French first round of voting for the National Assembly :
So first a subtility I forgot : To qualify for the second round (provided one is necessary), you must either finish in the top 2 places in the first round OR have above 12,5% of all the voters on the ballot in your district (regardless of whether they did vote or not). In short, if you have a 50% turnout, a candidate would need at least 25% to go into the second round provided he's not among the two top vote getters.
And as it turns out turnout (
) is low for the election this year, slighty below 50%. And as expected, Macron's party
La République en Marche (
LREM) is trailing ahead with 30%+ of the total votes. In short : this year there won't be a ton of runoffs with 3 candidates or more (so far only one for sure, while there was 34 last election).
The Macronist wave is already pretty much in and on track to be perhaps the largest majority in the history of the 5th Republic (depending if all future elected MPs file as a single group in the Assembly or if the center-right MoDem keep some autonomy), possibly over 400 seats out of 577.
The national tally is along those lines :
La République en Marche (LREM)
32%Right wing
Les Républicains (LR)
21%Far right
Front National (FN)
14%Far left
France Insoumise (FI)
11%Parti Socialiste (PS)
10%Green
Europe Ecologie Les Verts (EELV)
3%Parti Communiste de France (PCF)
3%Right wing
Debout la France (DLF)
1%Revised projections for seats ([min] to [max]) :
LREM (& MoDem) - 415 to 455
LR (& UDI) - 70 to 110
PS (& EELV) - 20 to 30
FI - 8 to 18
FN - 3 to 10
PCF - 1 to 5 (?)
Others - 7 to 12
- So far (votes are still counted), only 3 people have been elected in the first round, which is very low.
- There will be a lot of new blood and people being elected to their first mandate.
- All parties (Except Macron which is probably fine and dandy with the results) hope for a better turnout and frantically call to not give all powers to the new President. Fat chance...
- It's a bloodbath for the Socialists & Greens (which are projected to get 15-30 seats), with a lot of experienced personnel, recent ministers, and big names losing jobs tonight. I won't bore you with obscure french politicians so we'll just name two : Hamon (candidate in the recent presidential election) and Cambadelis (First Secretary of the Party) are already out of their respective races.
- Nicolas Dupont Aignan, leader of DLF and the only prominent candidate to the presidency having sided with far right Marine Le Pen, is being unusually roughed in his district (which he is holding since 1997, including a few wins in the first round) : He's apparently in second position with 25% (EDIT : 29%), trailing behind a LREM candidate. Probably some voter fatigue and his deal with the FN in the presidential election (a deal since then dissolved... A FN candidate was running against him too) shocked a lot of people.
- The FN is not doing great either and should have at most 10 MPs come next week, if that.
- FI leader Mélenchon is personally doing better than a lot of the other failed presidential bids (he's ahead in the Marseille district he chose to run in and the incumbent Socialist has been eliminated) but his national score is meh. They're still above the Socialists so there's that. FI and the Communists rivalry was bitter this time round and except a few select cases they each ran candidates in the same districts. They'll probably become "allies" again in the Assembly if needed to form a group (you need at least 15MPs to do so and it is used to determine speaking times and who gets to get into committees). The most depressing part is that we went through all of this 5 years ago almost down to the letter.
Always the rhetorician, Mélenchon is spinning the low turnout as "No majority of voters came forward to reform labor law".
- Henry Guaino, former member of President Sarkozy's inner circle, ran as a dissident and was flattened. He went to TV a few minutes ago to announce that he retired from politics and said the voters in his Paris district were all either
"selfish bobos" (Bobo for "Bourgeois Bohème") or "
Pétainists (ie Fascists)
fundamentalist Christians bourgeois" and that they were all
"sickening"