Macron poised to take huge parliamentary majority in French election

French President Emmanuel Macron
(Image credit: Axel Schmidt/Getty Images)

After one month in office, French President Emmanuel Macron is poised to consolidate his victory by taking a clear majority in the National Assembly elections, which begin Sunday.

Polling shows a strong lead for Macron's En Marche! movement, founded just a year ago and fielding candidates — many of them young and political newcomers — in 525 of 577 districts, of which the new party is expected to win as many as 400 seats. The only other party predicted to take more than 100 seats are the conservative Republicans, while the Socialists, far-right National Front, and far-left Left Party collect, at most, a few dozen.

Like the presidential race, the parliamentary election for the lower house (members of the upper house, the Senate, are not chosen by direct popular vote) is a two-stage runoff. A second round of voting on Sunday, June 18, will take place for all races that do not have an outright winner in the first ballot.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.