The 2024 French legislative elections confirm a major political reconfiguration. Historically structured by strong bipolarisation, French politics has now shifted to tripolarization, with the National Assembly dominated by three blocs: the New Popular Front (192 seats), the centrist Macronist bloc (162 seats), and the National Rally and its allies (143 seats). This election also marks the historic rise of the far right, a trend observed in many European countries.

This article examines this tripolar configuration and the resulting political crisis through the lens of the neo-realist approach developed by Amable and Palombarini (2024). In this framework, the crisis corresponds to the impossibility to form a dominant social bloc (DSB). Such a bloc could emerge only through the significant expansion of one of the three existing blocs at the expense of the others, or through the formation of an entirely new social bloc.

Building on this observation, the article analyses tripolarization from the perspective of both political supply and electoral demand, with the aim of identifying potential reconfigurations that could lead to a new DSB.

The article is structured into three sections. The first traces the collapse of traditional political blocs that produced the current configuration. The second analyses the deeper motivations of voters and abstainers, using a mixed-methods approach based on opinion survey data and qualitative research in electoral sociology. The third section discusses possible enlargement strategies and the political reconfigurations they may generate. The article concludes with a comparison to the situations observed in several neighbouring European countries.