By Graham Tearse
The Socialist Party has gained an absolute majority in France's National Assembly, with between 312 and 326 seats out of a total 577, according to exit poll results of voting in the second and final round of nationwide parliamentary elections on Sunday.
With 289 seats needed to obtain a majority, the result gave newly-elected President François Hollande a comfortable leading margin in the lower house with which to push ahead his programme of reforms, which notably include raising taxes on the wealthy and tempering austerity measures to promote growth, without the need to form a coalition deal with the Greens or the Radical Left.
The Socialist Party majority is calculated by including the affiliated movements of its parliamentary group, who on Sunday are expected to represent some half dozen elected, maverick, social democrat candidates.
The results on Sunday, which ended ten uninterrupted years of conservative majority in parliament, will also now give Hollande increased authority at a European level, particularly in his opposition to the strict continent-wide austerity measures championed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The estimates, released after voting ended at 8p.m., gave the far-right Front National up to four seats. Two were confirmed early Sunday evening, announcing the party’s first return to parliament in almost 25 years. Marion Maréchal Le Pen, the 22 year-old niece of party leader Marine Le Pen, and another Front National candidate, lawyer Gilbert Collard, won separate constituencies in southern France. An independent far-right candidate, former Front National member Jacques Bompard, also won a constituency.
The conservative UMP party of former president Nicolas Sarkozy and its centre-right allies were credited with between 212 and 234 seats, the Green EELV party between 18 and 24 and the radical-left Front de Gauche with between 9 and 11.
The turnout rate among the country's 46,066,506 registered voters was estimated at 56%, a record low compared to previous second-round polls.
The elections returned a record number of women Members of Parliament, who now total 155.
UMP party leader Jean-François Copé, 48, speaking early Sunday evening, said he “took note of the victory of the Left” and launched what he called “a solemn appeal for the unity of our political family”.
With a bitter power struggle already underway for leadership of the party, a position eyed by former Prime Minister François Fillon, and a likely fierce debate to come over the causes of its first election defeat in ten years, Copé - who kept his seat in Meaux, east of Paris - added: “In the middle of [an economic] crisis, when the workings of parliament will begin again straight away and continue through all the summer with worrying bill propositions, the French would not understand that we become lost in quarrels between personalities.”
Meanwhile Fillon, 58, who on Sunday won a Paris constituency he was fighting for the first time, after giving up his old rural seat in the Sarthe, western France, announced: “The battle for re-conquest begins this evening [...] We must renew ourselves.”
Among the high-profile upsets of the evening was the defeat of Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal by rebel socialist candidate Olivier Falorni in La Rochelle, south-west France. Royal, Hollande’s former partner and the defeated socialist challenger in the 2007 presidential elections, was appointed as the party’s candidate by its Paris HQ over the heads of the local branch, whose preferred choice, Falorni, the town’s deputy-mayor, ran against her as an independent.
Royal received high-profile support from both Hollande and Socialist Party leader Martine Aubry, but the contest between her and Falorni became the centre of controversy last week when Hollande's companion Valérie Trierweiler lent Falorni her support via a Twitter message in which she indirectly attacked Royal.
Front National leader Marine Le Pen lost her bid for the northern Pas-de-Calais constituency of Hénin-Beaumont where she was narrowly defeated by the Socialist Party candidate, after seeing off a challenge by radical-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon in last Sunday’s first round. Speaking on Sunday evening, Le Pen claimed she lost by just 114 votes. She alleged there had been a possible fraud behind the result of the votes which, she said, "probably need to be recounted given what we know about the manner in which some municipalities function." Later in the evening, Front National secretary-general Steve Briois announced the party will lodge a formal request for a recount.
Other upsets on Sunday included the defeat of François Bayrou, 61, leader of the centrist MoDem party, who lost the south-west France constituency he had represented since 1997, and also the defeat of Claude Guéant, a long-serving Sarkozy ally and former interior minister, who was standing for the first time as a parliamentary candidate in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. Guéant, in the same manner as Royal, was appointed by UMP headquarters instead of a local UMP party favourite, who took the constituency on an independent ticket.
Former UMP ecology and transport minister and spokeswoman for Nicolas Sarkozy's failed re-election campaign, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, narrowly won her seat in a hotly contested duel with the socialist candidate in a constituency just south of Paris. Kosciusko-Morizet was top of a so-called 'blacklist' drawn up by Front National leader Marine Le Pen, who called on her party's electorate to vote out eight UMP and Socialist Party candidates she accused of being principle enemies of the Front. In each case, she appealed for local Front National supporters to switch their vote to whoever was the main opponent of those singled out. Kosciusko-Morizet scraped to victory with 50.47% of the vote.
All the ministers in Hollande’s interim government, formed in May, were elected on Sunday. The first to be counted were Socialist Party candidates Pierre Moscovici (economy and finance), Manuel Valls (interior), Aurélie Filippetti (culture), Marisol Touraine (health and social affairs) Jérôme Cahuzac (budget), Marie-Arlette Carlotti (handicapped), Marylise Lebranchu (state reform and decentralisation) and Stéphane Le Foll (agriculture), Benoît Hamon (social economy). The French president had warned that any who lost their seat would not be re-appointed.
Meanwhile, party veteran Jack Lang, 72, a former culture minister under President François Mitterrand, was defeated.
Senior UMP figures elected on Sunday included former labour minister Eric Woerth, former agriculture minister Bruno Le Maire, former economy and finance minister François Baroin, former labour minister (who succeeded Woerth) Xavier Bertrand, former higher education minister Laurent Wauquiez and former National Assembly president (speaker), Bernard Accoyer. UMP figures who lost their seats included disgraced former foreign minister Michèle Alliot-Marie, former professional training minister Nadine Morano, and veteran MP and one-time junior minister for small- and medium-sized businesses, Hervé Novelli.
The second round poll concerned 541 of the country's 577 constituencies. In last Sunday's first round, 36 candidates were elected outright when they garnered support from more than 50% of registered voters (as opposed to votes cast).