For Macron, Triumph and a Warning

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/opinion/france-parliament-elections-emmanuel-macron.html

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Along with conferring the legislative power to easily enact promised economic and social reforms, the overwhelming victory by President Emmanuel Macron’s party and its allies in Sunday’s National Assembly election in France allowed Mr. Macron to make good on his promise of political renewal. Many of the winners in his party were first-time candidates, including some of Arab or African ancestry. A historic number of women also won seats: 223 of 577 members, versus 155 in the last Parliament.

Sunday’s vote also raised cautionary signs. Turnout was the lowest for any legislative race, about 43 percent. A shocking 70 percent of voters stayed away from the polls in the economically marginalized, heavily immigrant department of Seine-Saint-Denis. No candidate prevailed there from Mr. Macron’s party, La République en Marche (the Republic on the Move).

But six candidates from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s leftist France Unbowed party did. This should give Mr. Macron serious pause and may give him headaches in Parliament. With an estimated 17 seats nationwide — including one for Mr. Mélenchon himself in Marseilles — Mr. Mélenchon’s party cleared the 15-seat threshold required to form an official parliamentary group, giving the party more speaking time and access to top roles in the assembly.

France’s longtime standard-bearers on the left, the Socialists, are all but destroyed as a party after François Hollande’s unpopular presidency, with 30 seats, down from 284. Against 350 seats to be held by Mr. Macron and his allies, the center-right Les Républicains party, with 112 seats, is the main opposition party in the new Parliament, despite its fall from 194 seats.

The far-right National Front’s Marine Le Pen, who lost her presidential bid against Mr. Macron last month, won her first parliamentary seat, from a northern rust belt area that elected four other National Front candidates. In all, though, the party won only eight seats.

Mr. Macron doubtless faces turbulence. “Abstention is never good news for democracy,” Prime Minister Édouard Philippe asserted. “The government interprets it as a strong obligation to succeed.”

The political divide in France, as elsewhere, is increasingly between society’s winners and losers. Mr. Macron’s government will succeed only if it delivers as much for those who did not vote for him or his party as for those who did.