Following the results of the first round of the French legislative elections this weekend, Emmanuel Macron appears on course not only to accomplish his essential goal of winning an absolute majority in the new parliament after the second round next Sunday, but also to gain an exceptional landslide majority that is estimated could see his new maverick centrist party occupy 450 seats out of the total 577.
But importantly, behind this impressive political triumph is the fact that more than half of registered voters preferred not to take part in the elections this weekend.
By next Monday, Macron, 39, who was elected president last month barely one year after launching his political movement En Marche (On the Move), now renamed as La République En Marche (LREM), will be in firm control of the National Assembly, the lower house; all of the REM candidates have signed up to a pledge to put in place his presidential programme, which notably includes the introduction of sweeping structural reforms.
But the massive political base of support that has emerged from the elections for Macron, who has become sarcastically nicknamed “Jupiter” by some, hides another reality. While 51.29% of the almost 47 million registered voters abandoned the urns on Sunday, as if turning their backs on what they perceived as an event that did not concern them, many of those who voted for him did so to give the freshly elected Macron a working majority to get on with his programme. It is a short-term contract, and in the event that the confidence given to him and his prime minister, former conservative Les Républicains party member Édouard Philippe, is betrayed, the consequences may well be severe.
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For the moment, however, the sky is clear. In the majority of constituencies all across the French regions, LREM candidates emerged from the first round well in the lead (the few candidates who won outright on Sunday are those who garnered more than 50% of votes cast), or even eliminating the old political guard along with some of the younger candidates from the Socialist Party and Les Républicains (candidates whose scores represented less than 12.5% of registered voters were disqualified from standing in the second round).
In Paris, Socialist Party leader Jean-Christophe Cambadélis was soundly beaten by Mounir Mahjoubi, 33, who was appointed by Macron last month as junior minister for digital affairs in the interim government. Cambadélis, 65, who was first elected in the north Paris constituency in 1997, was eliminated, coming in a poor fourth behind Mahjoubi and the radical-left and ecologist candidates. In Villeurbanne, close to Lyon, the LREM candidate Bruno Bonnell, a businessman, came well in front (with a 36.69% share of the vote) of the Socialist Party’s Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, (16.54%), who was education minister under former president François Hollande’s presidency. While she qualified for the second round, she has a mountain to climb to catch up on Bonnell’s lead.
It was the same story across the country, with LREM candidates, most of whom are new to political life, knocking down many of Hollande’s former ministers, and also conservative figures, like skittles. For some who have become the subject of controversy in the media, it was as if the Macron ‘brand’ offered a sort of absolution that would have felled many a candidate from traditional parties. They include Romain Grau, LREM candidate in Perpignan, southern France, who is the object of a preliminary investigation by the local public prosecutor’s office into alleged “moral harassment” of employees who work for his aeronautical maintenance company; Olivier Serva, LREM candidate in the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe is at the centre of controversy over his comments that homosexuality is an “abomination”; Frédéric Petit, LREM candidate for one of the 11 virtual constituencies representing French nationals who live abroad (he is standing for that representing French nationals in Germany and Eastern Europe), lied on his Facebook presentation, falsely claiming he had been mayor of a village in France. All three are in pole position for the second round when they are likely to win the constituencies they are standing in.
Similarly, the most politically inexperienced LREM candidates appeared assured of election despite occasionally catastrophic performances in public debates, such as that of Fabienne Colboc, whose bewildering comments on Macron's policies during a TV round table on the France 3 television channel has become the subject of an embarassing YouTube sequence. Yet on Sunday, standing in a constituency in the Indre-et-Loire département (county) in west-central France, she emerged from the first round with a 34.39% share of the vote, well ahead of second-placed conservative rival Hervé Novelli, on 17.84%, while the incumbent socialist MP, Laurent Baumel, lost his seat.
In the Paris constituencies, most LREM candidates garnered 40% or more of votes cast, and in every one where an LREM candidate was fielded (all but two), they emerged in the lead.
All of the six ministers and junior ministers in Macron’s interim government who are standing for election as MP are qualified for the second-round playoff. They are Richard Ferrand (standing in the Finistère département), Bruno Le Maire (Eure), Marielle de Sarnez (Paris), Mounir Mahjoubi (Paris), Christophe Castaner (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence), and Annick Girardin (Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon). Only Girardin, a former socialist minister for public sector affairs under François Hollande, and appointed by Macron as overseas territories minister, is in second place.
Richard Ferrand, a former socialist who was appointed territorial cohesion minister by Macron (and who jumped ship last year to head the En Marche movement), took the lead in the Brittany constituency he is fighting (33.93%) over second-placed conservative candidate Gaëlle Nicolas (18.10 %), despite recently becoming the subject of a judicial investigation into alleged favouritism for the financial benefit of his partner when he managed a mutual health insurance company. His score was in fact higher than that he managed when he stood in the constituency for the socialists in 2012. “Despite your efforts, the Finisterians [the local Breton population] once again gave me their confidence,” he triumphantly, and somewhat cynically, told reporters on Sunday evening.
Marielle de Sarnez, Macron’s junior minister for European affairs who belongs to the centre-right MoDem party, allied to the president, is caught up in an ongoing investigation dating to her past activities as a member of the European Parliament, when it is alleged her parliamentary assistant was in fact employed to work for her party. Despite the allegations, which she strongly denies, she took the lead on Sunday in the Paris constituency she is fighting with 40.71% of the vote, well ahead of second-placed conservative Les Républicains candidate Francis Szpiner (17.04 %) and eliminating the incumbent socialist Pascal Cherki.
Macron’s prime minister Édouard Philippe, addressing the nation on Sunday, said the historic poor turnout of the electorate in the first round was “the consequence of the demobilisation of certain political formations” who he said had failed after the presidential elections to find a “second wind”, and that it was also “the effect of the demobilisation of a section of the electorate for who the election of the president [Macron] had closed the [political] debate”. But he added that “the message of the French people is unambiguous”.
“France is back again,” continued Philippe. “Over the past month, the president has known how to represent, in France and on the intentional scene, confidence, willpower and audacity. The government, for its part, illustrates in its composition a radical new [popular] rallying and it is determined to serve France and to answer the expectations of the French people. Next Sunday, the National Assembly will represent the new face of our republic, a strong republic, a republic that is rallied together, a republic that is attentive to the needs of each person.”
Meanwhile, Christophe Castaner, a former socialist MP who last month became the Macron government’s spokesman and junior minister for relations with parliament, and who on Sunday garnered 44.04% of the vote in his constituency in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence département in south-east France, well ahead of second-placed radical-left candidate Léo Walter (16.55 %), claimed that Sunday’s abstention rate “takes nothing away from the commitment and engagement of each of the [future] MPs who will be elected in all the constituencies”, adding: “I invite those who will be mobilised for the second round to vote for a representative of La République en Marche who will be able, allied to the action of the government […] to put these political policies into being.”
In preparation for the possible scenario of achieving only a relative majority, the LREM had taken care not to field its own candidates against a number of conservative Les Républicains (LR) candidates, and others from the centre-right UDI party, who had displayed their willingness to become allies of the Macron government. These included LR party MP Thierry Solère, seeking re-election in a constituency in the Hauts-de-Seine département that borders western Paris, Franck Riester, LR candidate seeking re-election in the Marne département in north-east France, and Marine Brenier who succeeded mayor of Nice Christian Estrosi as an LR party MP for a constituency in the Alpes-Maritimes département in south-east France. All three emerged from the first round with comfortable leads, and Solère even drew 42.6 % of votes cast on Sunday, three percentage points above his first-round score in the last legislative elections in 2012.
Below: the nationwide results, in terms of share of votes cast, of the LREM and its centre-right MoDem allies in the first round of the legislative elections on June 11th. The colour scheme is explained in the caption below the graphic, ranging from plaest yellow for those who garnered less than 20% of votes cast, to deep orange for those who drew more than 40% of votes cast. The national average for LREM and MoDem candidates was 32.32%.
On June 27th, the new members of the National Assembly will gather to elect its president (speaker) when they will begin their five-year term. The projected majority of 450 seats for the LREM compares only with the 1993 election victory of the two-party coalition of the conservatives and centre-right, respectively the RPR (now Les Républicains) and the UDI, who together numbered 458 MPs. For Macron, the massive majority he is promised means that he no longer need worry about falling out with his own centre-right allies of the MoDem party, whose leader François Bayrou was last month appointed as justice minister. Bayrou, 66, has become a potential embarrassment for the new government after the opening last week of a preliminary investigation by the public prosecutor’s office into allegations that some staff of his party were fraudulently on the European Parliament payroll as parliamentary assistants. Bayrou is in charge of pushing through new legislation to impose greater probity in political life, but he also, as justice minister, is the ultimate hierarchical head of the prosecutor's office.
The Macron government has interpreted the first-round result as a public encouragement to very quickly engage on the reforms it has promised to enact, beginning with a loosening up of the labour laws, the aforementioned legislation to impose greater probity in political office, the transfer of some of the current state of emergency powers into common law, and an overhaul of the unemployment benefit system. Government spokesman Christophe Castaner on Sunday argued that “by their vote, the French have this evening, massively shown their will to move swiftly on major subjects”.
There will be an exceptional sitting of the National Assembly in July, which may well overlap into August, when the forecasted LREM-dominated lower house will no doubt vote as one on the initial legislation to be pushed through by Macron. Most of the LREM MPs, a majority of who come from non-political professional backgrounds, owe their new careers to the risen-star president and no dissent is expected so early. The government’s priority is already that of ensuring alongside it a coherent if heteroclite parliamentary majority, made up of both experienced former figures of the Left and Right as well as the novices who have never been engaged in political action and who know little of the functioning of parliament. It has already begun plans for an “integration seminar”, and “team-building” (the phrase is used by the Macron team in its original English) sessions, and a programme whereby those with professional political experience will help the Macron-generation rookies to settle in.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse