Almost 50 million people are called to the polls. The polling stations opened this Sunday in metropolitan France at 08:00, after French residents abroad and in the overseas territories will begin voting the day before.
At 12 noon local time, participation registered a significant increase, to 25.9%, compared to 18.4% at the same time in 2022according to the Ministry of the Interior.
The first estimates of the results of the first round will be known after 8pm when the last polling stations close.
France: the unknowns that will be cleared up by these elections
The main question is whether the far-right party National Grouping (RN) if he wins the election, as the polls suggest, and, above all, if he obtains an absolute majority. The final result will be known after the second round scheduled for July 7.
“These are not easy elections, the results are very uncertain.the repercussions can be serious for society”Julien Martin, a 38-year-old architect in Bordeaux, in the southwest, told AFP.
“I am very worried, I don’t understand what is happening, why we have come to this,” said Amalia, a cartoonist who went to vote before going to bed after a night of partying.
The coming to power of the extreme right, for the first time since the Liberation of France from the occupation of Nazi Germany in 1945, would add a new country to the European Union (EU) governed by this trend, like Italy.
Could weaken French President Emmanuel Macron’s policy of support for Ukraine. Although Le Pen’s party, whose detractors consider her close to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, assures that it supports kyiv, it emphasizes that it wants to avoid an escalation with Moscow.
Macron, whose term ends in 2027, caused the electoral advance on June 9 as a result of the resounding victory of RN in the European elections in France and now he risks sharing power with a government of a different political color, less than a month before the start of the Paris Olympic Games.
The far-right party proposes Jordan Bardella, 28, as a candidate for prime minister if it obtains an absolute majority, with a program that seeks to limit immigration, impose “authority” in schools and reduce household electricity bills.
This formation and its allies have a 36% of voting intention, followed by the left-wing coalition New Popular Front (NFP, 29%) and the centre-right alliance of President Emmanuel Macron (20%), according to a large Ipsos poll published on Friday.
The outcome of the second round is, however, uncertain due to the electoral system itself: the 577 deputies are elected in single-member constituencies, using a two-round majority system.
Political risk
In this context, the Paris Stock Exchange recorded losses of 6.42% in June, closing its worst month in two years; and the ten-year bond yield of the EU’s second largest economy recorded its widest gap with respect to German securities since 2012.
RN’s rivals have tried in the final stretch to warn of the risk of the extreme right coming to power, which has made efforts in the last decade to moderate the image inherited from its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, known for his racist comments. .
“Giving him any power means nothing less than running the risk of seeing everything that has been built and achieved over more than two and a half centuries gradually fall apart,” warned the daily Le Monde.
During the LGBT Pride marchwhich brought together tens of thousands of people in Paris on Saturday, many also carried banners against the extreme right. “It is even more important now to fight against hate in general, in all its forms,” said 19-year-old student Themis Hallin-Mallet.
Socialists, communists and environmentalists, allies of the radical party La Francia Insumisa (LFI) in the left-wing NFP coalition, have already warned that they will withdraw their candidates in the second round, if they come in third position, to give the official candidate more options against one far-right
Under pressure to adopt a similar policy towards leftist forces, Macron, whose popularity fell due to the early elections and who will reunite his government on Monday, He hinted that his voting slogan will be not to vote for the “extremes” that, in his opinion, RN and LFI represent.
Source: Ambito
