French voters from overseas and abroad began voting on Saturday for the second round of legislative elections, the outcome of which will determine President Emmanuel Macron’s room for manoeuvre, particularly in terms of reforms, for the next five years.
Two months after his re-election against the far right, Mr. Macron, a centrist liberal leader, hopes to obtain a new absolute majority in the National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament, where 577 deputies sit.
The game, however, promises to be more delicate than five years ago after the surprise breakthrough in the first round of the legislative elections last Sunday of the alliance of parties from the left called Nupes and from the far right.
The key is in the hands of the more than 48 million voters who are called to the polls on Sunday from 6 a.m. GMT. To take into account the time difference, some overseas voters began to vote on Saturday.
First in St-Pierre-et-Miquelon, an archipelago off the coast of Canada, at 8 a.m. (12 p.m. in Paris), then in Guyana, in South and North America, and in the French islands of the Caribbean, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint-Martin and Saint-Barthélemy.
In the Pacific, Polynesia will start voting when it is 10 p.m. in Paris, as will Wallis and Futuna, then New Caledonia.
In the Indian Ocean, where the time difference is less, voters will vote well on Sunday. At 6 a.m. Paris time, the polling stations will open in Reunion, followed at 7 a.m. by those in Mayotte.
Macron-Mélenchon duel
This second round closes a week marked by virulent exchanges between the two coalitions that arrived neck and neck in the first round: the Together block! bringing together the supporters of the presidential party and the alliance of the left Nupes, which brings together communists, ecologists, socialists and radical left.
At the start of the week, Emmanuel Macron notably dramatized the issue, just before taking off for a tour of Eastern Europe and Ukraine, warning against extremes who would come to sow the disorder in France.
On the other hand, the leader of the radical left Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who hopes to obtain a majority and impose cohabitation on the head of state, brandished the threat of a mess if the French did not decide clearly at the polls this weekend.
The far right, formed around Marine Le Pen and her National Rally (RN) party, could reach the bar of 15 elected members and form a group in the Assembly, synonymous with more resources and speaking time in the hemicycle.
In the midst of a heat wave, abstention could once again be massive. In the first round of the ballot, one in two French people had already shunned the ballot box, a record.
France Media Agency
Source: Radio-Canada
