President predicted to strengthen grip on France with huge poll majority
FRANCE’S centrist President Emmanuel Macron appears set to consolidate his presidential victory with an overwhelming win in parliamentary elections today at the expense of traditional parties and Marine Le Pen’s far-Right Front National (FN).
Polls said Mr Macron’s La République En Marche and its allies would take a massive majority of 430 to 460 seats in the 577-seat national assembly in the second round of voting, turbo-charging the president’s chances of driving through crucial economic reforms.
The 39-year-old former banker, who was unknown to the public just three years ago, has defied all the unwritten rules of French politics with his meteoric rise and now looks set to secure a position of almost unassailable power.
Marine Le Pen, who has spent years successfully broadening the appeal of her Eurosceptic, anti-immigrant party, is set for another defeat, five weeks after Mr Macron trounced her in the second round of the presidential election.
The FN was predicted to win between one and six seats, far below the dozens the party had hoped for before the first round of voting a week ago.
But Ms Le Pen herself, who is tipped to enter the national parliament for the first time since being elected in her northern stronghold of Henin-Beaumont, looks safe from any attempt to oust her as party leader.
“There is no one who would have the courage or political weight to try,” Jérôme Fourquet of the IFOP polling institute told The Sunday Telegraph, noting that the FN was very much a “family business” founded by her firebrand father Jean-Marie Le Pen.
The only possible contender would have been Ms Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, but she is taking a break from politics and is not running.
Mr Macron’s presidential triumph and his party’s predicted win today will have revolutionised French politics and sidelined the main Right-wing Les Républicains party and the Socialists, who between them have dominated the country’s political life for decades.