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French MPs re-elect Macron ally as Assembly head in blow to Left

Yaël Braun-Pivet scored 220 votes while her main rival for the job, veteran communist lawmaker Andre Chassaigne, received 207 votes in a close race.

La rédaction de Mediapart

This article is freely available.

After three tense rounds of voting, French lawmakers on Thursday re-elected a centrist ally of President Emmanuel Macron as president of the National Assembly, infuriating the left after its victory in parliamentary elections this month, reports The New York Times.

Yaël Braun-Pivet, a member of Mr. Macron’s Renaissance party, won with 220 votes in the 577-seat assembly to 207 votes for André Chassaigne, the candidate of the New Popular Front left-wing alliance that came in second.

In effect, after weeks of political tumult, the result gave the impression that nothing had changed in France. The so-called Republican front of left and center parties that kept Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally from power in the runoff election on July 7 turned into a center-right front to keep out the left.

The turnabout strengthened Mr. Macron’s position and enraged left-wing lawmakers. Olivier Faure, the Socialist Party leader, called the result “a form of holdup,” and Mathilde Panot, the president of the far-left France Unbowed party, condemned “an anti-democratic coup.”

In fact, it was a question of math. The New Popular Front, an alliance of leftist parties, won about 190 seats in the assembly, the largest of any group, and was able to nudge that score up by 17 votes on Thursday. But Mr. Chassaigne, a Communist Party lawmaker, did not have the votes to carry him over the line. Ms. Braun-Pivet, by contrast, benefited from support of center-right parties that rallied to her cause after the first round of voting.

“Our country is fractured,” Ms. Braun-Pivet told lawmakers immediately after she was re-elected.

Read more of this report from The New York Times.