The French parliamentary election first-round on Sunday put Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Ensemble group barely ahead of the leftist coalition NUPES under firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon – a disappointing result for the freshly re-elected president. But Macron’s centrist alliance is expected to get a second-round boost as swing voters rally to moderates – while a relatively strong performance for France’s conservatives gives them a chance to assure Macron a National Assembly majority.
For two decades French parliamentary elections – or the législatives, as they are called in France – have seen the newly (re)elected president sail to a National Assembly on the back of their victory in the Élysée Palace race. At the outset, observers expected this month’s polls to conform to type.
But it seems unusual législatives should have been foreseen after an unusual campaign overshadowed by the war in Ukraine and an unusually anti-climactic victory for the president.
‘Macron ended up drifting’
The first round projects point to an aberrant result indeed: Macron’s Ensemble (“Together”) has only scraped first place, barely ahead of the left-wing Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et sociale (“New Ecological and Social Popular Union”, or NUPES) coalition, with 25.75 percent for the former and 25.66 percent for the latter, according to figures provided by the interior ministry.
Even after Mélenchon came a close third in April’s presidential election first round, the most dreamily optimistic French socialist would have been brave to expect such an outcome – given the hitherto dire state of the French left, which saw its historic vehicle the Socialist Party dwindle into irrelevance.
A controversial figure whom swathes of the electorate detest for his hard-left policies and sometimes conspiratorial rhetoric, Mélenchon is nevertheless a formidable campaigner with a gift…
Source : france24
