Turnout high in French election as far right seeks majority
Polling
stations in France opened at 08:00 (07:00 BST) and will close at 18:00
(17:00 BST) in some rural locations and by 20:00 (19:00 BST) in the
cities.
We’ll get the first projections pretty much as soon as the polls close.
A
more complete picture will come a few hours later. By the end of the
evening, we should have a good idea of the winners and the losers of the
second round of France’s parliamentary elections.
French voters are at the polls for the third time in a
month, and the country is on maximum alert because this is the day we learn
if the far right National Rally (RN) is going to take over the government.
The chances of that seemed strong a week ago, after the
first round. But they have receded because of withdrawals of candidates
in around 200 constituencies, in order to concentrate the anti-RN vote.
But projections are not necessarily reliable, because
no one knows to what extent voters will obey the calls of party leaders.
To form an anti-RN barrage, many centrists will have to
vote for the far left (the biggest component is the New Popular Front), who they loathe; and
many left-wingers will have to vote for the Macronites, who they equally loathe.
Meanwhile
the far-right vote could be galvanised by a
widespread sentiment that the RN – now clearly the biggest party in the
land - is once again being kept from power by an establishment
stitch-up.
Nothing is decided till the day is out.
French voters are going to
the polls for the second round of a snap parliamentary election called
by President Emmanuel Macron four weeks ago.
They
are voting today to elect 501 deputies of the Assemblée Nationale – the
French parliament - with 76 other seats already decided in the first
round.
For an absolute majority a party needs 289.
The first round eliminated all candidates who failed to win the support of 12.5% of locally registered voters.
In today’s round, anyone who scores a majority of the vote wins.
