President Emmanuel Macron began efforts on Monday to extract France from political uncertainty after a left-wing coalition defeated the far-right in an election that left no group with an absolute majority, The National reported.

Macron's Ensemble bloc came second in the election, ahead of the National Rally (RN) in third, which had been tipped to govern the country for the first time.

The left won 182 seats, Macron's centrist alliance 168 and Marine Le Pen's National Rally and allies 143, interior ministry data showed.

Difficult negotiations between political parties lie ahead in a country with no history of broad coalitions as the country readies to host the Olympic Games in three weeks.

Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said he would submit his resignation but Macron's office said on Monday that he asked him to stay "for the moment to ensure the stability of the country."

“I'm relieved but also worried about what's coming,” Pierre, a 28-year-old engineer who supports Macron, told The National.

“I'm not sure what's going to happen now.”

Left-wing politicians say they want to govern and the President, which has the final say in choosing a Prime Minister, will be under pressure to respect political balances in the new National Assembly. But his office said that he would wait to see what its final structure looks like before making decisions regarding a new prime minister and government.

Macron has previously signaled his interest in building a broad coalition that excludes the RN and France Unbowed, which obtained the biggest bloc of MPs within the leftist coalition, ahead of the socialists and greens. Led by firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon, France Unbowed has been portrayed as anti-Semitic – an accusation it denies.

Macron called the surprise election three years early after a bruising defeat in the European Parliament elections in June that saw the National Rally win about one in three votes. The RN's relatively low score - it has nearly doubled its number of MPs - can be explained by the system of alliances between the left and centrists between the two rounds of voting to block the far right.

RN president Jordan Bardella criticized these political man oeuvres, which have been adopted for decades by mainstream political parties to block the rise to power of the party that was founded by Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Bardella described them as an “alliance of dishonor”.