National vote gives Macron major boost
PARIS — French voters gave President Emmanuel Macron’s upstart party a solid victory in Sunday’s parliamentary election, handing the centrist a strong mandate to reshape French politics and overhaul the country’s restrictive labor laws.
Pollsters projected Macron’s Republic on the Move! and its allies could take up to 360 of the lower chamber’s 577 seats. Official partial results confirmed the trend, showing them with 327 seats, with 33 seats yet to be counted. The party will have far more than the 289 seats needed for an absolute majority to carry out Macron’s program.
Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, a center-right politician who joined Macron’s movement, said “through their vote, a wide majority of the French have chosen hope over anger.”
With 82 percent of the vote counted, the Interior Ministry said Macron’s party had 42 percent of the vote, the conservative Republicans had 22 percent and the far-right National Front captured 10 percent. The Socialists, who ruled the nation before Macron’s independent presidential victory in May, were decimated and only won six percent of the vote.
Republicans leader Francois Baroin declared his party the main opposition and wished Macron “good luck” because he said he wants France to succeed. He said conservative lawmakers are going to have a strong bloc in the lower house to be able to voice their views.
However, some prickly opponents vowed to do their best to counter Macron’s plans. Far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen registered a massive victory in her northern bastion of Henin-Beaumont, defeating Macron’s candidate as she won her first French parliamentary seat. Le Pen was handily defeated by Macron in the May 7 presidential vote.
Le Pen said she would “fight with all necessary means the harmful projects of the government,” especially what she called Macron’s pro-European, pro-migrant policies. She said her National Front party had won at least six seats — with not all votes counted — an increase from the two seats it held in the outgoing legislature.
Ultra-leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon, who Macron also defeated in the presidential vote, said he won in his Marseille district. Melenchon, whose party was projected to win 25 to 30 seats, denounced Macron’s planned labor reforms that would make it easier to hire and fire French workers, calling them a “social coup d’etat” that he would fight.