France elects record number of women to Parliament

PARIS: France voted a record number of women into Parliament, election results showed yesterday, after President Emmanuel Macron’s victorious Republique en Marche (Republic on the Move, REM) party fielded a gender-balanced candidate list.

Of the 577 newly elected lawmakers, 233 were female, beating the record of 155 set after the last election.

That sent France leapfrogging from 64th to 17th in the world rankings of female parliamentary representation and to sixth place in Europe, overtaking Britain and Germany, according to Inter-parliamentary Union data compiled at the start of this month.

REM, which won an overwhelming majority in Sunday’s ballot, had the highest proportion of women elected, at 47 per cent.

“For the first time under the (post-war) Fifth Republic, the National Assembly will be deeply renewed — more diverse, younger,” the party’s acting president, Catherine Barbaroux, said.

“But above all, allow me to rejoice, because this is a historic event for the representation of women in the National Assembly.”

Female representation in the National Assembly had risen steadily, from 12.3 per cent at the 2002 election to 38.6 per cent this time. But most parties still put up more men for election, despite France having a system in which a party’s funding was restricted if women did not make up at least 49 per cent of candidates.

Female candidates had also tended to stand in constituencies they were unlikely to win, keeping the numbers of women who made it to the Palais-Bourbon low.

“(Macron’s) En Marche (party)... decided to give winning seats to women,” said Brune Poirson, 34, who beat the far-right National Front to be elected in the Vaucluse district in southeastern France. “This is a really bold move. “Normally political parties allocate women seats that are almost impossible to win, so they can say ‘hey, we have as many female candidates as male’,” added Poirson, a parliamentary novice with master’s degrees in political science from Harvard and the London School of Economics.

Poirson decided to become a candidate in January when Macron sent a video to LREM members urging more women to put themselves forward.

“(Macron)... said: ‘This is your responsibility as well. We need you.’ It was very powerful, and it really worked,” she said. Reuters