Candidatures for the legislative elections have been closed since Friday at 6:00 p.m. in the 577 constituencies of France, kicking off the race for the National Assembly, the outgoing majority of which is given as favorite.
If the main political parties had already published the list of those invested, a few last doubts remained to be lifted. In particular in Corrèze where the ex-president François Hollande confirmed to the newspaper La Montagne that he would not be a candidate in his stronghold of Tulle, considering that he “had (t) no vocation” to become a deputy again.
In this first constituency of Corrèze, he will support a pair of the “progressive left” Annick Taysse-Philippe Brugère.
In Gironde, the ex-LREM deputy Benoît Simian (Liberties and Territories), who appeared at the end of March for harassment of his wife in a stormy divorce, announced his candidacy to him.
After hesitating, Guillaume Peltier, ex-LR who rallied Eric Zemmour to the presidential election, announced that he would run for Reconquest! in his constituency of Loir-et-Cher.
With this closing of candidacies in the 577 constituencies, the official campaign will be able to start on May 30, before the first round on June 12.
The Interior Ministry is expected to unveil the full lists of candidates by constituency on Monday. Five years ago, they were 7,882 to run for the legislative elections, an average of nearly 14 per constituency and 1,300 more than five years earlier.
A newcomer to the French political landscape, the presidential party LREM then obtained an absolute majority with its MoDem allies. Emmanuel Macron, reappointed to the Elysée for five years, hopes to have a new absolute majority to carry out his program and support his new government, the composition of which was unveiled on Friday.
The presidential majority this time comes in the form of a “confederation” called Ensemble!, which brings together LREM and its Agir allies, the MoDem, the Radical Party and the new center-right formation Horizons launched by the former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe. She invested 556 candidates.
Among the unfilled constituencies, those of outgoing Damien Abad (ex-LR) in Ain, Béatrice Descamps (UDI) in the North or David Habib (PS) in Pyrénées-Atlantiques.
The outgoing deputy Thierry Solère, first candidate for his own succession in the Hauts-de-Seine, finally gave up running when he is indicted in several cases.
The outgoing MoDem Sandrine Josso (Loire-Atlantique), disputed internally and in dispute with her ex-assistant, was however invested in extremis Friday morning.
Faced with the Macronist coalition, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) launched 569 candidates, but without agreement with Reconquête!, the party of polemicist Eric Zemmour (550 candidates), or Debout la France, that of sovereignist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan .
The left, on the other hand, is united. Under the aegis of Jean-Luc Mélenchon – who called on the French to “elect him Prime Minister” – LFI, the PS, EELV and the PCF came together under the banner of the New Popular Ecological and Social Union (Nupes ) which invested 546 candidates.
As for the Republicans, crushed during the presidential election, they are counting in particular on the local roots of their candidates to avoid a shipwreck that would jeopardize the very survival of the party.
For now, polling institutes credit Nupes with around 28% of voting intentions in the first round, ahead of the presidential majority (26%-27%, within the margin of error) and the RN (21.5% -23%).
The two-round majority voting system, however, gives a clear advantage to LREM and its allies in terms of the number of seats in the future assembly, according to the rare opinion polls, even if the low range is close to the 289 seats necessary for the absolute majority.
Participation will be one of the challenges of these legislative elections, after the record abstention in the second round of 2017 (57.56%), i.e. less than one in two voters who went to the polls.
A low turnout in the June legislative elections would have an impact on the ballot, virtually eliminating any possibility of a triangular vote, with candidates having to garner at least 12.5% of registered voters, not voters, to qualify for the second round.
05/20/2022 19:04:46 – Paris (AFP) – © 2022 AFP
