France enters the final stretch of the campaign for the first round of early legislative elections with the far-right National Group (RN) solidly installed at the forefront of the polls and close to the absolute majority.
After a week of campaigning, the differences between the three large blocs remain almost unchanged, and despite the dominance of the far-right in the polls, the possibility that the National Assembly do not have a clear majority is increasingly presented as a plausible hypothesis.
On a busy Sunday of election events, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal stepped up his attacks on the RN, insisting that He has gone back on many of his promises when he saw that he could win, with the excuse of the high public deficit.
“The RN is not ready to govern, It is an opposition party, not a government party.“Attal stated in a joint interview with the newspaper Le Figaro and RTL radio.
The leader of the far-right party, Marine Le Pen, visited a Sunday market in her electoral stronghold in the department of Pas de Calais, where she was seen speaking with Maghreb merchants, within the process undertaken years ago of soften the image of your party.
“Be totally safe, don’t pay attention to the caricature they want to make of us,” he told one of them. “You can be a foreigner and live in France from the moment the law and culture of our country are respected. “We don’t have any problems,” he insisted.
In the New Popular Front of the left, the founder of La Francia Insumisa (LFI), Jean Luc Mélenchon, called on the population “an extreme awareness of the moment we face” for the possibility of a victory for the extreme right.
Mélenchon, at a rally in Montpellier (southeast), assured that the RN “it is Macron covered in racism” and harshly criticized those on the far right and the Macronist bloc for accusing his formation of anti-Semitism. “They are abjectly using the fight against anti-Semitism to attack us,” she said.
The RN is approaching the absolute majority
Seven days before the first round on Sunday the 30th, the Elabe survey released this Sunday by Tribune du Dimanche and BFMTV assigns the RN and its right-wing allies 36% of the votes, with 250-280 deputiesan arc that in its upper part is close to the absolute majority of 289.
The left-wing New Popular Front would be second with 27% (150-170 seats), while the current Macronist majority continues in third position and further down (20% and 90-110 deputies).
The conservative party Los Republicanos (LR) remains at 10% and between 35 and 45 deputies.
The percentages are very similar to those of the survey Ipsos for Le Parisien and Radio France released on Saturday afternoon, with 35.5% for the RN and its dissident allies of the LR, 29.5% for the left alliance and 19.5% for the Macronist coalition . The LR remains at 7%.
This latest poll does not have a projection of seats, but there is another one by Odoxa published on Friday by the magazine Le Nouvel Obs, and which points even higher for the RN, since it does not exclude reaching that absolute majoritysince it attributes 250-300 seats.
Seat calculations before the first round are complicated in France due to uncertainty about How the duels can be defined in the second round in each of the 577 constituencies that elect their deputy.
Given the bad numbers for the ruling party, which now has 250 deputies, the outgoing president of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, appealed for a mobilization to “make the polls lie.”
And faced with the possibility that the National Assembly does not have a clear majority and there is a blockade – legally there cannot be new elections until a year later – former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, an ally of Macron, recognized that “a new majority is needed “, so there is no need to fear the word “coalition.”
Meanwhile, Paris was the scene today of a new demonstration against the possible arrival of the far-right to power, in this case called by two hundred feminist associations.
