could even achieve an absolute majority and form a government.
But although it fell far short of that aim, the National Rally dramatically increased its number of parliamentary seats — a state of affairs that is likely to result in considerable hand-wringing once the initial euphoria wears off.
And not everyone, of course, is rejoicing.
The National Rally made its name with deep antipathy toward immigration and scorn for the European Union, but part of its appeal springs from hard-edged dissatisfaction with the cost of living and economic inequalities within France — sentiments shared even by many who felt that voting for the party would be an affront to France’s democratic values.
Supporters of the far-left France Unbowed party react in Paris as a coalition on the left won the most parliamentary seats in the snap election.
(Thomas Padilla / Associated Press)
Initial reaction from Macron’s camp was muted. He made no immediate personal appearance, with his office saying he would ensure that the “sovereign choice of the French people will be respected.”
After the June 30 first round of voting in which the National Rally came in first — which itself followed France’s June 9 elections for the European Parliament, in which the National Rally also performed best — centrist and leftist forces joined together, as they have in the past, to create a “Republican front.”
That military-sounding endeavor is so named because it was intended to safeguard the French republic by blocking the far-right juggernaut.
The far right responded to the initial results with defiance. Its president, Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old who had hoped to become the next prime minister, referred darkly to “dangerous electoral deals” made to stymie the National Rally’s drive.
Leaning into the party’s narrative that it champions the forgotten against a powerful elite, Bardella told supporters in Paris that these machinations had “deprived” National Rally supporters of the government they wanted.
Calling the early elections had been a huge gamble on Macron’s part, and there was mixed opinion as to whether he had won his bet. He had counted on French voters repudiating the National Rally as a governing force, even if they were willing to lend it a protest vote.
Still, the battle was a deeply damaging one — and likely to leave Macron, deprived of a parliamentary plurality, a diminished figure in global affairs, including causes such as championing Ukraine and fighting climate change.
During the campaign, Macron described the far left as being as dangerous as the far right — a dynamic of enmity that will make it difficult for his centrists to secure even temporary tactical alliances with leftists.
At least at this juncture, none of the main blocs appeared willing to work with one another, and the successful leftist grouping in particular could be prone to infighting.
Marine Le Pen, the National Rally leader who did not contest this election but is expected to run for president in 2027, suggested in a post-vote television interview that it had taken the combined efforts of the left and center to keep her party down.
In the night’s setbacks, she told France’s TF1, she saw “the ferments that are those of tomorrow’s victory.”
Supporters of the far-right National Rally react at their Paris headquarters after the release of vote projections that the party would come in third.
(Louise Delmotte / Associated Press)
Politics
Omar’s disclosures erased millions, leaving her with potential negative net worth. She won’t explain why.
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Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., refused to address her revised financial disclosures that could imply she has a negative net worth after the progressive lawmaker dramatically reducing the reported value of assets tied to her husband’s business ventures.
“Can you tell us if your husband still has the consulting business and the wine business?” Fox News Digital asked Omar.
The congresswoman stayed silent as she was repeatedly questioned, after previously telling Fox News Digital that the original filing — showing Omar’s reported assets reducing by as much as $29.9 million — was inaccurate and “incomplete” information.
ILHAN OMAR’S OFFICE SAYS SHE’S ‘NOT A MILLIONAIRE’ AFTER $30M FILING REVISED DOWN TO UNDER $100K: REPORT
US Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, speaks during a press conference with family members of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh as members of Congress call for US investigations into Israel’s actions and reintroduce the Justice for Shireen Act, outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, May 18, 2023. The Al Jazeera journalist, who was a dual US citizen, was killed on May 11, 2022. The Israeli army later admitted one of its soldiers likely shot the reporter. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
The controversy surrounding Omar’s finances began when a 2024 financial report estimated that Omar and her husband possessed between $6 million and $30 million in assets, all while the Minnesota fraud scandal within the Somali community was beginning to come to fruition.
A more recent 2025 financial disclosure report shows Omar’s revised value of shared assets between her and husband to sit at a maximum of $125,000 — a multi-million-dollar drop from the year prior. The lower estimate of their assets, $20,000, compared to the low and high debt estimates, $30,000 and $100,000, would imply the Minnesota Democrat could have a negative net worth.
Both her and her husband have separate debts, each ranging somewhere between $15,000 and $50,000 — from her own student loans and her husband’s credit card debt, according to the disclosures.
WATCH: OMAR SILENT WHEN CONFRONTED ON ALLEGED TIES TO MASSIVE MINNESOTA FRAUD SCANDAL
RICHFIELD, MN – AUGUST 08: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) (C) campaigns with her husband Tim Mynett (R) at the Richfield Farmers Market on August 8, 2020 in Richfield, Minnesota. Omar is hoping to retain her seat as the representative for Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District in next week’s primary election. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
The biggest change in the documents involved Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett. His reported ownership interests in both his winery and venture capital advisory firm, which were previously valued in the millions of dollars, are listed with no value now.
In Omar’s 2024 financial disclosure records, Mynett’s share in his winery was valued between $1 million and $5 million, and his share at the venture capital advisory firm was valued between $5 million and $25 million. Now, his equity interests are both listed at $0.
Omar’s office previously told Fox News Digital that Mynett has partners in both businesses and said the earlier disclosure mistakenly reflected the businesses’ total equity rather than his ownership interest. The office also said the original filing listed assets without accounting for liabilities.
VANCE REFERS TIM WALZ, MINNESOTA ATTORNEY GENERAL TO DOJ FOR CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION OVER STATE’S ALLEGED FRAUD
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has publicly voiced his interest in the Ethics Committee opening an investigation into Omar’s personal finances after the 2025 financial reports came out showing the possibility of a $29 million drop in her net worth.
Vice President JD Vance also has previously said the U.S. Department of Justice will be opening a probe into her alleged fraud as part of the administration’s anti-fraud taskforce that he spearheads, though no formal investigations have been shared with the public at this time.
Omar has been reluctant to answer Fox News Digital’s questions about her financial fallout and potential probes to be opened against her.
The Minnesota lawmaker similarly dodged answering any of Fox News Digital’s questions just last month about the revised disclosures.
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“There’s also the possibility that it might rain on this sunny day,” Omar replied without responding directly to the content of the question.
Fox News Digital’s Robert Schmad contributed to this report.
As a student years ago, I dove deep into the history of the Red-hunting McCarthy era and became familiar with the actor who emerged second only to Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy as the villain of that insidious time: his shameless, conniving young lawyer, Roy Cohn. Never would I have imagined that a future president would count Cohn as a mentor and role model.
Then came Donald Trump.
Now, in Cohn-inflected McCarthyesque style, President Trump is channeling his tutor yet again, baselessly labeling his political enemies — all Democrats — as communists as he looks ahead to the fall’s midterm elections. Once more Trump shows that his catchphrase “Make America great again” means regressing, this time to Trump’s formative 1950s and the McCarthy era that sadly helped define it.
In recent speeches, including on the Fourth of July, Trump’s utterances of “communist” or “communism” reached double digits each time. (As that implies, the president didn’t set aside his divisive rhetoric even for the nation’s 250th birthday.)
“Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America,” Trump said late on the Fourth on the National Mall.
Trump couples his commie-baiting with a dash of his trademark xenophobia. “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including by newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he said at Mount Rushmore a day earlier. (He’s got it backward, of course: Immigrants come here for the American way of life and promise of success.)
Here’s the irony: Trump’s actions in his second term make him look more like the commie. He’s projecting again.
Now that Trump is exploiting a few victories lately by left-wing democratic socialists in Democratic primaries to paint the entire party as communists, it’s time to review the record — his record.
A hallmark of communism is government ownership of companies and control of the economy, at the expense of private property and free markets. In just over a year, Trump has used billions of taxpayers’ dollars to buy shares for the government in a growing list of private companies — U.S. Steel, Intel, Westinghouse and more — citing national security. The companies don’t always welcome their new stakeholder; at a minimum, they rightly fear it for the demands the government could make about prices and production.
“It’s what Putin did,” the estranged Republicans at the Lincoln Project posted online Monday. “Trump is the closest we’ve ever come to communism.”
“What began as a populist revolt against so-called elites has become a program of state ownership, price fixing and top-down industrial control,” free-market economist Veronique de Rugy wrote in The Times last October of Trump’s actions. “The power to ‘partner’ with business is the power to control it.”
Comrade Trump’s first big government grab, and a model for those to come, was in June last year, when he wrested a permanent “golden share” in U.S. Steel in return for approving its sale to Japan’s Nippon Steel. The company’s charter was revised to give the U.S. president extraordinary veto power over nearly a dozen corporate activities, including closing or relocating plants, supply-chain decisions, even pricing.
“We have a golden share, which I control,” Trump told reporters at the time, in words I never thought I’d hear from a president of the party once associated with free markets.
Just last week, Trump boasted to CNBC how he’d extracted a 10% stake in beleaguered chip giant Intel last August, after first demanding that its chief executive resign. “Intel came in. They had a problem. I said, ‘I can solve your problem, but I want 10% of the company.’ … Somebody said that’s not very American. I said, ‘No, I think it is very American, actually.’ And I’ve done that with other deals.”
And so he has.
The Pentagon is now the largest stockholder in struggling MP Materials, a large rare-earth mine in California, and guarantees a 10-year price floor for its output that stunned competitors. The administration has since taken shares in other rare-earth companies. The Commerce Department took an option for an 8% stake in Westinghouse, to spur construction of nuclear reactors, and has the right to 20% if the government decides the company should go public. The government takes a 15% cut of Nvidia’s and Advanced Micro Devices’ AI chip sales to China.
As much as anything he does, Trump’s direct intervention in private enterprise invites the question “What if Biden/Harris/Obama did that?” The answer, of course: Trump and Republicans would cry “Communist!”
Trump’s actions are the sort Americans generally have only seen during economic emergencies or major wars, and then rarely. I covered the frenzied and ultimately successful response to the near-collapse of the global financial system and the U.S. auto, insurance and housing industries. Behind the scenes in the Obama White House (and George W. Bush’s at the outset) was constant, angst-filled debate about any actions smacking of government takeovers and a determination that interventions be temporary, unlike Trump’s schemes. (For all the still-lingering unpopularity of the banking bailout, the Treasury — the taxpayers — got all the money back and then some, and exited the business.)
Trump’s economic big-footing isn’t the only way in which he resembles the commies Americans know best, and whom he so admires: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jung Un. There are also the images of himself everywhere, monuments planned, drearily long and self-adulating speeches and interference in the nation’s cultural, educational and legal spheres and — worst of all — in elections.
At Rushmore, Trump closed with a demand that Congress pass his so-called SAVE America Act to restrict voting. “We do that and we’re not going to lose an election for 100 years,” he said, speaking of course about Republicans.
One-party rule through central government election finagling? Now that’s a communist.
Bluesky: @jackiecalmes
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Maine state Rep. Valli Geiger, a Rockland Democrat, former nurse and former mayor, is drawing sudden national attention after saying now-former Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner encouraged her to consider taking his place on the ballot in the Maine Senate race.
While Geiger has not been named the replacement nominee, her name entered the Maine Senate scramble after she told local outlet WMTW that Platner called her Monday night, praised her as a “fighter” and asked whether he could put her name forward. Platner’s campaign told the outlet he had not made an endorsement decision but confirmed he encouraged Geiger to consider running if he stepped aside.
After Geiger said Platner called her about potentially putting her name forward, Geiger posted Tuesday she would not “throw Graham under the bus,” while also saying she would not “slander or accuse” Jenny Racicot, the woman who accused Platner of rape, “of anything more than telling the truth as she experienced it.”
By Wednesday, local outlets were reporting that Geiger said Platner had encouraged her to consider running if he withdrew. Platner, who suspended his campaign Wednesday night, has denied the claim.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT IF PLATNER DROPS OUT? HERE’S WHO COULD REPLACE HIM ON THE BALLOT AND HOW IT COULD WORK
Graham Platner Maine State Rep. Valli Geiger (Maine State Legislature/Getty Images)
“For the movement to continue, it can’t be me. For that reason, we are suspending campaign operations,” Platner said in a video posted to social media.
Geiger is a third-term Democratic state representative from Rockland, according to her legislative biography, representing a coastal House district in Maine that includes Rockland, Criehaven Township, Matinicus Isle Plantation, the Muscle Ridge Islands, North Haven and part of Owls Head. Her biography says she serves on the Labor Committee and the Energy, Utilities and Technology Committee.
Before entering the state legislature, Geiger served six years on the Rockland City Council, including one year as mayor and four years on the Rockland Comprehensive Planning Commission, three of them as chair.
Her biography says she holds a master’s degree in sustainable design and built her own passive-solar, net-zero-energy house. It also describes her as a former nurse at Pen Bay Medical Center who later worked as a health policy analyst and health administrator, including as director of the Healthreach Hospice program and clinical director for Federally Qualified Health Centers around Maine.
The Maine State Capitol May 18, 2026, in Augusta, Maine. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
PLATNER CAMPAIGN PUTTING ‘THUMB ON SCALE’ TO INFLUENCE POSSIBLE REPLACEMENT, MAINE DEM ALLEGES
Geiger’s connection to Platner predates the latest replacement speculation. Local reporting has described her as a close Platner supporter, and WMTW reported she previously stood with him and credited him with helping secure funding for rape kit tracking in Maine.
In her Facebook post responding to Racicot’s allegation, Geiger wrote that Racicot’s story “seems credible” but added that “none of us knows the truth nor will we ever.” She also described Platner as “a man becoming a better man” and said she had hoped he would lead the political movement his campaign had built and will not “throw Graham under the bus.”
In the post, Geiger also praised Platner’s “passion for economic populism” and said she had granted him “an enormous amount of grace” for his behavior during what she described as his “dark years” after multiple deployments.
Dr. Nirav D. Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks during a news conference about COVID-19 at Maine Emergency Management Agency in Augusta. (Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)
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The Maine state representative is not the only Democrat whose name has surfaced as Maine Democrats prepare for the possibility that Platner exits the race against Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
Several Democrats have expressed interest or are considering bids, including former gubernatorial candidate Troy Jackson, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and former Maine CDC Director Nirav Shah.
Under Maine law, the Maine Democratic Party can replace him on the general election ballot by selecting a new nominee through its party process, with the replacement required to be chosen by July 27.
Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller and Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.
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