Mainland France is voting on June 18, 2017 in a second and final round to elect legislators to the 577-member lower house of Parliament, or National Assembly, where they will hold a five-year term.
What happened in round one?
French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist movement, La Republique En Marche (LREM), which has drawn candidates from the left, right and centre, and its ally, Democratic Movement (MoDem), won 32.32% of the vote in a landslide victory. The main party of the right, the Republicans, and its allies, won 21.56%. Mr. Macron’s rivals in May’s presidential round, Marine Le Pen’s far right Front National (FN), won 13.2%. However, the first round had a record high abstention rate of 51.3%, beating the previous record of 42.8% in 2012. Some of Mr. Macron’s opponents have blamed this on disillusionment because of the large win predicted by polls.
What is expected now?
Polls predict a sizeable majority for the LREM-MoDem alliance: 415-455 seats according to an Ipsos/Sopra Steria projection. The same poll predicts that the Republicans and their allies will get between 70 and 110 seats and the left alliance, comprising the Socialist Party (PS) and its allies, including Europe Ecology, will get 20-30 seats — another significant setback in a series for the left which started with former Socialist President Francois Hollande’s record low approval ratings. Benoit Hamon, the PS’s presidential candidate, was eliminated from the presidential race in round one of voting in April, having won just 6.36% and the party’s current leader, Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, has already been eliminated from the parliamentary race. The Communist Party and Jean-Luch Melenchon’s La France Insoumise or France Unbowed are projected to get 8-18 seats. The FN is expected to get 1-5 seats in the new Parliament, compared to its current 2 seats, according to the Ipsos poll.
The party has set itself a goal of 15 seats, the minimum number required to form a parliamentary group.
Why does a win matter?
From the point of view of Mr. Macron, and his party, a majority is important so the Prime Minister – who by law has to have the confidence of a majority in the assembly – can carry out the President’s agenda. Usually, the electorate’s choices for President and legislators are consistent with each other, i.e., voters give the President a parliamentary majority. Occasionally, however, France has witnessed cohabitation, where the Prime Minister is not from the party to which the President belongs. This has happened three times, the third being between 1997 and 2002 when President Jacques Chirac, a conservative, had Socialist Lionel Jospin for Prime Minister.
The law was changed in 2000 to synchronize presidential and parliamentary terms by cutting the presidential term down from seven to five years. Mr. Macron’s political agenda, which includes changes to the country’s social protection schemes and labour laws, is ambitious as well as contentious and an LREM/MoDem majority will help him carry it through.
What are the critics saying?
A criticism of Mr. Macron’s projected win is that it will be unhealthy for democracy. The low turnout and the fact that Mr. Macron inherited a deeply divided France, coupled with the large majority predicted for LERM/MoDEM, will mean that views that are at odds with Mr. Macron’s policies will not have a sufficiently strong presence in Parliament to impact legislation. Both Mr. Melenchon’s far left Insoumise, and the far right’s FN, have economic policies that are at odds with Mr. Macron’s centrist policy platform which borrows from the left (e.g., government investment in key sectors) and right (e.g., downsizing government and making the labour market more fluid). Mr. Macron is also staunchly pro-EU and supports free trade and globalisation — views that the far ends of the political spectrum disagree with partly or wholly. Mr. Melenchon had hoped that the Insoumise would function as the primary opposition to the President but the projections suggest that is unlikely to happen.
