With Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (NR) party expected to emerge as the biggest party in the second and final round of voting on July 7, pro-establishment parties in France are working behind the scenes to prevent the right-wing party from building the next government by winning an absolute majority.
In the first round of the vote held on July 1, the nationalist National Rally won over 33 percent of the vote, indicating that the party could win between 230 and 280 seats. Le Pen’s party will need 289 seats to secure a majority in the 650-member French parliament.
More than 200 candidates, ranging from Communist to pro-EU parties, have dropped out of the race for the second round of the vote. The move is expected to unite the vote behind candidates considered most likely to beat their National Rally rivals in individual constituencies.
“More than 210 left-wing or Macronist candidates qualified for the run-off round of the legislative elections have already withdrawn in order to block the far right from winning a majority, according to a provisional count by AFP,” the state-run France24 TV channel reported Tuesday.
The French newspaper Le Monde on Friday the final poll projection before Sunday’s vote:
The far-right Rassemblement National (RN) could obtain the largest group in the French Assemblée Nationale, with 175 to 205 seats, including its new allies who joined from the conservative Les Républicains (LR) party, but without an absolute majority. It is therefore looking like there will be an unstable Assemblée, or even alternative coalitions, according to the Ipsos Talan electoral poll (…). Two days before the second round of voting, the expected turnout remains extremely strong, ranging between 66% and 70%, compared with the 66.7% turnout in the first round.While the far right looks set to double its numbers, the second-ranked bloc, the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) left-wing alliance, could win 145 to 175 seats .(…)In third place, President Emmanuel Macron’s coalition formed by MoDem, Renaissance and Horizons could drop from 245 seats in the previous legislature to between 118 to 148 seats.
Despite ‘unite the vote’ effort, the National Rally is likely to emerge at the largest party in the parliament, giving it the opportunity to form a coalition government with the Republicans. Le Pen and party’s prime ministerial candidate, Jordan Bardella, have so far denied interest in joining a coalition government.
In the upcoming second round, the Republican candidates have aligned themselves with the leftist bloc to weaken National Rally’s chances of winning a majority.
If the National Rally falls short of a majority and decides to join the opposition, this, too, could spell trouble for President Macron, who will have to contend with a large hostile bloc in the parliament.
The NR opposes Macron’s pro-EU policies that erode French sovereignty and transfer power to unelected Eurocrats in Brussels. The right-wing party is also opposed to the EU’s open borders policy that is causing a demographic shift in Europe as the continent is swarmed by illegal immigrants from Muslim-dominated North Africa and the Middle East.
Electoral gains by the French right-wing party could have a spillover effect in neighbouring countries, EU political elites fear. “A potential victory of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) in France’s snap legislative elections has sparked fears of a wider Euroscepticism wave across the bloc, compounding the far-right’s surge in the recent EU elections, the pro-EU news website Euractiv noted recently.
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