Voters are going to the polls Sunday for the second round of France’s legislative election, in which President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party is projected to win a huge majority in Parliament.
After a strong showing in the first round, Macron’s La Republique En Marche party is expected to win more than 400 seats in the lower house when the second round of voting concludes.
Such a margin of victory in the 577-seat house would give Macron, a pro-European centrist, the majority he craves to further his political revolution and would inflict a further blow on the country’s traditional ruling parties.
Macron’s party, founded just a year ago, won the first round of elections on June 11 with less than half of eligible voters going to the polls.
Turnout again looked set to be low for the second round. Nationwide, it stood at just over 35% as of 5 p.m. local time (11 a.m. ET) on Sunday, France’s Interior Ministry said on its website, significantly down compared with the same time in the 2012 election.
Macron won the French presidency last month without the support of a traditional mainstream party, as his newly minted En Marche! movement helped carry him to a convincing election victory over far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.
How the elections work
The final results of the legislative elections will be confirmed after Sunday’s second round of voting.
To win a seat outright in the first round of voting, candidates had to win more than half of the votes, which must account for at least a quarter of the registered voters.
If no single candidate managed to achieve that target, then all candidates who won at least 12.5% of registered voters advanced to the second round.
The winner from the second round will then advance to Parliament.
According to CNN’s French affiliate BFMTV, more than 1,000 candidates were still in the running on Sunday.
First-round results
The novice La Republique En Marche party and its political ally — the Mouvement Démocrate (MoDem) — won a combined 32.3% of the vote in the election’s first round. The established Les Républicains trailed with 15.8% of the vote.
Both the Republican and Socialist parties, which have traditionally governed during the time of the Fifth Republic, struggled with turnout.
Le Pen’s right wing Front National party garnered 13.2% of the vote last Sunday and is expected to take between one and four seats. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left party will likely claim between 10-20 seats after accounting for 11% of the vote in the first round.
The newly-elected President is leading a country suffering from high unemployment, a stagnant economy and security worries.
Macron is hoping to carry out the far-reaching reforms he promised during his campaign but first he needs a majority in Parliament.