Macron faces the challenge of revalidating the parliamentary majority in an election where his great rivals will be Le Pen and Mélinchon
After the election this Sunday of the president of the French Republic, the battle of the legislative elections begins, which will take place on June 12 and 19. The French will be called back to the polls to renew the National Assembly, the lower house of the Gallic Parliament. Citizens will have to decide whether or not to give the parliamentary majority to the president of the country or, on the contrary, distribute their vote among the different parties, which could complicate the legislature of Emmanuel Macron.
Voters must elect in each constituency by absolute majority who will be their 577 deputies for the next five years. According to the French electoral system, the elections are held in two rounds. If no candidate gets more than 50% of the votes in the first round, there is a second round. Only the two candidates with the most votes are classified.
Legislative elections traditionally give the president a majority, as happened in 2017 when Macron was first elected. Of the 577 deputies currently in the National Assembly, 269 are from the presidential majority.
Even before the results of the elections were known last night, French politicians were already thinking about the legislative elections and the best tactic to follow to get the largest number of deputies in the National Assembly. A total of twelve acronyms were submitted in the first round.
One of the first candidates to speak of “the third round”, as many call the legislative elections in France, was Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who, with almost 22% of the votes, was the third most voted in the presidential elections. However, he was eliminated in the first round.
“I ask the French to elect me prime minister by voting for the popular unity candidates,” Mélenchon said on Tuesday. The leader of La Francia Insumisa is convinced that, if the leftist parties unite in the legislative elections, they could obtain a majority in the National Assembly. This would force Emmanuel Macron to elect him prime minister, according to Mélenchon’s calculations.
The environmentalists and the communists have shown themselves willing to negotiate with La Francia Insumisa for the legislative elections. In France, the president appoints the prime minister, although he usually does so based on majorities in the National Assembly. La France Insumisa now has 17 of 577 deputies.
Slamming to a united right
Macron did not want this week to open the melon of the June elections. He considered it premature before knowing the name of the winner of the presidential elections and asked “not to confuse the agendas” out of respect for the voters. “As in sports competitions, it is never good to write the final match sheet when we are still in the quarterfinals,” the leader of La República en Marcha told the ‘Ouest France’ newspaper on Friday.
The legislative elections will also be the opportunity to see what happens to the two traditional great French parties, the Socialist Party and the Republicans, after their debacle in the first round of the presidential elections. Valérie Pécresse, candidate of the moderate right, obtained 4.78% of the votes and the socialist Anne Hidalgo 1.75% of support. It will be necessary to see if these two formations, which usually have a strong local anchor, manage to maintain the 105 deputies and the 29 deputies, respectively, with which they have so far.
Another of the unknowns in the legislative elections is whether Reconquest, the party of far-right Éric Zemmour, is capable of winning seats in the new National Assembly. Zemmour called on Tuesday to form “a great coalition of right-wingers and all patriots” in the legislative elections against Macron and the “Islamo-leftist” Mélenchon.
However, Jordan Bardella, president of Regrouping National and Marine Le Pen’s right-hand man, this week closed the door on the right-wing alliance proposed by Zemmour. “There will not be an alliance of parties, there will be candidates for National Regrouping everywhere,” Bardella clarified.
Although in 2017 Marine Le Pen managed to qualify for the second round of the presidential elections, her party only managed eight deputies in the legislative elections, including Le Pen herself. She is now six. French parties usually unite in the second round to prevent far-right candidates from being elected deputies. History may repeat itself in the June legislative elections.
