2024-07-07 20:01:15
French voters are voting today in the second round of early parliamentary elections, which are likely to significantly complicate the rule of President Emmanuel Macron. The favorite is the far-right opposition National Association (RN) of Marine Le Pen, who won in the first round. However, the latest polls indicate that he will not be able to win a majority in the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament.
The interior ministry said voter turnout at midday was 26.63 percent. It was thus slightly higher than in the first round, in which it was 25.90 percent at the same time, the AFP agency wrote. According to the agency, this is the highest midday turnout in parliamentary elections since 1981.
President Macron and his wife Brigitte already cast their vote in Touquet in the north-west of the country, for example Prime Minister Gabriel Attal and former President François Hollande also voted. Le Pen will not vote today because she won a seat in the National Assembly in the first round in her constituency.
Polling stations opened at 8:00 am. It will be possible to vote until 18:00, two hours longer in big cities. The results of the voting should be known during the evening. “There is a lot of tension, people are going crazy,” said 66-year-old pensioner Laurence Abbad, who fears violence after the results are announced, according to AFP. French authorities deployed 30,000 police officers across the country, 5,000 of them in and around Paris, out of similar concerns.
Early parliamentary elections in France were unexpectedly announced by President Macron after the failure of the government camp in the European Parliament elections at the beginning of June. In the first round of elections last Sunday, the new left-wing bloc New People’s Front came in second. Macron’s government camp Spolu finished third with a significant margin.
Although the RN clearly won in the first round and won 39 mandates, the party is apparently weakened by the formation of the republican front. Most of the other parties agreed on this before the second round, in which more than five hundred mandates will be decided. In many constituencies, candidates in third place withdrew from the elections in order to strengthen the chances of victory for the remaining candidate of one of the civic parties. For this reason, the RN will probably not reach the threshold of 289 mandates, which would ensure it an unprecedented absolute majority in the National Assembly. However, the estimate of overall results is highly uncertain due to the complex system of single-member constituencies.