The French vote this Sunday in the first round of early legislative elections that could bring to power, for the first time in history, Marine Le Pen’s far-right party and change the course of
According to the criteria of
France.
Almost 50 million people are called to the polls. The polling stations opened this Sunday in metropolitan France at 08:00 (06:00 GMT), after French residents abroad and in overseas territories began voting the day before.
At 12:00 local time, participation registered a significant increase, to 25.9 percent, compared to 18.4 percent at the same time in 2022, according to the Ministry of the Interior of the EU’s second economy.
“This is the highest level since the 1981 legislative elections,” wrote Mathieu Gallard, director of research at the Ipsos polling institute, in X. The first estimates of the result of the first round will be known at 8:00 p.m. (18:00 GMT) when the last polling stations close.
Parliamentary elections in France.
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The main question is whether the far-right National Rally (RN) party will win the election, as polls suggest, and, above all, whether it will secure an absolute majority. The final result will be known after the second round scheduled for July 7.
“These are not easy elections, the results are very uncertain, the repercussions could be serious for society,” Julien Martin, a 38-year-old architect in Bordeaux, in the southwest, told AFP.
“I’m very worried, I don’t understand what’s happening, why we’ve come to this,” said Amalia, a cartoonist who went to vote before going to bed after a night of partying.
The coming to power of the extreme right, for the first time since the Liberation of
France, after being occupied by Nazi Germany in 1945, would add a new country to the European Union (EU) governed by this trend, like Italy.
It could weaken French President Emmanuel Macron’s policy of support for Ukraine. Although Le Pen’s party, whose detractors consider her close to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, assures that it supports kyiv, it emphasizes that it wants to avoid an escalation with Moscow.
Immigration, authority and purchasing power
Macron, whose mandate ends in 2027, called early elections on June 9 following the resounding victory of RN in the European elections in France and now risks sharing power with a government of another political colour, less than a month before the start of the Paris Olympic Games.
The far-right party proposes Jordan Bardella, 28, as a candidate for prime minister if it obtains an absolute majority, with a program that seeks to limit immigration, impose “authority” in schools and reduce household electricity bills.
This formation and its allies have 36% voting intention, followed by the left-wing coalition New Popular Front (NFP, 29%) and the center-right alliance of President Emmanuel Macron (20%), according to a large poll by Ipsos published on Friday.
The outcome of the second round is, however, uncertain due to the electoral system itself: the 577 deputies are elected in single-member constituencies, using a two-round majority system.
Citizens in Switzerland vote in elections.
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“Risk”
RN’s rivals have tried in the final stretch to warn of the risk of the extreme right coming to power, which has made efforts in the last decade to moderate the image inherited from its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, known for his racist comments. .
“Ceding any power to him means nothing less than running the risk of seeing how everything that has been built and conquered over more than two and a half centuries is gradually undone,” warned the newspaper Le Monde.
During the LGBT Pride march, which brought together tens of thousands of people in Paris on Saturday, many also carried banners against the far right. “It is even more important now to fight against hatred in general, in all its forms,” said 19-year-old student Themis Hallin-Mallet.
Socialists, communists and environmentalists, allies of the radical party La Francia Insumisa (LFI) in the left-wing NFP coalition, have already warned that they will withdraw their candidates in the second round, if they come in third position, to give the official candidate more options against one far-right
Under pressure to adopt a similar policy towards leftist forces, Macron, whose popularity fell due to the early elections and who will reunite his government on Monday, hinted that his voting slogan will be not to vote for the “extremes” they represent, in your opinion, RN and LFI.
French election turnout rises to 59.39% at 5pm
Voter turnout in the first round of the French legislative elections rose to 59.39 percent in the metropolitan area at 5 p.m. local time, well above the total for the elections two years ago.
In the previous 2022 elections, participation at that same time had been 39.42 percent, and only reached 47.51 percent at the end of the day, according to data from the Ministry of the Interior.
This is the highest turnout for a two-round national parliamentary election since 1978.
And the significant increase in turnout is uniform throughout the country. Among the 95 departments of metropolitan France, in just over half the turnout had already exceeded 60% and in only one (Seine Saint Denis, the poorest in the country) the turnout had not reached half (47.04%).
The total turnout could reach 69 percent, according to the Elabes polling institute, while Ipsos predicted a slightly lower figure of 67.5 percent, and if the figure is confirmed it will be an increase of at least 20 percentage points compared to the last elections.
A share in that range would be the highest since the 1980s.
EFE and AFP
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