Macron’s Likely Huge Majority is a Worry for France, Say Rivals

Macron’s party said that they will not be a dominant majority but a responsible majority.

The turnout in first round of voting was the lowest since 1948. (Photo Courtesy: Flickr)

There will be no room for debate in parliament and democracy will be stifled if French President Emmanuel Macron wins the landslide parliamentary majority pollsters are predicting, his rivals said after Sunday's first round of voting.

It is neither healthy nor desirable for a president who gathered only 24 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidentials and who was elected in the second round only by the rejection of the extreme right should benefit from a monopoly of national representation.

Socialist party leader Jean-Christophe Cambadelis 

Francois Baroin, who ran the campaign of conservative party The Republicans, echoed these sentiments, saying political power should not be concentrated in the hands of one party and urging supporters to turn out on18 June for the decisive second round.

Like other senior politicians from established parties not connected with Macron's meteoric rise to power, Baroin also bemoaned the low turnout, which at around 49 percent was the lowest first round showing since the Fifth Republic was born in 1958.

Today fewer than half of French people expressed a preference. This record level of abstention... bears witness to the continuing fractures in French society... They are neither forgotten nor wiped away.

Francois Baroin

Marine Le Pen, head of the far-right National Front who spoke after she qualified for the 18 June second round of voting which will determine the actual number of seats the parties get, called the huge abstention rate "catastrophic".

She won a fifth of the vote in the first round of the presidential election in April, coming second behind Macron by just a few percentage points of the vote, yet pollsters expect she will have just a handful of seats in parliament in contrast to 400 or more for Macron.

Responding to the criticism, a senior party official of Macron's Republic on the Move party said there would be no riding over alternative views.

We shall be very respectful of the opposition. There has to be respect for minorities in a debate. This will not be a dominant majority but a responsible majority.

Jean-Paul Delevoye, in-charge of selecting candidates for Republic on the Move.