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Bloomberg
Polling stations opened across France on Sunday as voters begin electing a parliament that will determine how much power recently elected President Emmanuel Macron will actually have. If polls are to be believed, it will be a lot.
The latest surveys suggest Macron’s Republic on the Move movement, or REM, will win a comfortable majority in the 577-seat National Assembly, allowing him to push through his plans to loosen French labor laws and simplify its tax system.
The 39-year-old Macron was elected in May after creating a centrist political movement that took millions of votes away from the two parties that have dominated French politics for decades. During one month in office, he’s further weakened the Socialist Party and the center-right Republicans by poaching some of their leading members for cabinet positions.
“Macron is shaping up as hyper-presidency, with a very strong central authority,†said Dominique Reynie, a politics professor at Sciences Po institute in Paris. “He’s got a party that he founded and fully controls. He’s got opposition parties that risk fragmenting.â€
Sunday’s ballot is for 539 seats in France. Voting has already closed in 27 constituencies for France’s overseas territories and another 11 to represent French expats. Voting started at 8 a.m. Paris time and most polling booths will close at 6 p.m., though local prefects can allow voting to continue until 8 p.m. The interior ministry will release turnout figures at noon and at again at 5 p.m. In 2012, about 59 percent of registered voters went to the polls.
Little will be settled Sunday night.
Under France’s two-round system for the parliamentary elections, any candidate with more than 12.5 percent of the registered voters goes through to runoffs on June 18, so long as no one gets 50 percent on Sunday. In the previous election five years ago, only 36, or about 6 percent, of the constituencies were settled in the first round.
Pollsters such as Edouard Lecerf, director of political-opinion research at Kantar Public in Paris, said most Macron candidates who make it through to the second round will be favorites because their centrist appeal enables them to scoop up votes from eliminated candidates, whether on the right or the left.