French electoral campaign ends with Le Pen’s margin of victory unknown

The campaign for the first round of the French legislative elections next Sunday ends today with the country in suspense over the foreseeable victory of the far right of Marine Le Pen and pending whether it will be able to achieve an absolute majority in the second round.

It was a whirlwind campaign that began just under two weeks ago, just eight days after President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the National Assembly and unexpectedly called elections following his party’s heavy defeat in the European elections on June 9.

All voting intention polls agree on a comfortable victory for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN), and some even point to the possibility of it exceeding the 289 deputies that mark the absolute majority in the National Assembly.

This is according to an Elabe survey released this Friday, and which attributes to the RN between 260 and 295 deputies after the second round on July 7, and even with a slight improvement in votes, until the 36% in the first round.

The poll gives the left-wing Popular Front a 27.5% of the votes (155-175 seats) and a twenty% to the centre-right Macronist coalition (75-105 legislators).

The possibilities that are being handled, in the event of a victory for the RN without an absolute majority, are two, the first of them a far-right government in a minority and in an unstable cohabitation with President Emmanuel Macron.

The president of the RN and candidate for prime minister, Jordan Bardella, has already stated that he does not wish to govern if he does not have full control of the National Assembly, since he could not have the power to implement his program.

The second possibility is that the rest of the forces join together to create a provisional government majority that agrees on a minimum alternative to “move the country forward in a minimal way”as defined by former socialist president François Hollande (2012-2017), who is a candidate for deputy.

The French Constitution stipulates that elections to the National Assembly can only be repeated after one year, so this second option would allow current affairs to be conducted during that period.

Former socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who left the party years ago, warned EFE that this option, “A government that only exists to prevent the victory of the extreme right will give a lot of strength to the extreme right itself, because it will say that it is not allowed to govern.”

Meanwhile, thousands of candidates took to the streets of the 577 constituencies for the last day in search of the last votes they could get.

RN leader Marine Le Pen had to spend a good part of the day trying to fix a blunder her party had created to discriminate against French nationals of another country.

Le Pen declared herself “stunned” by the statements of one of his deputies, Roger Chudeau, whom he disavowed for having said that binationals should not be ministers, since it is proposed “a problem of dual loyalty.”

Also seeking votes today was the Franco-Chilean Raquel Garrido, outgoing deputy and independent left-wing candidate, who toured a market in Drancy (in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis, northeast of Paris, which has a 25% of foreigners).

Garrido insisted to voters to avoid disputes between the different families of the left, because the extreme right “is at the gates of power”.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal was convinced in Lyon that, despite polls to the contrary, “Many French people say they do not want to choose between the National Rally and La France Insoumise” the party furthest to the left of the Popular Front and which the Government uses as a scarecrow.

The newspaper Le Monde today called for a mobilization of “all authentic democrats” for “stop the National Group”under the risk that if he comes to power “There is a risk of seeing how, little by little, what has been built and conquered in more than two and a half centuries is undone”as its director, Jérôme Fenoglio, writes in an editorial.

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