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The final, official results of the French parliamentary elections have given President François Hollande’s Socialist Party and its affiliated parties a comfortable majority in the National Assembly. While the whole of the broad Left captured 343 constituencies out of a total 577, the Right suffered its heaviest parliamentary defeat in three decades. Meanwhile, the far-right obtained three seats in its first return to the lower house in more than 25 years. Find out where the parties stand in this summary, complete with graphics, of the new political map of France.

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The final, official results of the French parliamentary elections, issued by the French interior ministry, have given President François Hollande’s Socialist Party and its affiliated parties a comfortable majority in the National Assembly, with 314 seats out of a total 577, ending ten years of conservative dominance of the lower house.

The whole of the broad Left, including the radical-left Front de Gauche coalition and the Green EELV party, captured 343 constituencies. The EELV won 17 seats, while the Front de Gauche took 10.

The mainstream Right suffered its heaviest defeat in three decades, emerging with a total 229 seats, with the conservative UMP obtaining 194 - down from 320.

The far-right obtained three seats (two for the Front National, one for an independent) in its first return to the lower house in more than 25 years. The centrist MoDem party, whose leader François Bayrou broke with its right-leaning tradition by supporting Hollande in the second round of the presidential elections, won two seats.

The new Members of Parliament include 155 women, the largest number ever, while one of them, newly-elected far-right Front National MP Marion Maréchal Le Pen, the 22 year-old niece of party leader Marine Le Pen, became the youngest person ever to be elected to the National Assembly (See Mediapart’s election night report here).

The turnout for the second round of voting on Sunday, at 56.29%, was a historic low compared with all previous final-round polling in legislative elections, and was 1% lower than in the first round on June 10th.


The graphics below shows (top) the make-up of the new parliament, and (bottom) the composition of the outgoing parliament, elected in 2007. To the left, the Socialist Party and its affiliated parliamentary movements are in shades of pink, the Front de Gauche in red and the EELV in green. The conservative UMP party is in blue, its centre-right allies in light blue and the far-right in brown. The centrist MoDem party is in orange, and independent MPs who stood as 'regionalist' representatives in the French Caribbean island of La Martinique are in yellow.

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The Left now has control of both the National Assembly, the lower house and the upper house, the Senate, which it took last year. It is also the dominant political force in the majority of the country’s regional and municipal councils.

With all the minister’s in Hollande’s interim government, led by Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, having won or kept their seats, few changes, if any, are expected in the line-up of his definitive government, which will be announced later this week.

It will swiftly press ahead with a busy agenda of reforms, beginning with a special session of parliament next month when Ayrault , on July 3rd, will present his government’s programme. The first legislation expected to be passed through will be new fiscal measures, including a hike in taxes on large companies and banks and an ending of tax breaks for the wealthy.

Hollande has anchored his policies on promoting economic growth, creating thousands of new jobs in the education sector and containing the harshest effects on the less well-off of austerity measures. At a European level, he is pushing for a 120 billion-euro package to encourage growth, and for institutional changes to the eurozone banking mechanism that include the issue of jointly-guaranteed debt bonds.  

Meanwhile, he has promised to balance France’s public deficit by 2017, when the current parliament will have served its full term.   The interim government has already commissioned a review of state finances by the national audit office, which is due to deliver its report early in July.  The results of this may well contain more negative news that the new government could present as justification for putting the brake some of its reforms.

For the absolute majority Hollande’s party won on Sunday sees him free to water down budgetary largess - a freedom that would otherwise have been compromised had he been forced into a coalition deal with the Radical Left and the Greens.


The graphic below shows how the parties fared constituency by constituency, including French overseas territories ('Outre-mer') and the constituencies created to represent French national living abroad ('Français de l'étranger'). The enlarged detail for Paris shows constituencies around the Greater Paris Region (top) and those within the city limits (bottom,'Paris-intra-muros'). Similarly, the two next largest cities, Lyon and Marseille, along with Lille, are detailed separately. 

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Finally, the graphic below here details (top) the percentage of the total number of votes cast for the Left, the Right and the centrist MoDem party. Below that are the results, as a percentage of all votes cast, in the first round of the parliamentary elections on June 10th (below left) and in the first round of the presidential elections in April (below right).

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