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French Parliamentary Elections: What to Watch For Macron’s Party and Allies Win Majority in French Parliamentary Elections
(about 5 hours later)
French voters are going to the polls on Sunday for the second round of important parliamentary elections, one week after President Emmanuel Macron’s party dealt a blow to traditional establishment parties by gaining a commanding lead in the first round. PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron of France won a crucial stamp of approval on Sunday as voters gave him and his allies a decisive majority in parliamentary elections, but a record-low turnout cast a shadow on his victory, pointing to the hurdles he will face as he seeks to revive the country’s economy and confidence.
Mr. Macron’s party, La République en Marche (The Republic on the Move), is on track to win an outright majority of seats, which would put the 39-year-old president in a strong position to enact his pro-business agenda. As the polls closed at 8 p.m., pollsters projected that Mr. Macron’s party, La République En Marche (The Republic on the Move) and its allies had won at least 355 seats in the 577-member National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament.
But over all the turnout was lower than in past legislative elections. At 5 p.m. local time, it was 35.33 percent, according to the Interior Ministry. Mr. Macron, a relative political newcomer who was elected on May 7, had called for a strong mandate to advance his legislative agenda, including plans to loosen France’s restrictive labor laws. Voters swept in many first-time candidates put forward by Mr. Macron’s party, including a record number of women and candidates of Arab or African ancestry.
Here is what else you need to know, and what to look for when polls close at 6 p.m. in much of the country, and as late as 8 p.m. in bigger cities. For the two mainstream parties, the outcome was a bleak repudiation: The center-right Republicans were relegated to a distant second place, with an estimated 125 members for its bloc in Parliament, while the Socialists, who had a majority in the last election, saw their bloc reduced to an estimated 49 seats. Parties on both the far left and the far right won more seats than analysts had projected in the past week, but fewer than what had been projected immediately after their strong showings in the presidential election.
The National Assembly, France’s lower house of Parliament, has 577 seats, each representing a district. Although more than 7,800 candidates vied for those seats in the first round, only two candidates — three in one case — are left in each district in this round. Mr. Macron now “has all the power,” said Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, who resigned on Sunday as head of the Socialist Party, which with its allies won both the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2012, only to see their popularity erode under the leadership of Mr. Macron’s predecessor, François Hollande.
In a given district, whichever candidate gets the majority of votes on Sunday wins the seat. (Fun fact: If two candidates are tied in the number of votes, the older person wins.) Representatives in the National Assembly are elected for five-year terms. A top Republican official, François Baroin, wished Mr. Macron “good luck” but said his party would continue to be heard, as the largest opposition party.
Pollsters will publish their first projections of how many seats each party has won when all of the polls are closed. However, the record-low turnout — perhaps as low as 40 to 45 percent, according to early estimates — dimmed Mr. Macron’s victory and pointed to the tentative, even ambivalent, view of many French citizens toward his promises to transform France.
Official results will be published throughout the evening on the Interior Ministry website. The leader of the far-left France Unbowed party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, said the abstention level was “crushing,” adding, “Our people have entered into a form of civic general strike.”
The National Assembly is the more powerful of France’s two houses of Parliament (the other is the Senate), and it has the final word in passing legislation. Mr. Macron needs a majority to push through his agenda, which includes an overhaul of labor laws, changes in the pension and tax systems, an ambitious ethics bill, and a controversial legalization of security measures currently possible only under the state of emergency. He suggested that with such a high number of people not voting, the government was robbed of its claim to legitimacy.
Since 2002, when the timing of legislative elections was changed so that they directly followed the presidential elections, the ballot has served as confirmation of the president’s victory, reliably sending a majority of representatives of the president’s party to Parliament. A majority of eligible voters did not show up, perhaps because they thought Mr. Macron’s candidates did not need their support or, more worryingly for Mr. Macron, because they were unwilling to give him their endorsement. Many might have been tired of voting, having been called to the polls not only for the two rounds of the presidential election and then two rounds of voting for Parliament, but also for primary elections on the left and the right ahead of the presidential election.
Analysts and pundits had questioned Mr. Macron’s ability to do the same with his newly formed and still inexperienced party, La République en Marche. Nonetheless, the overall picture for Mr. Macron was a positive one.
But after a strong showing in the first round by the party and its centrist ally, the Mouvement Démocrate, when they gathered about 32 percent of the vote, polls predict that they will secure upward of 400 seats — much more than the 289 needed for a majority. “A year ago, no one could have imagined such a political renewal,” Prime Minister Édouard Philippe said, adding: “Abstention is never good news for democracy. The government interprets it as a strong obligation to succeed.”
Turnout in the first round was the lowest for legislative elections in France’s modern history. Only about 49 percent of those registered to vote went to the polls, leading some to question the legitimacy, if not the efficacy, of a National Assembly dominated by Mr. Macron’s party. Mr. Macron, 39, has seemed like a golden child of Western liberal democracy of late, with his stunning rise to power in little more than a year and his seeming unerring sense of how to exercise it in his first weeks in office.
The turnout on Sunday was far lower than the turnout in 2012 (46.42 percent) and in 2007 (49.58 percent). However, Sunday’s abstention rate suggests that he has yet to convince many French voters that his ideas and legislative program will make their lives better. The high abstention rate could make it easy for opponents like Mr. Mélenchon to attack any efforts to enact fundamental changes in France’s social contract with workers. Union-led street protests, a longtime staple of French politics, could break out if Mr. Macron tries, as he has promised, to fast-track part of his legislative program.
A higher turnout would give La République en Marche a stronger mandate in the National Assembly. But it appears that voters opposed to Mr. Macron are discouraged enough to stay home, or that even those favorable to him think the results are a foregone conclusion. Still, with at least an estimated 355 representatives elected on the ballot of La République En Marche or its close ally, the Democratic Movement, Mr. Macron could justifiably say that a majority of those who voted chose his program of loosening France’s restrictive labor laws and making it easier for businesses to hire and fire employees, and also reducing worker protections with the goal of creating more jobs.
If the polls are correct in predicting a majority for his party, analysts worry that Mr. Macron will have little incentive to compromise with opposition parties or to build coalitions around certain bills. In the absence of that kind of parliamentary debate, anger from those opposed to certain legislation could spur street protests. The National Assembly, France’s lower and more powerful house of Parliament, will lose little time getting to work and — if all unfolds as Mr. Macron hopes — the steps will begin to change France.
The traditional parties that have governed much of France’s political life for the past 50 years — the Socialists on the left and the Republicans (or their predecessors) on the right — have struggled to compete with Mr. Macron’s message of political renewal. The Socialists are expected to save only a couple of dozen seats among the nearly 300 they currently hold. Although the Parliament will not vote on key measures in its first few weeks in office, it will start discussing the measures later this summer, setting the stage for rapid passage in the early fall, including the contentious overhaul of France’s labor laws.
Ms. Le Pen, the head of the far-right National Front and Mr. Macron’s runoff opponent, is running for a seat in Hénin-Beaumont in northern France. Mr. Mélenchon, the leader of the far-left France Unbowed movement, is running in Marseille, on the Mediterranean coast. Also on tap for completion in the next four months is a potentially controversial codification in common law of some measures in the current state of emergency, such as the ability to conduct house raids or place people under house arrest without the prior authorization of a judge. A much publicized — though less controversial — ethics law for politicians is also expected.
Even though both leaders have good chances of being elected, their parties, especially the National Front, failed to capitalize on their showings in the presidential election, and they may win only a few seats each. In Sunday’s voting, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front party saw a precipitous drop in support, winning an estimated four to eight seats, although Ms. Le Pen herself won her race for a seat in a district of northern France. Just two months ago in the immediate aftermath of the first round of the presidential election, analysts had predicted that the party might obtain more than 50 seats.
A record number of women are well positioned to be elected on Sunday, many of them candidates for La République en Marche, which was one of the only parties to field more women than men. Mr. Mélenchon, the far-left leader, won his seat in a district in the Mediterranean port city of Marseille. His party was expected to take only 20 to 30 seats, fewer than might have been expected after Mr. Mélenchon’s strong showing in the presidential election, but enough to challenge the Socialists for the status as the main left-wing opposition party.
Under French law, parties that do not field at least 50 percent female candidates in the legislative elections are fined. Some parties have fielded female candidates in districts that are hard to win anyway to reach the threshold, or they have preferred to pay the fines and not field the minimum number of women. Only the mainstream right party, the Republicans, and its allies managed to maintain a significant presence in Parliament, with an estimated 90 to 130 seats.