Voters in several European countries, including a number of EU member states, will go to the polls at various points this year, including the Portuguese for municipal elections. We highlight the 12 votes that could prove most significant on the continent, for their potential for surprise or the lack of it, plus one more that isn’t yet scheduled but could still take place.
France (?): July
We’re including France on this list not because it has elections scheduled for 2025, but because there are deep concerns among analysts that this could end up being the case once the country reaches the one-year mark since its last trip to the polls.
The French Constitution states that no new elections can be held in the country within one year of the last ones, which in this case took place on 30 June and 7 July, the first and second rounds respectively of the snap legislative elections that Emmanuel Macron called after his centrist coalition suffered a heavy defeat in June’s European elections.
In his New Year’s address, Macron for the first time acknowledged the “mistake” of having called snap elections, a decision that effectively plunged France into a political crisis which, shortly before the end of 2024, entered a new chapter with the collapse of the government led by Michel Barnier, the technocrat appointed by the president to take the reins of the country, who failed to get his austerity-driven state budget passed to address the enormous public debt crisis in Europe’s second-largest economy.
After falling to a parliamentary no-confidence motion, Barnier was replaced by François Bayrou, a veteran centrist from the MoDem party who has been part of Macron’s alliance since 2017 and who now faces the task of getting this year’s budget passed (in the immediate term) and maintaining some stability in the country (in the medium term).
Recent history shows there are no guarantees of anything, something French analyst Julien Hoez had already pointed out in the aftermath of Barnier’s resignation. “There’s every chance the next government could also fail. My prediction is that we’ll see one or two more governments before Macron has to dissolve the National Assembly and call new elections for July.”