Macron expected to win strong majority in French election

French voters cast their ballots on Sunday in the first round of a parliamentary election expected to give centrist President Emmanuel Macron the strong majority needed to carry out the far-reaching economic and social reforms he promises.

The vote to elect the lower house’s 577 members comes a month after Macron, a 39-yearold former banker with little political experience, won the presidency of the eurozone’s second-largest economy.

If Macron and his fledgling party win a commanding majority in next week’s second round, it will be another blow for the mainstream parties on the right and left, which failed to get a candidate into the presidential run-off.

“We want a big majority to be able to act and transform France over the next five years,” Mounir Mahjoubi, a tech entrepreneur running under Macron’s Republic on the Move (LREM) banner, told Reuters as he canvassed support in his northern Paris constituency ahead of the vote.

Opinion polls forecast LREM and its centre-right Modem allies would win at least 30% of votes on Sunday.

The conservative Republicans party and its allies trail with about 20%, ahead of the far-right National Front on about 17%. Such an outcome would transform into a landslide majority in the second round, the opinion polls show.

“I think voters are pretty mobilised behind LREM,” said Georges Garion, a 64-year-old company manager, before voting began in Paris. “We’re seeing a kind of majority cohesion, it’s democracy at work.”

While predicting the outcome can be tricky with 7,882 candidates vying for parliament’s seats, even LREM’s rivals have been saying they expect Macron to secure a majority.

Their strategy has been to urge voters to make sure the opposition will be big enough to have some clout in parliament.

“We shouldn’t have a monopolistic party,” former prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve, a Socialist, told Reuters on Sunday.

The survival of the Socialist Party, which ruled France for the past five years but is forecast to get just 15 to 30 seats, is at stake, as is the unity of Republicans. Some key figures from both parties have rallied behind Macron.

The National Front, reeling from a worse than expected score for chief Marine le Pen in the presidential election, could miss its target to get enough legislators to form a parliamentary group. It is expected though to improve on the two deputies it had in the previous legislature.

In a country with unemployment hovering near 10% and at risk of breaking its public deficit commitments, Macron was elected president in May on pledges to overhaul labour rules to make hiring and firing easier, cut corporate tax and invest billions in areas including job training and renewable energy, and to clean up French politics.

WE WANT A BIG MAJORITY TO BE ABLE TO ACT AND TRANSFORM FRANCE OVER THE NEXT FIVE YEARS