Majority in sight for Macron's party

French foes fear he’ll get ‘blank check’

PARIS -- French President Emmanuel Macron's party headed for a clear majority in the National Assembly after voters rallied behind their new head of state in the first round of legislative elections Sunday.

Based on returns from 97 percent of France's 577 districts, it appeared likely that candidates for Macron's party, Republic on the Move, would receive 28 percent of the votes for the National Assembly, the powerful lower house of Parliament, meaning that it appears on track to win a majority of seats, according to the Interior Ministry website.

Those candidates garnering 50 percent or more of the votes in their districts will be declared the winners. But given the large number of candidates for each seat and the low turnout, most of the top vote-getters will face a runoff next Sunday.

Less than 50 percent of the 47.5 million electors cast ballots.

To claim a majority in Parliament, candidates supporting Macron will need to win at least 289 seats. Failing that, he has formed an alliance with the centrist Democratic Movement to help ensure a majority. However, as things now stand, it appears likely that the president will have a majority -- and potentially a large one.

Macron intends to set his large cohort of legislators, all of them having pledged allegiance to his program, to work immediately. He wants, within weeks, to start overhauling French labor laws to make hiring and firing easier, and legislate a greater degree of honesty into Parliament to stanch the steady flow of scandals that over decades have eroded voter trust in the political class.

Macron also wants to change tax rates and fix inequalities in the pension system. He's already started to revamp French intelligence services after terrorists killed more than 200 people since the beginning of 2015.

Simplifying France's labor code was one of Macron's main campaign promises. The president began a round of initial meetings with union leaders within 10 days of taking office May 14. Those talks will begin after next Sunday's second-round vote.

Macron wants individual companies to negotiate wages rather than being bound by industrywide agreements. He has argued that a more flexible labor market would help boost growth and win the trust of France's European partners, above all Germany.

For at least two decades, French unions have opposed such efforts, emphasizing instead job protection for their members, but in a week, Macron may be in a stronger position than any other French president for a generation. With a majority in Parliament and hundreds of lawmakers who are new to politics, the president would hold extensive control over the government.

Macron's prime minister, Edouard Philippe, confidently declared Sunday night that the second round vote would give the assembly a "new face."

"France is back," he said.

Pollsters estimated that Macron's camp could end up with as many as 450 seats -- and that the opposition in Parliament would be fragmented as well as small.

The Socialist Party that held power in the last legislature and its allies were all but vaporized -- their 314 seats likely reduced, according to pollsters' projections, to as few as 20 seats, and possibly no more than 30, in the new assembly. Projecting seat numbers is an imprecise science in the two-round system.

Socialist Party leader Jean-Christophe Cambadelis warned that Macron's party could end up "almost without any real opposition."

"We would have a National Assembly with no real power of control and without democratic debate to speak of," he said.

On the right, the conservative Republicans were also reeling, projected to end up with 70 to 110 seats, having controlled 215 in the outgoing Parliament.

The National Front of far-right leader Marine Le Pen looked unlikely to convert her strong showing in the presidential election into anything more than a small handful of legislative seats and certainly not enough to make the party into a major opposition force. That was Le Pen's hope after she advanced for the first time to the presidential runoff that Macron won on May 7. Le Pen complained that the legislative voting system didn't fully represent voters' wishes -- because her party got about 14 percent of votes but wasn't able to greatly improve on the two legislators it had in the last legislature.

The party's secretary-general, Nicolas Bay, warned of Macron getting "a majority so big that he will have a sort of blank check for the next five years."

Another sign of voters' rejection of the political mainstream was that far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon was, with the Communist Party, projected to see his camp win as many as 18 seats, an improvement on the 10 they held before.

Voters said polls that had predicted a large majority for Macron's camp likely dissuaded people from turning out. They also blamed the long election cycle, with party primaries that started last year before the two rounds of presidential and then legislative voting, for turning voters off.

"I've voted seven times in the last few months," voter Jean-Luc Vialla said after casting his ballot in a quiet voting station in Paris where voters came in a trickle.

"And the result seems written in advance. It demotivated people."

Information for this article was contributed by Mark Deen, Gregory Viscusi, Geraldine Amiel and Helene Fouquet of Bloomberg News; by Sylvie Corbet, John Leicester, Nicolas Garriga, Philippe Sotto and Angela Charlton of The Associated Press; and by Alissa J. Rubin of The New York Times.

A Section on 06/12/2017

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