How France will vote
#133
My Dear Friend of Democracy,
Today, some basics about the upcoming election in France.
The election will be held as a consequence of President Emmanuel Macron's dissolution of the National Assembly. He decided to call a snap election after the 2024 European Parliament election, in which his L'Europe Ensemble electoral list suffered a heavy defeat to that of the National Rally.
This is how the election works.
The National Assembly (in France: Assemblée Nationale) has 577 members, elected for a five-year term in single seat-constituencies directly by the citizens.
Similar to the presidential election, two rounds of voting are usually required for the National Assembly election. If none of the candidates achieves the necessary majority in the first round (30 June 2024), a second round is held on the following Sunday (7 July 2024). All candidates who have won at least 12.5 per cent of registered voters in the first round can participate. This means that a run-off election between more than two candidates is also possible. Even then, a relative majority is sufficient, so the candidate with the most votes wins the constituency.
In such a majority voting system, small parties have little chance of winning seats in parliament. That is why the parties join together to form blocs. In each constituency, only the candidate from a bloc who is considered to have the highest chance of winning run for parliament.
There will be four main blocs in the upcoming election:
Ensemble, the coalition of pro-Macron forces, including Renaissance, the Democratic Movement, and Horizons;
Left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire, the New Popular Front in English, bringing together the main parties of the left, including La France Insoumise, the Socialist Party, The Ecologists, and the French Communist Party;
Far-right Rassemblement National, National Rally (RN) in English, which also jointly supported several dozen candidates backed by Éric Ciotti of The Republicans (LR) in addition to its own candidates;
The vast majority of other Les Républicains candidates, the Republican in English, who were supported by the national investiture committee of the party.
That's for the basics.
If you want to know how the individual blocs stand on various policy areas such as pensions, taxes and the war in Ukraine, I would like to refer you to an overview article written by Jérémie Baruch and Adrien Sénécat for Le Monde.
See you in Europe,
Johannes