Polls suggest parliamentary majority for Macron
PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron is set to defy naysayers yet again.
Pollsters project that his Republic on the Move party, known as REM in France, will emerge from tomorrow’s first round of legislative elections positioned for a comfortable majority in Parliament. A month ago, that prospect looked unlikely. Just as it looked unlikely he’d ever be president when he created his political movement from scratch a year ago.
And yet the 39yearold president is making a habit of proving the sceptics wrong. His party has been steadily rising in the polls as French public opinion increasingly approves of his first few weeks in office as he sets out plans to loosen French labour rules, impose new ethics restrictions on elected officials and simplify the tax system.
‘‘It looks like he will have an absolute majority and all the tools he needs to get to work,’’ Jerome Fourquet, head of the opinion department at pollsters Ifop, said.
‘‘There’s a real dynamic. The French approve of the ethics laws and he was successful on his first diplomatic trips abroad.’’
According to Ifop, the percentage of people saying they will vote for Macron’s party in the parliamentary election has risen to 31% from 24% a month ago. His centrist appeal is eating away at the Socialist Party and the centreright Republicans, the two parties that have dominated French politics for decades.
France’s bond spread has almost halved since Macron’s victory in the first round of the presidential election on April 23 signalled the threat of a populist backlash was on the wane. Investors yesterday were demanding an extra 40 basis points to hold French 10year government bonds instead of similarly dated German bunds. On April 19, they wanted 75 basis points.
After the second and decisive round of voting on June 18, REM and its allies may have more than 375 seats in the 577member National Assembly, BVA said in its latest poll, well above the 299 needed for a majority. Odoxa said REM would win between 350 and 390 seats, while Ipsos puts the range at 385 to 415.
Those projections suggest Macron may approach the historic majorities of the Fifth Republic — former President Jacques Chirac’s centreright party won 398 seats in 2002 and 472 in 1993. In practice, a similar result would give Macron even more power. Chirac at least faced a united Socialist party holding most of the rest of the legislature. Macron’s opposition looks set to be split among several parties, all facing internal problems after a bruising presidential campaign.
‘‘Previously, everything was based on a right versus left divide, and that has just been shattered,’’ Bruno Jeanbart, deputy director of pollster OpinionWay, said. OpinionWay sees the Republicans winning about 100 seats, and the remaining 120 or so divvied up between the Socialists, JeanLuc Melenchon’s farleft France Unbowed, and Marine Le Pen’s farright National Front.
Macron has appealed to Republicans with his calls to liberalise the economy, to Socialists with a relative openness to immigration and cultural tolerance, and to centrists with his strongly proEuropean views. His prime minister and finance minister were lured away from the Republicans, his foreign minister is a Socialist, and his Cabinet also includes popular figures from the world of sport and television.
His willingness to stand up to US President Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin have also gone down well in France. Depending on who is asking, his approval rating is between 45% and 62%.
‘‘Macron projects an image that France is back on the international scene, and we are leading again in Europe,’’ Ifop’s Fourquet said. ‘‘That goes across well.’’
That is not to say he has not had some hiccups. His minister for territorial development, Richard Ferrand, has been facing a preliminary criminal probe into how his exwife and his partner may have benefited from real estate transactions with a mutual insurer Ferrand ran in 2011 before becoming a member of the National Assembly. Macron has stuck by him and Ferrand says no laws were broken.
‘‘The affair has muddied Macron’s clean image, but Macron is lucky that most French had or have no idea who Ferrand is,’’ Edouard Lecerf, director of politicalopinion research at Kantar Public in Paris, said. ‘‘He’s not seen as a central figure.’’
Under France’s tworound system for the parliamentary elections, any candidate with more than 12.5% of the vote goes through to the runoff on June 18, so long as noone gets 50% at the first attempt. Lecerf says that system may work to the advantage of the centrist Macron, because his candidates may be systematically best placed to scoop up votes from candidates eliminated, whether on the right or the left.
‘‘We want a clear majority to put into effect our programme. It’s as simple as that,’’ spokesman Benjamin Griveaux said yesterday on BFM television. ‘‘I’m not going to set exact targets.’’ — TNS
of Bloomberg News ❛ Previously, everything was based on a right versus left divide, and that has just been
shattered❜
— OpinionWay’s Bruno Jeanbart